Little did the children in Elizabeth's time dream that the words of their doggrel ballad would one day be fulfilled, and the bridge be rebuilt of "iron and steel," and "wood and clay," strong enough to last for "ages long."

Among the many important events in the crowded reign of Henry II. none is more full of interest than the elevation to earthly power and the subsequent exaltation to martyrdom of St. Thomas à Becket. On the day of his birth in Cheapside, December 21, 1118, his paternal house was burnt down, and of all the furniture only the child's cot was saved, to be in due time converted into a sort of relic. Long after his murder, his surviving sister was wont to show it with devout affection to the pilgrims who came to press with reverent lips the richly embroidered purple silk quilt she had worked and thrown across the poor little wooden cradle. The house in the Cheap-the exact site is still well known since it is now occupied by the chapel of the Mercers' Company-was immediately rebuilt. After à Becket's death it was converted into a hospital or refuge for old men.

The Londoners of Henry the Second's time must have been very familiar with the slim, tall, pale-faced man with his abnormally long nose, and affable manner, who was created Lord Chancellor of England at the King's coronation, and who, although he affected the utmost magnificence in public, was reputed to wear a hair shirt of the coarsest beneath his outer splendours. Again and again they had seen him pontificate in St. Paul's Cathedral before the whole Court, a picture of ecclesiastical pomp and glory worthy of the brush of Memling or Van der Weyden. We too can see him, thanks to the minute details preserved by his many biographers, sitting at Lambeth in the great hall of the Archiepiscopal Palace, taking his meals in public, surrounded by his numerous attendants, ecclesiastical, lay, and military. The Archbishop sat under a canopy, a small high table before him, while two of his clerics handed his dishes and his cup. On either side of him, at long tables, sat the prelates and monks, each with his cup and pewter plate. At separate tables, far removed from the Reader,-a monk who from a little pulpit opposite the Archbishop chanted the Lessons of the day in monotone,-sat the laymen and guards. The laity, it seems, had

objected to this pious infliction, and had been removed to a lower place where they could chatter at their ease. The gold and silver plate on the sideboard at the upper end of the hall was most magnificent. The Archbishop himself was frugally inclined, preferring plain food to the daintiest of fare, and a cup of water with a sprig of fennel in it to the finest wine that could be offered him.

Brother," ," said Herbert de Bisham to him one day, "if I mistake not, you eat your beans with better appetite than I eat my pheasant."

On October 13, 1163, à Becket officiated in Westminster Abbey at the translation of the relics of the Confessor from their former resting-place to their present mutilated shrine. The King and all the Court were there "a most godly and sumptuous company." At Christmas time, three years later, London was thrown into consternation by the rapidly spreading news that the great Archbishop and Chancellor had been treacherously struck down in his cathedral at Canterbury. It was as if the world were coming to an end, and pious folk dreaded God's wrath. The King feared it, too; and soon the good citizens in Cheap and elsewhere about London talked of his Grace's self-inflicted penance, the lash laid on his bare back, as he knelt weeping before the tomb in the cathedral crypt, whence the Archbishop's remains were presently to be translated to the richest shrine in all England. So rich indeed, that Erasmus, who saw it four hundred years later, tells us a man could barely look upon it, so did it blaze with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires and pearls, as big as beans. For six hundred years and more this shrine was the Mecca of England, a haven of hope which every English man and woman vowed to visit at least once in a lifetime, generally in those fair months when the green lanes and flowering meadows of Surrey and Kent are gayest and sweetest. These pilgrimages were not matters of religious conviction only, but joyous outings that gathered men from all parts of the country, to extend their commerce and open out new fields of enterprise. They served to break up the stay-at-home tendency of a people none too well provided with the means of locomotion, and who, but for so agreeable a method

of obtaining salvation, would never have left their native towns and villages at all.

The death of à Becket deprived Henry of his wisest Councillor. Two years after his marriage he had banished his queen to Winchester; soon tired of a companion thirteen years older than himself. It was after this time that Queen Æleanora so startled her lord's mistress, fair Rosamond Clifford, in her retreat at Woodstock, that she drove her, frightened and penitent, to seek a peaceful haven from a troublesome world in the cloisters of Godwick Nunnery, where she died some twenty years later. This fact is now so well authenticated that the story of Queen Eleanora's dagger and poison bowl may be safely dismissed to the lumber room of fiction. At Winchester the Queen lived as a sort of State prisoner, separated from her husband, until his death, when his son Richard of the Lion Heart set her free, and appointed her Regent of England during his own absence on the Continent and in Palestine.

