Struggles of the bridge

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The Portfolio monograph on Mediaeval London, published in 1901, has for its frontispiece a reproduction of an old illumination illustrating the poems of Charles Duke of Orleans, and painted certainly not later than 1500; and in it the houses on the bridge are distinctly shown as existing then, as they probably did two or three centuries before.

The rush of the pent-up water through the bridge, the old starlings, and the ears chapel on the bridge are all distinctly shown, and there is but little that doubt that the artist must have drawn from what he saw and not from the his imagination, as was so often the case in illuminations to manuscripts.

Another reason for believing in the existence of the houses at the time of the fire is that the stonework of the bridge was so much injured that the King granted a brief to the bridge-keeper to ask subscriptions of his subjects towards its repair, but, as this did not bring in much, he imposed a toll to defray the expense.

Another calamity was in store for it before the close of the thirteenth century, for in 1282 there was a most terrible frost, the like of which had never been known.

The pressure of ice heaped up against the bridge, and unable to pass through from the narrowness of the arches of the bridge, carried away five arches of it, and rendered it, of course, impassable for the time until they were rebuilt.

One sees how the old river from time to time asserted itself, not only by the more direct method of sweeping away part of a bridge, but also by extraordinary floodtides, caused probably by the direction of the wind, and not altogether unknown in these days.

There was a memorable one in 1235, when all the low-lying grounds on the south side were flooded and, far worse, the King's Palace at Westminster-and boatmen had to bring their boats into the Great Hall and rescue the lawyers, not only accustomed to their own floods of eloquence, never dreamt that Father Thames would make such an attempt to drown them in on his own.

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