THE BRIDGE AND THE STONEBOW water within reach of the poor. A similar system of "conduits" also due to them, existed at Grantham. A serious epidemic, traced to the drinking water, which broke out in Lincoln a few years ago, caused the town to go to great expense in laying on a new supply which comes twenty miles in iron pipes from Elkesley, Notts, between Retford and Clumber, and crosses the Trent at Dunham on a little bridge of its own.
The "High bridge" marks the spot where the Ermine Street forded the Witham. It is the only bridge left in England out of many which still carries houses on it. The ribbed arch is a very old one, twenty-two feet wide. The houses are now only on one side, they are quaintly timbered, and their backs, seen from below by the waterside, are very picturesque. On the other side is an obelisk, set up 150 years ago, to mark the site of a bridge chapel dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury. From here you get the most magnificent view that any town can boast, as you look up the steep street to the splendid pile which crowns the height, and see the cathedral in all its beauty.
The length of the High Street is relieved by the "Stonebow." There was always a gate here from Roman times onward, for when the Roman town was extended southward to a good deal more than twice its original size, it was here that the new wall crossed the Ermine Street. The road had crossed the swampy ground and forded the river, and was now about to enter the city and climb the hill. The mediæval gate which succeeded the Roman 'porta' was removed in the fourteenth century, and the present one dates from the sixteenth, and was repaired in 1887, at Queen Victoria's Jubilee. It has one central and two side arches, with slender towers between, carried up to a battlemented parapet. On the east tower is a tall figure of the Archangel Gabriel, and in a niche on the other tower the Virgin Mary. The patroness of the city and cathedral is represented treading on a dragon. A long room above the arch with timbered roof is used as a Guildhall; in it are portraits of Queen Anne and Thomas Sutton of Knaith, founder of the Charterhouse. The corporation, to whom they belong, has had a long and distinguished existence, for municipal life in Lincoln began in Roman times; and when they left, and Saxons, Danes or Normans ruled, and the counties and towns had to adopt new names under each successive conqueror, Lincoln retained throughout her Roman name and her right of self-government.
