THE WAYFARER'S LIBRARY

THE HISTORIC THAMES

Hilaire Belloc

O. M. DENT & SONS Ltd. 

LONDON

THE HISTORIC THAMES

England has been built up upon the framework of her rivers, and, inthat pattern, the principal line has been the line of the Thames. 

Partly because it was the main highway of Southern England, partlybecause it looked eastward towards the Continent from which thenational life has been drawn, partly because it was better served bythe tide than any other channel, but mainly because it was the chiefamong a great number of closely connected river basins, the ThamesValley has in the past supported the government and the wealth ofEngland. 

Among the most favoured of our rivals some one river system hasdeveloped a province or a series of provinces; the Rhine has done so, the Seine and the Garonne. But the great Continental river systems--atleast the navigable ones--stand far apart from one another: in thissmall, and especially narrow, country of Britain navigable riversystems are not only numerous, but packed close together. It isperhaps on this account that we have been under less necessity in thepast to develop our canals; and anyone who has explored the Englishrivers in a light boat knows how short are the portages between onebasin and another. 

Now not only are we favoured with a multitude of navigablewaterways--the tide makes even our small coastal rivers navigableright inland--but also we are quite exceptionally favoured in themwhen we consider that the country is an island. 

If an island, especially an island in a tidal sea, has a good riversystem, that system is bound to be of more benefit to it than would bea similar system to a Continental country. For it must mean that thetide will penetrate everywhere into the heart of the plains, carryingthe burden of their wealth backward and forward, mixing their peoples, and filling the whole national life with its energy; and this will beespecially the case in an island which is narrow in proportion to itslength and in which the rivers are distributed transversely to itsaxis. 

When we consider the river systems of the other great islands ofEurope we find that none besides our own enjoys this advantage. Sicilyand Crete, apart from the fact that they do not stand in tidal water, have no navigable rivers. Iceland, standing in a tidal sea, too farnorth indeed for successful commerce, but not too far north for thegrowth of a civilisation, is at a similar disadvantage. Great Britainand Ireland alone--Great Britain south of the Scottish Mountains, thatis--enjoy this peculiar advantage; and there are few things moreinstructive when one is engaged upon the history of England than totake a map and mark upon it the head of each navigable piece of waterand the head of its tideway, for when this has been done all England, with the exception of the Welsh Hills and the Pennines, seems to bepenetrated by the influence of the sea. 

The conditions which give a river this great historic importance, thefundamental character, therefore, which has lent to the Thames itsmeaning in English history, is twofold: a river affords a permanentmeans of travel, and a river also forms an obstacle and a boundary. Men are known to have agglomerated in the beginning of society in twoways: as nomadic hordes and as fixed inhabitants of settlements. 

There has arisen a profitless discussion as to which of these twophases came first. No evidence can possibly exist upon either side, but one may take it that with the first traditions and records, as atthe present time, the two systems existed side by side, and thateither was determined by geographical conditions. A river is anadvantage to both groups, but to the second it is of more consequencethan to the first; and in South England, if we go back to the originsof our history, it is in fixed settlements that we find the firstevidence of man. With every year of research the extreme antiquity ofour inhabited sites becomes more apparent. And indeed the geographicalnature of Southern England should make us certain of the antiquity ofvillage life in it, even were there no archæological evidence tosupport that antiquity. 

South England is everywhere fertile, everywhere well watered, andnowhere divided, as is the North, by long districts of bare country, or of hills snowbound in winter, or of morass. Its forests, thoughnumerous, have never formed one continuous belt; even the largest ofthem, the Forest of the Weald, between the downs of Surrey and Kentand those of Sussex, was but twenty miles across--large enough tonourish a string of hunting villages upon the north and the southedges of it; but not large enough to isolate the Thames Valley fromthe southern coast. 

From the beginning of human activity in this island the whole lengthof the river has been set with human settlements never far removed onefrom the other; for the Thames ran through the heart of South England, and wherever its banks were secure from recurrent floods it furnishedthose who settled on them with three main things which every earlyvillage requires: good water, defence, and communication. 

The importance of the first lessens as men learn to dig wells and tocanalise springs; the two last, defence and communication, remainattached to river settlements to a much later date, and are apparentin all the history of the Thames. 

The problem of communication under early conditions is serious. Evenin a high civilisation the maintenance of roads is of greater moment, and imposes a greater burden, than most of the citizens who support itknow; but before the means or the knowledge exist to survey and toharden roads, with their causeways over marshes and their bridges overrivers, the supply of food in time of scarcity or of succour in timeof danger is never secure: a little narrow path kept up by nothing butthe continual passage of men and animals is all the channel acommunity of men have for communicating with their neighbours by land. And it must be remembered that upon such communication depend not onlythe present existence, but the future development of the society, which cannot proceed except by that fertilisation, as it were, whichcomes from the mixture of varied experiences and of varied traditions:every great change in history has necessarily been accompanied by somenew activity of travel. 

Under the primitive conditions of which we speak a river of moderatedepth, not too rapid in its current and perennial in its supply, ismuch the best means by which men may communicate. It will easilycarry, by the exertions of a couple of men, some hundred times theweight the same men could have carried as porters by land. Itfurnishes, if it is broad, a certain security from attack during thejourney; it will permit the rapid passage of a large number abreastwhere the wood tracks and paths of the land compel a long procession;and it furnishes the first of the necessities of life continually asthe journey proceeds. 

Upon all these accounts a river, during the natural centuries whichprecede and follow the epochs of high civilisation, is as much moreimportant than the road or the path as, let us say, a railway to-dayis more important than a turnpike. 

What is equally interesting, when a high civilisation after its littleeffort begins to decline into one of those long periods of repose intowhich all such periods of energy do at last decline, the riverreassumes its importance. There is a very interesting example of thisin the history of France. Before Roman civilisation reached the northof Gaul the Seine and its tributary streams were evidently the chiefeconomic factor in the life of the people: this may be seen in thesites of their strongholds and in the relation of the tribes to oneanother, as for instance, the dependence of the Parisians upon Sens. The five centuries of active Roman civilisation saw the river replacedby the system of Roman roads; the great artificial track from north tosouth, for instance, takes on a peculiar importance; but when the endof that period has come, and the energies of the Roman state arebeginning to drag, when the money cannot be collected to repair thegreat highways, and these fall into decay--then the Seine and itstributaries reassume their old importance. Paris, the junction of thevarious waterways, becomes the capital of a new state, and theinfluence of its kings leads out upon every side along the rivervalleys which fall into the main valley of the Seine. 

