ook of folklore which nowhere recognises that there was a great
Roman city of Lundinium which would dominate the minds of those not
trained to city life, is a fortunate circumstance which neither
historian nor folklorist is likely to repeat frequently, and I am
entitled, I think, to claim the utmost from it. I can at least claim
that it answers all the facts in a way that has not yet been
accomplished. Thus Sir John Rhys has discussed the treasure legend and
he can only account for it as part of the mythical trappings of Arthur
into which "London Bridge is introduced," because London Bridge
"formerly loomed very large in the popular imagination as one of the
chief wonders of London." Sir John Rhys refers for confirmation of
this to the "notion cherished as to London and London Bridge by the
country people of Wales even within my own memory," and then goes on
to say that "the fashion of selecting London Bridge as the opening
scene of a treasure legend had been set perhaps by a widely spread
English story," that of the Pedlar of Swaffham.[35] All this is very
unsatisfactory. Modern notions of this sort would not set the fashion
two centuries ago, nor extend it to Brittany. Nor is the suggestion in
accord with other evidence as to the extension of tradition. What has
happened is that the Arthur cycle has appropriated two London Bridge
traditions and has worked them up into the Arthur form, the traditions
themselves belonging to the far older period to which I have here
referred them--a period when the burial of treasure was a necessary
corollary to the events which were happening.[36] Buried treasure
legends are found all over the country. They belong to the period of
conquest and fighting. They are the evidence which tradition yields of
the unrest of the times which caused them to arise. They are the
fragments of history which tradition has preserved, while history has
coldly passed them by.[37]

With this in the background as the _corpus_ of a legend-covered
London Bridge, we come to the second period.

London Bridge to the Norsemen of the tenth and eleventh centuries was
a place of fierce fighting and struggle, a place of victory and death.
The saga takes pains to describe this wondrous bridge[38] before it
describes the great fight there and its capture by King Olaf, a fight
which produced a war-rhyme which, in Laing's version, begins with the
same words as the English nursery rhyme, "London Bridge is broken
down!"[3