96 the Danes are said to have gone up the Lea, and made a strong
work twenty miles above Lundenburgh. This description, says Earle, would
be particularly appropriate, if Lundenburgh occupied the site of the
Tower. Also one then sees the reason why they should go up the
Lea--viz., because their old passage up the Thames was at that time
intercepted.

"London," says Earle, in his valuable Saxon Chronicles, "was a
flourishing and opulent city, the chief emporium of commerce in the
island, and the residence of foreign merchants. Properly it was more an
Angle city, the chief city of the Anglian nation of Mercia; but the
Danes had settled there in great numbers, and had numerous captives that
they had taken in the late wars. Thus the Danish population had a
preponderance over the Anglian free population, and the latter were glad
to see Alfred come and restore the balance in their favour. It was of
the greatest importance to Alfred to secure this city, not only as the
capital of Mercia (_caput regni Merciorum_, Malmesbury), but as the
means of doing what Mercia had not done--viz., of making it a barrier to
the passage of pirate ships inland. Accordingly, in the year 886, Alfred
_planted_ the _garrison_ of London (_i.e._, not as a town is garrisoned
in our day, with men dressed in uniform and lodged in barracks, but)
with a military colony of men to whom land was given for their
maintenance, and who would live in and about a fortified position under
a commanding officer. It appears to me not impossible that this may have
been the first military occupation of Tower Hill, but this is a question
for the local antiquary."

In 982 (Ethelred II.), London, still a mere cluster of wooden and
wattled houses, was almost entirely destroyed by a fire. The new city
was, no doubt, rebuilt in a more luxurious manner. "London in 993,"
says Mr. Freeman, in a very admirable passage, "fills much the same
place in England that Paris filled in Northern Gaul a century earlier.
The two cities, in their several lands, were the two great fortresses,
placed on the two great rivers of the country, the special objects of
attack on the part of the invaders, and the special defence of the
country against them. Each was, as it were, marked out by great public
services to become the capital of the whole kingdom. But Paris became a
national capital only because its local count gradually grew into a
national king. London, amidst all changes, within and without