And in the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ we have the following brief entry:—“A.D. 604. This year the East Saxons received the faith and baptism under King Sebert and Bishop Mellitus.”
At this time, then, the King of Kent was the overlord of the Essex men, who had as well their own King. And their “metropolis” was London, where King Ethelbert built their first church—St. Paul’s. Also London was “the mart of many nations.” This was doubtless true in the eighth century when Bede wrote. How far was it true at the beginning of the seventh? Some advance had been made, that is certain. For the Bishop, London was the metropolis, the mother city. Whatever official and central life belonged to the diocese was placed, therefore, in London.
It would be interesting, if it were possible, to trace the gradual change in the manners and customs of the Saxons which enabled them to live in towns. That it was very gradual we may learn from the small number of towns in Saxon England, from the large number of Roman-British cities left “waste,” and from the fact that not until Alfred’s time did they begin to build or to restore the walls of their towns. It was, however, a Saxon population that occupied London as soon as the days of desolation were fulfilled. This is certain from the names of the streets, which, with one doubtful exception, are all Saxon—why the name of the river itself never became Saxon is a fact impossible to explain. First came the merchants with the sailors and the ships. They established themselves, as of old, along the river, beside the ports afterwards called Billingsgate and Dowgate or Walbrook. These ports with their quays were easily repaired by means of piles and planks. The ships and traders came with the spring, and in the summer the chapmen, with their caravans of pack-mules and pack-horses, rode from one clearing to another with their wares. Then it became convenient that some should stay all the year at the port. The streets within the river wall began to be reconstructed and houses rose, and the country folk, losing their dread of magic, began to drop in and to settle among the ruins of Augusta and near their new friends the foreign merchants.
[Illustration: GREGORY THE GREAT, ST. BENEDICT, AND ST. CUTHBERT