There are but two considerable modifications to the use for habitationof slow and constant rivers: their value is lessened or interrupted byprecipitous banks or they are rendered unapproachable by marshes. Thefirst of these causes, for instance, has singularly cut off one fromthe other the groups of population residing upon the upper and thelower Meuse, as it has also, to quote another example, cut off even inlanguage the upper from the lower Elbe. 

From this first species of interruption the Thames is, of course, singularly free. There is no river in England, with the exception ofthe Trent, whose banks interfere so little with the settlement of menin any place on account of their steepness. 

As to the second, the Thames presents a somewhat rare character. 

The upper part of the river, which is in lowland valleys the mosteasily inhabited, and the part in which, once the river is navigable, will be found the largest number of small settlements, is in the caseof the Thames the most marshy. From its source to beyond Cricklade theriver runs entirely over clay; thenceforward the valley is a flat massof alluvium, in which the stream swings from one side to the other, and even where it touches higher soil, touches nothing better than thecontinuation of this clay. In spite, therefore, of the shallowness andnarrowness of the upper river there always existed this impedimentwhich an insecure soil would present to the formation of anyconsiderable settlements. The loneliness of the stretch belowKelmscott is due to an original difficulty of this kind, and the oneconsiderable settlement upon the upper river at Lechlade stands uponthe only place where firm ground approaches the bank of the river. 

This formation endures well below Oxford until one reaches the gap atSandford, where the stream passes between two beds of gravel whichvery nearly approach either bank. 

Above this point the Thames is everywhere, upon one side or the other, guarded by flat river meadows, which must in early times have beenmorass; and nowhere were these more difficult of passage than in thelast network of streams between Witham Hill and Sandford, to the westof the gravel bank upon which Oxford is built. 

Below Sandford, and on all the way to London Bridge, the character ofthe river in this respect changes. You have everywhere gravel orflinty chalk, with but a narrow bed of alluvial soil, upon either bankto represent the original overflow of the river. 

At the crossing places (as we shall see later), notably at LongWittenham, at Wallingford, at Streatley, at Pangbourne, and, stilllower, at Maidenhead and at Ealing, this hard soil came right down tothe bank upon either side. 

On all this lower half of the Thames marsh was rare, and was to befound even in early times only in isolated patches, which are stillclearly defined. These are never found facing each other upon oppositebanks of the stream. Thus there was a bad bit on the left bank aboveAbingdon, but the large marsh below Abingdon, where the Ock came in, was on the right bank, with firm soil opposite it. There was a largebay, as it were, of drowned land on the right bank, from below Readingto a point opposite Shiplake, the last wide morass before the marshesof the tidal portion of the river; and another at the mouth of theColn, above Staines, on the left bank, which was the last before onecame to the mud of the tidal estuary; and even the tidal marshes werefairly firm above London. From Staines eastward down as far as Chelseathe superficial soil upon either side is of gravels, and the long listof ancient inhabited sites upon either bank show how little theoverflow of the river interfered with its usefulness to men. 

The river, then, from Sandford downward has afforded upon either bankinnumerable sites upon which a settlement could be formed. AboveSandford these sites are not to be found indifferently upon eitherbank, but now on one, now on the other. There is no case on the upperriver of two villages facing each other on either side of the stream. But though the soil of this upper part was in general less suited tothe establishment of settlements, a certain number of firmer stretchescould be found, and advantage was taken of them to build. 

There thus arose along the whole course of the Thames from its sourceto London a series of villages and towns, increasing in importance asthe stream deepened and gave greater facilities to traffic, and boundtogether by the common life of the river. It was their _highway_, andit is as a highway that it must first be regarded. 

Of the way in which the Thames was a necessary great road in earlytimes, perhaps the best proof is the manner in which various parishesmanage to get their water front at the expense of a somewhat unnaturalshape to their boundaries. Thus Fawley in Buckinghamshire has acurious and interesting arrangement of this sort thrusting down fromthe hills a tongue of land which ends in a sort of wharfage on theriver just opposite Remenham church. In Berkshire there are alsoseveral examples of this. On the upper river Dractmoor and KingstonBagpuise are both very narrow and long, a shape forced upon them bythe necessity of having this outlet upon the river in days when thelife of a parish was a real one and the village was a true andself-sufficing unit. Next to them Fyfield does the same thing. Lowerdown, near Wallingford, the parish of Brightwell has added on asimilar eccentric edge to the north and east so that it may share inthe bank; but perhaps the best example of all in this connection isthe curious extension below Reading. Here land which is of no use forhuman habitation--water meadows continually liable to floods--runs outfrom the parish northward for a good mile. These lands are separatedfrom the river during the whole of this extension until at last a bendof the stream gives the parish the opportunity it has evidently soughtin thus extending its boundaries. On the Oxford bank Standlake andBrighthampton do the same thing upon the Upper Thames and to someextent Eynsham; for when one thinks how far back Eynsham stands fromthe river it is somewhat remarkable that it should have claimed theright to get at the stream. Below Oxford there is another mostinteresting instance of the same thing in the case of Littlemore. Littlemore stands on high and dry land up above the river somewhat setback from it. Sandford evidently interfered with its access to thewater, and Littlemore has therefore claimed an obviously artificialextension for all the world like a great foot added on to the bulk ofthe parish. This "foot" includes Kennington Island, and runs up themeadows to the foot of that eyot. 

The long and narrow parishes in the reaches below Benson, NunehamMorren, Mongewell, and Ipsden and South Stoke are not, however, examples of this tendency. 

