Alured I Bridge-King

Alured I came to the throne in 4098, the year the first great floodgate works were finished, and his reign is remembered as the time London learned to cross its own river again. His portraits still watch the corridors of Westminster, and his name is said in every quarrel about a bridge.

London dates its great engine cluster to the years between 4084 and 4116: the King's Basin pumping frame of 4086, the Borough Lift of 4091, the first floodgates of 4098. Public king-lists put Alured's accession in that last year, and memory has joined the king to the works so firmly that most Londoners believe he built them. He did not; most were begun under Cenred. What he did was make them the Crown's.

The Bridge-King's reign is the reign of charters for spans and crossings: who might build, who might take toll, who must keep the piers, and what a ferry owed the bridge that ruined it. Those charters are the reason his name is still spoken whenever spans, tolls and passage rights are argued, because half the rights in dispute on the river were first written in his name, and a lawyer who can find the original is generally the one who wins.

He is the most painted of the early kings. A man climbing through Westminster passes beneath him in one corridor, and the bridge companies hang him in their halls. The likenesses agree on very little except a broad, cheerful face and a hand resting on a model of a bridge, which may be the only thing about him that was ever true.

In person

About thirty-eight at his accession, broad and ruddy, clean-shaven, with thick brown hair cut straight round under a gold circlet. He wears a long houppelande of deep blue velvet with fur-lined hanging bag sleeves and a heavy gold collar of linked esses; he stands three-quarter to us with one hand resting on a carved wooden model of a stone bridge, the grey Thames and a great timber floodgate frame through the window behind.