view, just as if, for example, we could say that Paternoster
Row was so named by the Romans. But, as I shall have to point out a
little further, the origin of such usages is obvious without any
recourse to the revival of laws dead and buried centuries before; if,
indeed, they ever existed among people whose very language had wholly
died out and been forgotten. It is, to say the least, unlikely that a
continuity should exist in this respect, while the language in which it
must have been preserved, orally, if not in records, died out and left
not a trace even in a local name.

[Illustration: BRONZE PIN WITH CHRISTIAN EMBLEMS (ROMAN).]

I had written so far when I received Mr. Gomme's very interesting volume
on the Governance of London. I greatly regret to say I cannot make his
views fit with most of the facts I have endeavoured to put into
chronological order above. For example, Roman London, when walled, was a
Christian city. When the Saxons had held it from about 457 to 609, it
was, we know, a heathen city, and twice afterwards returned to the
worship of Woden and Thor. Is this compatible with the survival of a
Roman constitution? Or, again, is there any London custom or law which
might not have come to it from the cities of Flanders and Gaul more
easily than after the changes and chances of two or three centuries?
This is not the place to discuss these and other similar questions, and
I for one will be extremely glad if Mr. Gomme can prove his point in the
face of so much which seems to tell against him.

The East Saxons, it is pretty certain, made but little use of London. We
only hear of it when the King of Kent, Ethelbert, set up Sebert, his
sister's son, as King of Essex, and having become Christian himself,
sent Mellitus, a Roman priest, to preach to Sebert and his people,
making him Bishop of London. So much we learn from the _Chronicle_ under
the year 609. Next, in Beda, we read that Ethelbert furthermore built
the church of St. Paul in London for Mellitus, "where he and his
successors should have their episcopal see." Beda also tells us that the
Metropolis of the East Saxons is London; so that when we, at the present
day, speak of it as the Metropolis, we mean it is the chief
ecclesiastical city of Essex; which shows the absurdity of a phrase very
common at the present day. Sebert lived till 616 or later, but there is
no distinct mention of his life in London. His supposed burial, whether
in St. Paul's or at