They owe their construction to the same causes as have produced thesimilar long parishes of the Surrey and the Sussex Weald. The life ofthe parish was in each case right on the river or very close to it, and the extension is not the attempt of the parish to reach the river, but the claim of the parish upon the hunting lands which lay up behindit upon the Chiltern Hills. The truth of this will be apparent toanyone who notes upon the map the way in which parishes are thuslengthened, not only on the western side of the hills, but also uponthe farther eastern side, where there was no connection with theriver. 

There are many other proofs remaining of the chief function which theThames fulfilled in the early part of our history as a means ofcommunication. 

We shall see later in these pages how united all that line of thestream has been; how the great monasteries founded upon the Thameswere supported by possessions stretched all along the valleys; howmuch of it, and what important parts, were held by the Crown; and howstrong was the architectural influence of towns upon one another upand down the water, as also how the place names upon the banks areeverywhere drawn from the river; but before dealing with these it isbest to establish the main portions into which the Thames falls and tosee what would naturally be their limits. 

It may be said, generally, that every river which is tidal, and whosestream is so slow as to be easily navigable in either direction, divides itself naturally, when one is regarding it as a means ofcommunication, into three main divisions. 

There will first of all be the tidal portion which the tide usuallyscours into an estuary. As a general rule, this portion is notconsiderably inhabited in the early periods of history, for it is notuntil a large international commerce arises that vessels have muchoccasion to stop as they pass up and down the maritime part of thestream; and even so, settlements upon its banks must comecomparatively late in the development of the history of the river, because a landing upon such flooded banks is not easily to beeffected. 

This is true of the Dutch marshes at the mouths of the Rhine, whosecivilisation (one exclusively due to the energy of man) came centuriesafter the establishment of the great Roman towns of the Rhine; it istrue of the estuary of the Seine, whose principal harbour of Havre isalmost modern, and whose difficulties are still formidable forocean-going craft; and it is true of the Thames. 

The estuary of the Thames plays little or no part in the very earlyhistory of England. Invaders, when they landed, landed on thesea-coast at the very mouth, or appear to have sailed right up intothe heart of the country. 

It is, nevertheless, true that the last few miles of tidal water, inWestern Europe at least, are not to be included in this first divisionof a great river. 

The swish of the tide continues up beyond the broad estuary, thesand-banks, and the marshes, and there are reaches more or less long(rather less than twenty miles perhaps originally in the case of theThames, rather more perhaps originally in the case of the lower Seine)which for the purposes of habitation are inland reaches. They have theadvantage of a current moving in either direction twice a day and yetnot the disadvantage of greatly varying levels of water. Thus one maysay of the Seine in the old days that from about Caudebec to Point deL'Arche it enjoyed such inland tidal conditions; and of the Thamesfrom Greenwich to Teddington that similar advantages existed. 

The true point of division which separates, so far as human history isconcerned, the lower from the upper part of such rivers is the firstbridge, and, what almost always accompanies the first bridge, thefirst great town. To repeat the obvious parallel, Rouen was this pointupon the Seine; upon the Thames this point was the Bridge of London. It is with the habitable and historic Thames Valley above the bridgethat this book has to deal, and it will later be to the reader'spurpose to consider why London Bridge crossed the stream just where itdid, and of what moment that site has been in the history of theThames and of England. 

The second division in a great European tidal river, considered as ameans of communication, is the navigable but non-tidal portion. 

The word navigable is so vague that it requires some definition beforewe can apply it to any particular stream. It does not, of course, meanin this connection "navigable by sea-going boats. " One may take aconstant depth of so little as three feet to be sufficient for thepurpose of carrying merchandise even in considerable bulk. 

The legislatures of various countries have established varying gaugesto determine where the navigability of a river may be said to cease. In practice these gauges have always been arbitrary. The upper reachesof a river may present sufficient depth but too fast a current, orthey may be too narrow, or the curves may be too rapid, or theobstruction of rocks too common, for any sort of navigation, althoughthe depth of water be sufficient. 

Conversely, in some streams of peculiar breadth and constancy veryshallow upper reaches may have early been converted to the use of man. The matter is only to be determined by the experience of what theinhabitants of a river valley have actually been able to do under thelocal circumstances, and when we examine this we shall usually beastonished to see how far inland a river was used until the history ofinternal navigation was transformed by the development of canals orpartially destroyed by the development of railways. Thus it is certainthat so small a stream as the Adur in Sussex floated barges up to theboundaries of Shipley Parish; that the Stour was habitually usedbeyond Canterbury; that so tiny a tributary as the Ant in Norfolk wasfollowed up from its parent Bure to the neighbourhood of Worsted. 

In this connection the Thames is of an especial interest, for it had, in proportion to its length, the greatest section of navigablenon-tidal water of any of the shorter rivers in Europe. Until thedigging of the Thames and Severn Canal at the end of last century itwas possible, and even common, for boats to reach Cricklade, or at anyrate the mouth of the Churn. And even now, in spite of the pumpingthat is necessary at Thames head and the consequent diminution of thevolume of water in the upper reaches, the Thames, were water carriageto come again into general use, would be a busy commercial stream ashigh up as Lechlade. 

This exceptional sector of non-tidal navigable water cutting rightacross England from east to west, and that in what used to be the mostproductive and is still the most fertile portion of the island, is thechief factor in the historic importance of the Thames. 

From Cricklade to the navigable waters of the Severn Valley is but along day's walk; and one may say that even in the earliest times therewas thus provided a great highway right across what then was by farthe most thickly populated and the most important part of the island. 

A third section in all such rivers (and, from what we have said above, a short and insignificant one in the case of the Thames) may be calledthe _head-waters_ of the river: where the stream is so shallow or souncertain as to be no longer navigable. In the case of the Thamesthese head-waters cover no more than ten to fifteen miles of country. With the exception of rivers that run through mountain districts thissection of a river's course is nearly always small in proportion tothe rest; but the Thames, just as it has the longest proportion ofnavigable water, has also by far the shortest proportion of uselesshead-water of all the shorter European rivers. 

