Only four years after the bridge had been completed a terrible calamity took place on it, on the 12th of July, 1212, which the river must have witnessed in all its terrible intensity.
A dreadful fire broke out at Southwark and extended to the old Norman Church of St. Mary Overie, and immense crowds were coming over the bridge to the scene of the conflagration, when another fire took place on the London end of the bridge which, by the violence of the south wind, blew right across it and prevented any one from returning.
At the same time the fire on the Southwark side extended also to the houses at that end of the bridge, so that the crowd, hemmed in between two fires, expected nothing but death. Boats and ships put off to their rescue, and the people, wild with terror, so unadvisedly thronged them that they were capsized and the people drowned.
It is said that through this double calamity over three thousand people lost their lives, whose bodies were found partly burnt, besides those who were wholly burnt and could not be found; but nothing is said of those who were drowned.
The description of this terrible calamity gives one the impression that, even from the very start, there must have been houses on the bridge. Otherwise, why were the people so wild with terror?
Clearly their safest plan would have been to have remained on the bridge, where, in the absence of houses, there could have been no danger; but one never knows, when a panic spreads among a multitude, what the possibilities may be.
Next page: Struggles of the bridge