King Olaf then constructed a kind of raft or scaffold which he placed round his ships so that his men could stand upon them and work. As soon as they reached the bridge they were assailed by a hail-storm of missiles, which broke their shields, and forced many of the ships to retire. Those that remained, however, made fast the ships with ropes and cables. Then the rowers tugged their hardest; the tide turned in their favour; and crash! down fell that part of the bridge and all the people who were on it into the river. Thus Ethelred was restored. In memory of this exploit the Norse Bard sang:—
“And thou hast overthrown their Bridges, Oh thou Storm of the Sons of Odin; skilful and foremost in the Battle! For thee was it happily reserved to possess the land of London’s winding City. Many were the shields which were grasped sword in hand, to the mighty increase of the conflict; but by thee were the iron-banded coats of mail broken and destroyed....
Thou, thou hast come, Defender of the Earth, and hast restored into his kingdom the exiled Ethelred. By thine aid is he advantaged, and made strong by thy valour and prowess; Bitterest was that Battle in which thou didst engage. Now in the presence of thy kindred the adjacent lands are at rest, where Edmund, the relation of the country and the people, formerly governed.”
There is nothing about all this in the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_. It may have happened; but it could not have been invented with a stone bridge in view, the piers of which all King Olaf’s ships together could not move. Of a wooden bridge constructed in the way described above the thing seems quite possible.
The next event in the history of the bridge is the unsuccessful siege by Cnut. In the course of this siege the besiegers dug the trench round the south end of the bridge and dragged their ships through it, so as to attack London all along the river face. Maitland, the historian, pleased himself by thinking that he had discovered vestiges of the trench all the way round. In his time (_circa_ 1740) there were meadows and pastures and orchards over the whole of south London.
“By a diligent search of several days,” Maitland says, “I discovered the vestigia and length of this artificial water-course: its outflux from the river Thames was where the Great Wet Dock below Rotherhithe is situate: whence, running due west by the seven houses in Rotherhithe Fields, it continues its course by a gentle winding to the Drain Windmill: and, with a west-north-west course passing St. Thomas of Watering’s, by an easy turning it crosses the Deptford Road, a little to the south-east of the Lock-Hospital, at the lower end of Kent Street; and, proceeding to Newington Butts, intersects the road a little south of the turnpike; whence, continuing its course by the Black Prince in Lambeth Road, on the north of Kennington, it runs west-and-by-south, through the Spring garden at Vauxhall, to its influx into the Thames at the lower end of Chelsea Reach.”