There is a further discussion as to what is the true source of theThames, and which streams may properly be regarded as its head-waters:the Churn, especially since the digging of the canal, having a largerflow than the stream from Thames head; but whichever is chosen, thenon-navigable portion starts at the same point, and is the third ofthe divisions into which the valley ranges itself when it isconsidered in its length, as a highway from the west to the east ofEngland. The two limits, then, are at London Bridge and at Cricklade, or rather at some point between Lechlade and Cricklade, and nearer tothe latter. 

But a river has a second topographical and historic function. Itcannot only be considered longitudinally as a highway, it can also beconsidered in relation to transverse forces and regarded as anobstacle, a defence, and a boundary. 

This function has, of course, been of the highest importance in thehistory of all great rivers, not perhaps so much so in the case of theThames as in the case of swifter or deeper streams, but, still, morethan has been the case with so considerable and so rapid a river asthe Po in Lombardy or the uncertain but dangerous Loire in its passagethrough the centre of France. For the Thames Valley was that whichdivided the vague Mercian land from which we get our weights, ourmeasures, and the worst of our national accent, and cut it off fromthat belt of the south country which was the head and the heart ofEngland until the last industrial revolution of our history. 

The Thames also has entered to a large, though hardly to adetermining, extent into the military history of the country; to anextent which is greater in earlier than in later times, because withevery new bridge the military obstacle afforded by the streamdiminished. And finally, the Thames, regarded as an obstacle, was thecause that London Bridge concentrated upon itself so much of the lifeof the nation, and that the town which that bridge served, always thelargest commercial city, became at last the capital of the island. 

We have already said that the establishment of the site of LondonBridge was a capital point in the history of the river and theprincipal line of division in its course. What were the topographicalconditions which caused the river to be crossed at this point ratherthan at another?

It is always of the greatest moment to men to find some crossing for agreat river as low down as may be towards the mouth. For the higherthe bridge the longer the detour between, at the least, _two_provinces of the country which the river traverses. It is especiallyimportant to find such a crossing as low down as possible when theriver is tidal and when it is flanked upon either side by greatflooded marshes, as was and is the Thames. For under such conditionsit is difficult, especially in primitive times, to cross habituallyfrom one side to the other in boats. 

Now it is a universal rule of early topography, and one which can beproved upon twenty of the old trackways of England, that the wild pathwhich the earliest men used, when it approaches a river, seeks out aspur of higher and drier land, and if possible one directly facinganother similar spur upon the far side of the water. It is a featurewhich the present writer continually observed in the exploration ofthe old British trackway between Winchester and Canterbury; it issimilarly observable in the presumably British track between Chesterand Manchester; and it is the feature which determined the site ofLondon Bridge. 

From the sea for sixty miles is a succession of what was onceentirely, and is now still in great part, marshy land; or at least ifthere are no marshes upon one bank there will be marshes upon theother. In the rare places down stream where there is a fairly rapidrise upon either side of the river the stream is far too wide forbridging; and these marshes were to be found right up the valley untilone struck the gravel at Chelsea: even here there were bad marshes onthe farther shore. 

There is in the whole or the upper stretch of the tidal water but oneplace where a bluff of high and dry land faces, not indeed landequally dry immediately upon the farther bank, but at least a spur ofdry land which approaches fairly near to the main stream. If themodern contour lines be taken and laid out upon a map of London thisspur will be found to project from Southwark northward directlytowards the river, and immediately opposite it is the dry hill, surrounded upon three sides by river or by marsh, upon which grew upthe settlement of London. Here, then, the first crossing of the Thameswas certain to be made. 

It is not known whether a permanent bridge existed before the RomanConquest. It may be urged in favour of the negative argument thatCæsar had no knowledge of such a bridge, or at least did not marchtowards it, but crossed the river with difficulty in the higherreaches by a ford. And it may also be urged that a bridge across theRhine was equally unknown in that time. But, the bridge onceestablished, it could not fail to become the main point of convergencefor the commerce of Southern England, and indeed for much of thatwhich proceeded from the North upon its way to the Continent. Such anobstacle would oppose itself to every invasion, and did, in fact, oppose itself to more than one historical invasion from the North Sea. It would further prevent sea-going vessels whose masts were securelystepped and could not lower from proceeding farther up stream, andwould thereupon become the boundary of the seaport of the Thames. Sucha bridge would, again, concentrate upon itself the traffic of all thatimportant and formerly wealthy part of the island which bulges out tothe east between the estuary of the Thames and the Wash, and whichmust necessarily have desired communication both with the stillwealthier southern portion and with the Continent. But, more importantthan this, London Bridge also concentrated upon itself all theup-country traffic in men and in goods which came in by the naturalgate of the country at the Straits of Dover, except that small portionwhich happened to be proceeding to the south-west of England: and thisexception to the early commerce of England was the smaller from thecomparative ease with which the Channel could be crossed betweenBrittany and Cornwall. 

Finally, the Bridge, as it formed the limit for sea-going vessels, formed also if not the limit at least a convenient terminus for craftcoming from inland down the stream. It would form the place oftranshipment between the sea-going and the inland trade. 

Everything then conspired to make this first crossing of the Thamesthe chief commercial point in Britain; and, since we are consideringin particular the history of the river, it must be noted that theseconditions also made of London Bridge what we have remarked it to be, the chief division in the whole course of the stream. This characterit still maintains, and the life of the river from the bridge to theNore is a totally different thing, with a different literature and adifferent accompanying art, from the life of the river above bridges. 

We have seen that the river when it is regarded as an avenue of accessto men for commerce or for travel is, especially in early times, andwith boats of light draught, of one piece from Lechlade to LondonBridge. There was in this section always sufficient water even in adry summer to float some sort of a boat. But the river, regarded as abarrier or obstacle for human beings in their movement up and downBritain, did not form one such united section. On the contrary, itdivided itself, as all such rivers do, into two very clearly definedparts: there was that upper part which could be crossed at frequentintervals by an army, that lower part in which fords are rare. 

In most rivers one has nothing more to do in describing those twosections than to show how gradually they merge into one another. Inmost rivers the passage of the upper waters is perfectly easy, and asone descends the fords get rarer and rarer, until at last they cease. 