Henry II., naturally a tyrannical and covetous man, rescinded all or nearly all the rights and privileges granted by his three predecessors to the citizens, and thereby roused a spirit of rebellion which more than once threatened danger to his throne. The Saxon blood, although now considerably diluted by frequent inter-marriages, still flowed hotly in the veins of the majority of the burghers and lower orders, and their dogged Teutonic nature was not easily subdued by repressive measures. For obvious reasons London was in those days but poorly supplied with the necessaries, let alone the luxuries, of life, and the food of the population depended, in a measure, on the freedom to hunt in the almost virgin forests that still covered the country at no great distance from the metropolis. In the year 1158, twenty thousand persons died of hunger owing to a scarcity of corn. In 1170, there was another terrible famine. An immense number of rabbits might easily have been caught in the forests, and would have been most useful to the starving population, but the King, who was inordinately fond of hunting, reserved the sole rights of the chase for himself, and this greatly embittered his subjects. Neither threats nor prayers would move him, and when he died at Chinon, on July 6, 1189, he was little regretted either by his family or by his people.

Richard's first act on reaching England was, as already intimated, to restore his mother to her proper position. His filial devotion was one of the many charming traits of his attractive nature. He was no paragon, truly, but he was blessed with that indefinable charm that veils many evils and obtains forgiveness for the worst offences. His beauty of face and form, his accomplishments, his leonine bravery, his delightful voice and manner, and above all his frankness, captivated all who approached him. He could be as cruel as any devil, and he proved himself on occasion as tender as a woman. As our great Crusading King he is the hero of a thousand romances, but as the King of the English Realms he looms less large, for most of his time was spent far from these shores. His lovely consort, Berengaria of Navarre, is the only British queen that never set foot in England.

Richard 1. is usually credited with a lavish recognition of municipal life, but an examination of dates and of contemporary evidence proves that the numerous liberties granted to the citizens of London at this period were due to the inspiration, and even to the direct act, of Queen Eleanora, whom he had appointed Regent, and who acted in this capacity, save during the few brief intervals when he was in England, throughout the whole of her son's reign.

The title of our chief magistrate was changed at Richard's accession from "Portreeve" to "Mayor." Henry FitzAlwin was London's first "Mayor," and that learned man and true, Mr. Round, has immortalised him in the Dictionary of National Biography. From his capital article we glean that he was a member of what the French would term a municipal family, being the grandson and son of men who have been eminent in official circles. He had for dwelling a "fair house" close by London Stone, and ruled the Mayoralty of London for twentyfive years. At his decease, King John decided that the Mayor of London should be changed every year. Although in some of the earlier editions of Stowe, Alwin's portrait figures with the words "Lord Mayor of London" under it, he never enjoyed that exalted title, being generally designated in his own time as "Sir Mayor, Domine Maiore." Meanwhile his colleague of York was created Lord Mayor as early as 1389, when Richard II.

greeted him by the title on presenting him with his sword and mace. That industrious antiquary Mr. W. H. St. John Hope, in a letter to the Times in 1901, proved conclusively enough that "down to the year 1540 London's chief magistrate was invariably addressed as plain 'Mr. Mayor,' but after that date the designation of 'Lord Mayor of London' has been invariably used." Our medieval Mayors generally proceeded to Westminster on horseback for the election, but Sir John Norman, who was lame, invented the water procession, which continued to be a picturesque item in the programme on Lord Mayor's Day until about forty-five years ago. Up till the year 1712, the Lord Mayor and City authorities always rode to Westminster, but by that time state coaches were almost universally used by the nobility, and in 1756, the then Lord Mayor, not to be behind the times, ordered the present much begilded but none the less extremely decorative vehicle to be constructed. The Aldermen and Sheriffs followed suit, and their Cinderella-like coaches still form the most attractive among the scanty survivals of the pageantic glories of Old London. In pre-Reformation times the Lord Mayor's Show was, however, one of the least magnificent of the many annual pageants, but in Elizabeth's day, after the suppression of the religious processions, the great Queen thought fit to encourage splendour and elaboration on the occasion of this annual procession, which, as the Venetian Envoy to our Court informs us, "takes place early in November when it is so foggy you can't see it, or so rainy that you get drenched to the skin in trying to catch a glimpse of it." He continues, "the Londoners are fond of processions and pageants, but the English climate is so fickle that the shows are mostly spoilt either by the rain, the fog, or the wind, when the worthy folk who take part in the pageant are obliged to hide their finery under the long woollen cloaks and capacious hoods which the people here carry about with them, in case of rain. Everybody possesses one of these cloaks, and in the rainy weather the town looks as if it were inhabited by so many monks and nuns." Evidently these cloaks, which were probably impervious to wet, served the purpose of our modern umbrellas, which did not come into general use until the eighteenth century.

On the day of Richard's coronation, which chanced to be a