Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/272

Sir L. Gomme has no doubt on this point. When London ceased to be a Roman city she did not continue as the capital city of a state; if she was anything she was a petty state herself (p. 77). As a small state, so to speak, and on Roman lines, she lived on during the period of the Saxon invasion and occupation. Yet she was able to keep the Danes from entering and occupying her walls, and to make them settle down without those defences. This was not done by Anglo-Saxon organisation, "and the only possible source for such an organization must have been the old Roman system kept up through these years of neglect" (p. 104). Roman London rose with such rapidity that historians have been at a loss to account for her progress. English London emerged so slowly from the mists of the Saxon period that historians have thought that the city for a time had ceased to exist. Sir Laurence explains the first difficulty by pointing out that London, like Winnipeg or Chicago, made extraordinary leaps and bounds of progress when she got the chance in Roman days, and that in later days she was left alone until the moment arrived when Aelfred's genius, recognising the supreme strategical value of her position, brought London into a position of national importance which she has ever since occupied. "Anglo-Saxon kings had ignored London, and London had carried on her existence in a sort of constitutional independence—an independence not granted to her as a matter of state policy, but created by her as a means of existence. Alfred broke into that independence by bringing London into definite relationship with English national life" (p. 95). Hence Stubbs' view that London sprang into life as a collection of communities is not correct. London herself, the city, according to this thesis preserved her own constitution, her own organization, and this was founded on and descended from the Roman organization when it was an empire city. But where, all this time, were the Anglo-Saxons? Their advance, by way of settlement, commenced at some distance from the city and in the lands surrounding it, and spread inwards, gradually approaching the walls of the city. Of this form of occupation Sir Laurence has much to say, and draws a most interesting picture of Park Lane,—of all places in the world!—when it was made up of acre-strips of cultivation, and