With the Thames this is not the case. The two portions of the riverare sharply divided in the vicinity of Oxford, and that for reasonswhich we have already seen when we were speaking of the suitability ofits banks for habitation. The upper Thames is indeed shallow andnarrow, and there are innumerable places above Oxford where it couldbe crossed, so far as the volume of its waters was concerned. It wascrossed by husbandmen wherever a village or a farm stood upon itsbanks. Perhaps the highest point at which it had to be crossed at onechosen spot is to be discovered in the word Somer_ford_ Keynes, butthe ease with which the water itself could be traversed is apparentrather in the absence than in the presence of names of this sort uponthe upper Thames. Shifford, for instance, which used to be speltSiford, may just as well have been named from the crossing of theGreat Brook as from the crossing of the Thames. The only other isDuxford. 

While, however, the upper Thames was thus easy to cross whereindividuals only or small groups of cattle were concerned, the marsheson either side always made it difficult for an army. The records ofearly fighting are meagre, and often legendary, but such as they areyou do not find the upper Thames crossed and recrossed as are theupper Severn or the upper Trent. There are two points of passage:Cricklade and Oxford, nor can the passage from Oxford be made westwardover the marshes. It is confined to the ford going north and south. 

Below Oxford, after the entry of the Cherwell, and from thence down toa point not very easily determined, but which is perhaps best fixed atWallingford, the Thames is only passable at fixed crossings inordinary weather, as at Sandford, where the hard gravels approach thebank upon either side, and at other places, each distant from the nextby long stretches of river. 

It is not easy, now that the river has been locked, to determineprecisely where all these original crossings are to be found. 

The records of Abingdon and its bridge make it certain that adifficult ford existed here; the name "Burford" attached to the bridgepoints to the ancient ford at this spot. It is a name to be discoveredin several other parts of England where there has been some ancientcrossing of a river, as, for instance, the crossing of the Mole inSurrey by the Roman military road. 

The next place below Abingdon may have been at Appleford, but was morelikely between the high cliff at Clifton-Hampden and the high and dryspit of Long Wittenham. Below this again for miles there was no easycrossing of the river. 

The Thames was certainly impassable at Dorchester. The wholeimportance of Dorchester indeed in history lies in its being a strongfortified position, and it depends for its defence upon the depth ofthe river, which swirls round the peninsula occupied by the camp. 

It has been conjectured that there was a Roman ford or ferry at theeast end of Little Wittenham Wood, where it touches the river. Theconjecture is ill supported. No track leads to this spot from thesouth, and close by is an undoubted ford where now stands ShillingfordBridge. 

Below this again there was no crossing until one got to Wallingford;and here we reach a point of the greatest importance in the history ofthe Thames and of England. 

Wallingford was not the lowest point at which the Thames could ever becrossed. So far was this from being the case that the _tidal_ Thamescould be crossed in several places on the ebb, notably at the passagebetween Ealing and Kew, where Kew Bridge now stands; and, as we shallsee, the Thames was passable at many other places. But the specialcharacter of the passage at Wallingford lay in the fact that it was aford upon which one could always depend. Below Wallingford thecrossings were either only to be effected in very dry seasons or, though normally usable, might be interrupted by rain. 

It is at Wallingford, therefore, that the main lowest passage of theThames was effected, and it was through Wallingford that Berkshirecommunicated with the Chilterns. Wallingford is, then, the secondpoint of division upon the Thames when one is regarding that river asa defence or a boundary. Below Wallingford there was perhaps a regularcrossing at Pangbourne; there was certainly a ford of great importancebetween Streatley and Goring; and all the way down the river atintervals were difficult but practicable passages--notably at CoweyStakes between the Surrey and the Middlesex shore, a place which isthe traditional crossing of Cæsar. The water here in normal weatherwas, however, as much as five feet deep, and this ford wellillustrates the difficulties of all the lower crossings of the Thames. 

The effect of the river as a barrier must, of course, have largelydepended upon the level to which the waters rose in early times. It isexceedingly difficult to get any evidence upon this--first, becausehowever far you go back in English history some sort of control seemsalways to have been imposed upon the river; and secondly, because theearly overflows have left little permanent effect. 

As an example of the antiquity of the regulation of the Thames we havethe embankment round the Isle of Dogs, which is Roman or pre-Roman inits origin, like the sea-wall of the Wash, which defends the Fenland;and at Ealing, Staines, Abingdon, and twenty other places we havesites probably pre-historic, and certainly at the beginnings ofhistory, which could never have been inhabited if the neighbouringfields had not been drained or protected. The regularity of the streamhas therefore been somewhat artificial throughout all the centuries ofrecorded history, and the banks have had ample time to acquireconsistency. 

It is certain, of course, that works of planting, of draining, or ofembankment, which required continuous energy, skill, and capital, decayed after the coming of the Saxon pirates, and were not undertakenagain with full vigour until after the Norman Conquest. Even to-daythe work is not quite complete, though every year sees itsimprovement: we are still unable to prevent regularly recurrent floodsin the flats round Oxford and below the gorge of the Chilterns; butfor the purpose of this argument the chief fact to be noted is that noserious interruption to the approach of the river seems to haveexisted in historic times. 

In pre-historic times many stretches of the river must have affordedgreat difficulties of approach. The mouths of the Ock, the Coln, theKennet, the Mole, and the Wandle must each have been surrounded by amarsh; all the plain between Oxford and the Hinkseys must have beenpartially flooded, as must the upper reaches between Lechlade andWitham (on one side or the other of the stream as it winds from thesouthern to the northern rises of land), and as must also have beenthe long stretch of the right bank below Reading. The highest springtides may have been felt as high up the stream as Staines, and boththe character of the surface and the contour lines permit one toconjecture that the valley of the Wandle and several other inlets fromthe lower river were flooded. Yet it is remarkable that in thisalluvium, more disturbed and dug than any other in Europe, little ornothing of human relics, of boats, or of piles has been discovered, and this absence of testimony also points to the remoteness of datefrom which we should reckon the human control of the river. 

Here, as in many other conjectures concerning early history orpre-history, one is convinced of that safe rule which, in Europe atleast, bids us never exaggerate the changes achieved by the last fewcenturies or the contrast between recorded and unrecorded things. 

