with Danes and wolves, and who were ready to
fight them again. The shops must have been mere stalls, and much of the
trade itinerant. There would be, no doubt, rudimentary market-places
about Cheapside (Chepe is the Saxon word for market); and the lines of
some of our chief streets, no doubt, still follow the curves of the
original Saxon roads.

The date of the first Saxon bridge over the Thames is extremely
uncertain, as our chapter on London Bridge will show; but it is almost
as certain as history can be that, soon after the Dane Olaf's invasion
of England (994) in Ethelred's reign, with 390 piratical ships, when he
plundered Staines and Sandwich, a rough wooden bridge was built, which
crossed the Thames from St. Botolph's wharf to the Surrey shore. We must
imagine it a clumsy rickety structure, raised on piles with rough-hewn
timber planks, and with drawbridges that lifted to allow Saxon vessels
to pass. There was certainly a bridge as early as 1006, probably built
to stop the passage of the Danish pirate boats. Indeed, Snorro
Sturleson, the Icelandic historian, tells us that when the Danes invaded
England in 1008, in the reign of Ethelred the Unready (ominous name!),
they entrenched themselves in Southwark, and held the fortified bridge,
which had pent-houses, bulwarks, and shelter-turrets. Ethelred's ally,
Olaf, however, determined to drive the Danes from the bridge, adopted a
daring expedient to accomplish this object, and, fastening his ships to
the piles of the bridge, from which the Danes were raining down stones
and beams, dragged it to pieces, upon which, on very fair provocation,
Ottar, a Norse bard, broke forth into the following eulogy of King Olaf,
the patron saint of Tooley Street:--

"And thou hast overthrown their bridge, O thou storm of the sons of
Odin, skilful and foremost in the battle, defender of the earth, and
restorer of the exiled Ethelred! It was during the fight which the
mighty King fought with the men of England, when King Olaf, the son of
Odin, valiantly attacked the bridge at London. Bravely did the swords of
the Volsces defend it; but through the trench which the sea-kings
guarded thou camest, and the plain of Southwark was crowded with thy
tents."

It may seem as strange to us, at this distance of time, to find London
Bridge ennobled in a Norse epic, as to find a Sir Something de
Birmingham figuring among the bravest knights of Froissart's record; but
there the Norse song stands on