. This land
passage more than halved the distance by river, it cut off not only
the numerous large turns which the Thames begins to take between
Middlesex and Surrey, but also the general sweep southward of the
river, and it avoided, what another road might have necessitated, the
further crossing of the stream.

Long as the march is, there was no fortification of importance between
one point and the other, and mediaeval history is crammed with
instances of armies leaving the Tower to march to Windsor in one day,
or leaving Windsor to march to the Tower.

The position of the Tower we saw in an earlier page to be due to the
same geographical causes as had built up so many of the urban
strongholds of Europe. It was situated upon the very bank of the river
which fed the capital, it was down stream from the town, and it was
just outside the walls. In a word, it was the parallel of the Louvre.

Its remote origins are doubtful; some have imagined that they are
Roman, and that if not in the first part of the Roman occupation at
least towards the end of those wealthy and populous three centuries,
which are the foundation and the making of England, some fortification
was built on the brow of the little eminence which here slopes down to
the high-water mark.

I will quote the evidence, such as it is, and the reader will perceive
how difficult it is to arrive at a conclusion.

Of actual Roman remains all we have is a couple of coins of the end of
the fourth century (probably minted at Constantinople), a silver ingot
of the same period, and a funeral inscription. No indubitably Roman
work has been discovered.

On the other hand there has been no modern investigation of those
foundations of the White Tower where, if anywhere, Roman work might be
expected. This exhausts the direct evidence. In sciences such as
geology or the criticism of Sacred Books evidence to this extent would
be ample to overset the firmest traditions or the most self-evident
conclusion of common human experience. But history is bound to a
greater caution, and it must be reluctantly admitted that the two
coins, the ingot and the bit of stone are insufficient to prove the
existence of a Roman fortress.

Leaving such material and direct evidence we have the tradition, which
is a fairly strong one, of Roman fortification here, and we have the
analogy, so frequently occurring in space and time throughout the
history and the area of Western Europe, that Gaul r