The tendency of most modern history in this country has been toexaggerate such changes and such contrasts. In the greater part ofmodern popular history care is taken to emphasise the differencebetween the Middle and Dark Ages and the last few centuries. Theforests of England are represented as impassable, or nearly so; thenumbers of the population are grossly underestimated; the towns whichhave had a continuous municipal existence of 1500 years arerepresented as villages. 

The same spirit would tend to make of the Thames Valley in the Darkand Middle Ages a very different landscape from that which we seeto-day. The floods were indeed more common and the passage of theriver somewhat more difficult; cultivation did not everywhere approachthe banks as it does now; and in two or three spots where there hasbeen a great development of modern building, notably at Reading, and, of course, in London, the banks have been artificially strengthened. But with these exceptions it may be confidently asserted that no beltof densely inhabited landscape in England has changed so little in itsnatural features as the Thames Valley. 

There are dozens of reaches upon the upper Thames where little is insight save the willows, the meadows, and a village church tower, whichpresent exactly the same aspect to-day as they did when that churchwas first built. You might put a man of the fifteenth century on tothe water below St. John's Lock, and, until he came to Buscot Lock, hewould hardly know that he had passed into a time other than his own. The same steeple of Lechlade would stand as a permanent landmarkbeyond the fields, and, a long way off, the same church of EatonHastings, which he had known, would show above the trees. 

There is another method of judging the comparative smallness of thechange, and it is a method which can be applied to many other parts ofEngland whose desertion or wildness in the Dark and early Middle Ageshas been too confidently asserted. That method is to note where humansettlements were and are found. With the exception of the long andprobably marshy piece between Radcot and Shifford the whole of theupper Thames was dotted with such settlements, which, though small, were quite close to the banks. Kelmscott is right up against the riverin what one would otherwise have imagined to be land too marshy forbuilding until modern times. Buscot, on the other bank, is not onlyclose to the river, but was a royal manor of high historicalimportance in the eleventh century. Eaton Hastings is similarly placedright against the bank; so was in its day the palace of Kempsfordabove Lechlade, and so is the church of Inglesham between the two. Allthe way down you have at intervals old stonework and old place names, indicating habitation upon the upper Thames. 

A proper system of locks is comparatively modern on any Europeanriver. The invention is even said (upon doubtful authority) to be aslate as the sixteenth century, but the method of regulating the watersof a river by weirs is immemorial. 

We have no earlier record of weirs upon the Thames than that in MagnaCharta; but some such system must have existed from the time when menfirst used the Thames in a regular manner for commerce. 

There is but one place left in which one can still reconstruct foroneself the aspect of such weirs as were till but little more than acentury ago the universal method of canalising the river. Modern weirsare merely adjuncts to locks, and are usually found upon a branch ofthe stream other than that which leads up to the lock. But in thisweir the old fashion of crossing the whole stream is still preserved. There is no lock, and when a boat would pass up or down the paddles ofthe weir have to be lifted. It is, in a modern journey upon the upperThames, the one faint incident which the day affords, for if one isgoing down the stream but few paddles are lifted, and the boat shootsa small rapid, while to admit a boat going up stream the whole weir israised, and, even so, a great rush of water opposes the boat as it ishauled through. Some years ago there were several of these weirs uponthe upper river. They have all been superseded by locks, and it isprobable that this last one will not long survive. 

Such weirs did certainly sufficiently regulate the stream as to makeits banks regularly habitable. If no local order, at least theinterest of villagers in their mills sufficed to the watching of thestream. 

We have in the place names upon the Thames a further evidence of theantiquity of its regulation, for, as will be seen in a moment, nonegive proof of any important settlement later than the eleventhcentury. 

These place names not only indicate a continuous and early settlementof the banks, but also form in themselves a very interesting series, whose etymology is a little section of the history of England. 

Of purely Celtic names very few survive in the sites of humanhabitation, though the names of the waterways are almost universallyCeltic, as is the name of Thames itself. But it is probable that inthe Saxon names which line the river there are many corruptions ofCeltic words made to sound in the Saxon fashion. We cannot prove suchorigins. We can surmise with justice that the "tons" and "dons" all upand down England are Celtic terminations; they are almost unknown inGermany. There is a somewhat pedantic guess, drawn (it is said) fromIceland, that we got this national name ending from Scandinavia; souniversal a habit would hardly have arisen from an admixture ofScandinavian blood received at the very close of the Dark Ages andaffecting but small patches of North England. Moreover, as againstthis theory, there is the fact that quite half the Celtic place namesmentioned in our early history and in that of Gaul had a similartermination. London itself is the best example. 

If, however, we neglect this termination, and consider the first partof the words in which it occurs (as in Abing-don, Bensing-ton, Ea-ton, etc. ), we shall find that most of the place names are Saxon in form, and some certainly Saxon in derivation. 

Thus Ea-ton, a name scattered all along the Thames, from its verysource to the last reaches, is the "tun" by the water or stream. Clif-ton (as in Clifton-Hampden) is the "ton" on the cliff, a verymarked feature of the left bank of the river at this place. OfBensing-ton, now Benson, we know nothing, nor do we of the origin ofthe word Abing-don. 

The names terminating in "ham" are, in their termination at least, certainly Teutonic; and the same may be true of most of those--but notall of those--ending in "ford. " Ford may just as well be a Celtic as aTeutonic ending, and in either case means a "passage, " a "going. " Itdoes not even in all cases indicate a shallow passage, though in thegreat majority of cases on the Thames it does indicate a place whereone could cross the river on foot. Thus Wallingford was probably thewalled or embattled ford, and Oxford almost certainly the "ford of thedroves"--droves going north from Berkshire. One may say roughly thatall the "hams" were Teutonic save where one can put one's finger on aprobable Celtic derivation such as one has, for instance, in the caseof Witham, which should mean the settlement upon the "bend" or curveof the river, a Celtic name with a Teutonic ending. 

One may also believe that the termination "or" or "ore" is Teutonic;Cumnor may have meant "the wayfarers' stage, " and Windsor probably"the landing place on the winding of the river. "

Hythe also is thought to be Teutonic. One can never be quite sure witha purely Anglo-Saxon word, that it had a German origin, but at leastHythe is Anglo-Saxon, a wharf or stage; thus Bablock Hythe on the roadthrough the Roman town of Eynsham across the river to Cumnor andAbingdon, cutting off the great bend of the river at Witham; so alsothe town we now call "Maidenhead, " which was perhaps the "mid-Hythe"between Windsor and Reading. Some few certainly Celtic names dosurvive: in the Sinodun Hills, for instance, above Dorchester; and thefirst part of the name Dorchester itself is Celtic. At the very headof the Thames you have Coates, reminding one of the Celtic name forthe great wood that lay along the hill; but just below, where thewater begins, to flow, Kemble and Ewen, if they are Saxon, are perhapsdrawn from the presence of a "spring. " Cricklade may be all Celtic, ormay be partly Celtic and partly Saxon. London is Celtic, as we haveseen. And in the mass of places whose derivation it is impossible toestablish the primitive roots of a Celtic place name may very possiblysurvive. 

The purely Roman names have quite disappeared, and, what is odd, theydisappeared more thoroughly in the Thames Valley than in any otherpart of England. Dorchester alone preserves a faint reminiscence ofits Romano-Celtic name; but Bicester to the north, and the crossing ofthe ways at Alchester, are probably Saxon in the first part at least. Streatley has a Roman derivation, as have so many similar namesthroughout England which stand upon a "strata" or "way" of British orof Roman origin. But though "Spina" is still Speen, Ad Pontes, closeby, one of the most important points upon the Roman Thames, has lostits Roman name entirely, and is known as Staines: the stones or stonewhich marked the head of the jurisdiction of London upon the river. 

To return to the river regarded as a _boundary_, it is subject to thisrather interesting historical observation that it has been more of aboundary in highly civilised than in barbaric times. 

One would expect the exact contrary to be the case. A civilised mancan cross a river more easily than a barbarian; and in civilised timesthere are permanent bridges, where in barbaric times there would beonly fords or ferries. 

Nevertheless, it is true of the Thames, as of nearly every otherdivision in Europe, that it was much more of a boundary at the end ofthe Roman Empire, and is more of a strict boundary to-day, than it wasduring the Dark Ages, and presumably also before the Claudianinvasion. Thus we may conjecture with a fair accuracy that in the lastgreat ordering of boundaries within the Roman Empire, which was thework of Diocletian, and so much of which still survives in ourEuropean politics to-day (for instance, the boundary of Normandy), theThames formed the division between Southern and Midland Britain. It isequally certain that it did _not_ form any exact division betweenWessex and Mercia. 

The estuary has, of course, always formed a division, and in thebarbarian period it separated the higher civilisation of Kent fromthat of the East Saxons, who were possibly of a different race, andcertainly of a different culture. But the Thames above London Bridgewas not a true boundary until the civilisation of England began toform, towards the close of the Dark Ages. It is perpetually crossedand recrossed by contending armies, and the first result of a successis to cause the conqueror to annex a belt from the farther bank to hisown territories. 

It is further remarkable that the one great definite boundary of theDark Ages in England--that which was established for a few years byAlfred between his kingdom and the territory of the Danishinvaders--abandons the Thames above bridges altogether, and uses it asa limitation in its estuarial part only, up to the mouth of the Lea. 

With the definition of exact frontiers for the English counties, however, a process whose origin can hardly antedate the NormanConquest by many years, the Thames at once becomes of the utmostimportance as a boundary. 

Its higher and hardly navigable streams are not so used. The upperThames and its little tributaries for some ten miles from its sourceare not only indifferent to county boundaries, but run through aterritory which has been singularly indefinite in the past. Forinstance, the parish of Kemble, wherein the first waters now appear, has been counted now in Gloucester, now in Wilts. But when these tenmiles are run, just after Castle Eaton Bridge, and not quite half waybetween that bridge and the old royal palace at Kempsford, the Thamesbecomes the line of division between two counties, and from there tothe sea it never loses its character of a boundary. 

It is a tribute to the great place of the river in history that thereis no other watercourse in England nor any other natural division ofwhich this is so universally true. 

The reason that the Thames, like so many other European boundaries, has come late into the process of demarcation, and the reason that itsuse as a limit is more apparent in civilised than in uncivilisedtimes, is simply the fact that limits and boundaries themselves arenever of great exactitude save in times of comparatively highcivilisation. It is when a complex system of law and a far-reachingpower of execution are present in a country that the necessity forprecise delimitation arises. In the barbaric period of England therewas no such necessity. Doubtless the men of Berkshire and the men ofOxfordshire felt themselves to be in general divided by the stream;but had we documents to hand (which, of course, we have not) it mightbe possible to show that exceptional tracts, such as the isolated Hillof Witham (which is much more influenced by Oxford than by Abingdon), was treated as the land of Oxfordshire men in early times, or wasperhaps a territory in dispute; and something of the same sort mayhave existed in the connection of Caversham with Reading. 

In this old age of our civilisation the exactitude of the boundarywhich the Thames establishes is apparent in various survivals. Islandsnow joined to the one bank and indistinguishable from the rest of theshore are still annexed to the farther shore. Such a patch is to befound at Streatley, geographically in Berkshire, legally in Oxford;there is another opposite Staines, which Middlesex claims from Surrey. In all, half-a-dozen or more such anomalous frontiers mark the courseof the old river. One arrested in process of formation may be seen atPentonhook. 

A boundary--that is, an obstacle to travel--has this further feature, that the point at which it is crossed--that is, the point at which theobstacle is surmounted--is certain to become a point of strategic andoften of commercial importance. So it is with the passes overmountains and with the narrows of the sea, and so it is with fords andbridges over rivers. So it is with the Thames. 

The energies both of travel and of war are driven towards and confinedin such spots. Fortresses arise and towns which they may defend. Depots of goods are formed, the coining and the change of money areestablished, secure meeting places for speculation are founded. 

Such passages over the Thames were of two sorts: there are first theoriginal fords, numerous and primeval; next the crossing places of thegreat roads. 

Of the original fords we have already drawn up a list. Few have, merely as fords, proved to be of strategic or commercial value. Oxfordmay have been an early exception; and the difficult passage atAbingdon founded a great monastery but no military post: the rise ofeach was connected, as was Reading (which had no ford), with thejunction of a tributary. Wallingford alone, in its character of thelast easy and practicable ford down the river, had for centuries animportance certainly due to geographical causes alone. Two principalevents of English history--the crossing of the Thames by the Conquerorand the successful challenge of Henry II. To Stephen--depend upon thesite of this crossing. Long before their time it had been of capitalimportance to the Saxon kings, so early as Offa and so late as Alfred. If the bridges built at Abingdon in the fifteenth century had notgradually deflected the western road, Wallingford might still countthe fourteen churches and the large population which it possessed forso many centuries. 

Apart from Wallingford, however, the fords, as fords, did little tobuild up towns or to determine the topography of English history. Ofmore importance were the crossings of the great _roads_. 

When one remembers that the south of England was originally by far thewealthiest part of the country, and when one considers the shape ofIreland, it is evident that certain main tracks would lead from northto south, and that most or all of these would be compelled to crossthe Thames Valley. We find four such primeval ways. 

One from the Straits of Dover in the south-east to the north-westerncentres of the Welsh Marches and of Chester, the Port for Ireland, andso up west of the Pennines. This came in Saxon times to be called the_Watling Street_, a name common to other lesser lanes. 

Another, the converse to this, proceeded from the metal mines of thesouth-west to the north-east until it struck and merged into otherroads running north and east of the Pennines. This came to be called(as did other lesser roads) the _Fosse Way_. 

A third went more sharply west from the southern districts, andconnected them not with the Dee, but with the lower Severn. This trackran from the open highlands of Hampshire through Newbury and theBerkshire Hills to Gloucester, and was called (like other lessertracks) the _Ermine Street_. 

Finally, a fourth went in a great bend from these same highlands upeastward to the coast of the North Sea in East Anglia. This was calledin Saxon times the _Icknield Way_. 

All these can be traced in their general direction throughout and formost of their length minutely. All were forced to cross the ThamesValley, which so nearly divided the whole of South England from eastto west. 

Of these four crossings the first in point of interest is that whichthe _Ermine Street_ makes over the upper Thames at _Cricklade_. 

These old roads are of capital importance in the story of England, andthough historians have always recognised this there are a number offeatures about them which have not been sufficiently noted--as, forinstance, that armies until perhaps the twelfth century perpetuallyused them; for the great English roads, though their general track waslaid out in pre-historic times, were generally hardened, straightened, and embanked by the Romans in a manner which permitted them to surviveright on into the early Middle Ages; and of these four all were sohardened and strengthened, except the Icknield Way. Not one of them isquite complete to-day, but the Ermine Street is perhaps the bestpreserved. It is a good modern road all the way from Bayden toGloucester, with the exception of a very slight gap at this village ofCricklade. 

It originally crossed the river half-a-mile below Cricklade Bridge, sothat the priory which stood on the left bank lay just to the south ofthe old road. How and when the old bridge at Cricklade fell we have norecord, but one of the most important records of the Thames inAnglo-Saxon history is connected with this passage of the river. 

The importance of Cricklade as a station upon the upper Thames doesnot only proceed from its being the crossing place of a great road, itis also the point when the first important tributary stream, theChurn, joins the Thames. Above this junction the Thames nowadays ishardly a stream; and even in the eighteenth century and earlier, before the digging of the Severn and Thames Canal, it must havedepended on the weather whether there were any appreciable amount ofwater in the upper part or not. It would probably be found, if recordscould be examined, that the mills at Somerford Keynes were notcontinually worked throughout the year, even when the supply of waterhad been left undiminished by modern engineering. But when once theChurn (which, as we have seen, has a larger volume of water than theThames) had fallen in at Cricklade the two formed a true river, withdepth in it always sufficient to support a boat, and with a fairlystrong stream, as also with a width sufficient for minor traffic; andit is after Cricklade that you get a succession of villages andchurches dependent upon the river and standing close to its banks. 

But though this piece of hydrography has its importance the chiefmeaning of Cricklade in history lay in the fact that it was the spotwhere this Ermine Street on its way from the south country to theSevern Valley got over the Thames, and the village connected with itwas entrenched certainly in Roman and probably in pre-Roman times. This entrenchment may still be traced. 

The crossing of the Thames by the Icknield Way, unlike the crossing ofthe Ermine Street at Cricklade, presents a problem. 

Cricklade, as we have seen, is a perfectly well-established site, andwe owe our certitude upon the matter to the fact that the Romans hadhardened and straightened what was probably an old British track. Butwith the crossing of the Icknield Way no such complete certitudeexists, for the Icknield Way was but a vague barbarian track, oftentortuous in outline, confused by branching ways, and presenting allthe features of a savage trail. Doubtless that trail was used duringthe four hundred years of the high Roman civilisation as a countryroad, just as the similar trail, known as the "Pilgrims' Way" fromWinchester to Canterbury, was used in the same epoch. There are plentyof Roman remains to be found along the track, and there is no doubtthat all such roads, even when the State was not at the expense ofhardening or straightening them, were in continual use before, as theywere in continual use after, the presence of Roman government in thisisland; but the Icknield Way does not approach the river in a clearand unmistakable manner as would a Roman or a Romanised road. It is onthis account that the exact point of its crossing has been debated. 

The problem is roughly this: the high and treeless chalk downs havebeen used from the beginning of human habitation in these islands asthe principal highways, and any single traveller or tribe that desiredin early times to get from the Hampshire highlands to the east andnorth of England must have begun by following the ridge of theBerkshire Hills, and by continuing along the dry upland of theChiltern Hills, which continue this reach beyond the Thames. But thespot at which the pre-historic crossing of the Thames was effectedcannot be determined by a simple survey of the place where the Thamescuts through the chalk range. Wallingford up above this gorge hascertain claims, both because it was the lowest of the continuallypracticable fords upon the river, and because its whole history pointsto an immemorial antiquity. