"To London the war brought all but ruin; so violent, in fact, was the shock to its life that its very bishoprick seemed for a time to cease to exist. The Roman walls must have been broken and ruined, for we hear of no resistance such as that which in later days made the city England's main bulwark against northern attack." Asser, in his _Life of Alfred_, tells us plainly enough of the condition of the space within the ruined walls. It must have been that of Pevensey now, or of Silchester before the grass grew over it. Alfred, he says, "restauravit et habitabilem fecit." "To make a town habitable" implies that it was uninhabited; "to restore it" implies that at some previous period it had been what the great king then made it once more. How long this condition of desolation prevailed within the Roman wall we have no information. Unfortunately no successful attempt has been made to discriminate between the Roman masonry, that of Alfred, and that of the successive mediaeval repairs, in the recent examinations of what is left of the wall. It is well to keep the few chronological facts before us in trying to judge of the influence of the events of 457 on what was left of Roman London. These facts may be briefly stated. In 369 London was Augusta of the Romans. In 457, or ninety-eight years--practically a century--later, the Saxons caught the Britons of London at the ford over the Cray, in Kent, fifteen miles down the Thames, and slew 4,000 of them, the rest flying "in great terror to London." The chronicle does not tell us whether the Saxons entered the city then or not. Judging by analogy, they did enter it then or soon after, and slew the Britons that were left from the slaughter at Crayford. The Britons had certainly ceased out of London when we hear of it again. They had so utterly perished that not a single Celtic or Roman local name was left, except the two already mentioned--Thames and London. There is absolute silence in the chronicle. This ominous silence lasts from 457 to 609. We have, therefore, a hundred years from the departure of the Romans to the battle of Crayford, and 152 years more to the next mention of London; in all 250 years during which there is only one thing certain--namely, that owing to some cause, the British and Roman languages ceased altogether to be spoken or even remembered, and together with them the Roman religion. The change is complete, as well it might be in that long time--as long as between the death of Charles I. and the accession of Edward VII. This blank in the history is all the more marked because no inscriptions have survived. We have a few--very few--examples of writing before the Romans left. We have not a line, not a letter, during those 250 years, and when we find anything again, the writers are Anglo-Saxon--the language is entirely changed, so entirely that not even one local name survives.