'The banks of the Thames from the Postern of Petit Wales [near the Tower], so far probably as the Friars Preachers, or Black Friars, near the entrance of the Fleet River, seem to have been intersected in these times by numberless small lanes, which, themselves public property, ran from Thames Street, by the side of a private residence or other edifice, and led to the owner's wharf in front of his dwelling-house; these wharfs again, in some instances, being separated by water-gates, through which apparently the public had a right to claim, as an easement, right of passage. From many of the wharfs there also projected bridges or jetties into the river, for the same purposes as the stairs of modern times.'[71] Many of the wharves on the Thames were known as gates besides Billingsgate, as Ebbgate, identical with the present Old Swan Lane and Wharf, Upper Thames Street, and Oystergate, on the site of the north end of the present London Bridge. The latter was the principal place for the sale of shell-fish, which was only to be sold 'from the way of London Bridge towards the west, unto the corner of the wall of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene.'[72] Oystergate was also a place of great resort for the sellers of rushes, who paid a small rent for their standing. We learn from Fitz-Stephen that 'London formerly had walls and towers in like manner in the south, but that most excellent river the Thames, which abounds with fish, and in which the tide ebbs and flows, runs on that side, and has in a long space of time washed down, undermined and subverted the walls in that part.' Whether there were gates or not along the river front of London, there can be little doubt that there were not structures at all the places named gates, many of these were doubtless merely ways. This use of the word gate is common enough in the South, as in Ramsgate, Margate, Sandgate, etc.