Saxon and Danish London

Saxon London was but Roman London despoiled.

True, it was Christianized, and King Ethelbert had built the cathedral of St. Paul's.

The citizens had contrived to bridge over the broad Thames with a stout wooden structure wide enough to allow two vehicles to pass each other.

But, apart from these evidences of religion and civilization, Saxon London was hardly an improvement upon the old Londinium, and in some respects was inferior.

Its larger buildings had fallen into ruins.

The floorless Saxon dwellings much resembled the mud-and-plaster cottages still seen in some parts of Scotland and Ireland, for architecture was not a strong point with the Anglo-Saxons.

Like the Picts and Scots, they were, on the whole, a barbarous people, fonder of the forest and the chase than of cities and commerce; content so long as they had abundance of swine's flesh to eat, and mead or ale to drink.

Even the genius of Sir Walter Scott has failed to make them interesting.

Front-de-Boeuf and Rebecca alternately rouse our hatred and enthusiasm, but the commonplace Saxon Thane does neither.

Material evidences of Saxon rule in London are infinitesimal; and the Danes who defeated them have left no permanent mark, save in the names of three churches: St. Clement Dane; St. Olave's, Tooley Street; and St. Magnus, London Bridge.

In 1900 an old Danish battle-ship was, after a lapse of more than a thousand years, discovered during some excavations in Tottenham Marshes; but it was carried away piecemeal by a crowd of some hundreds of people, and it disappeared to the last atom.

(From Imperial London, by Arthur Henry Beavan, 1901)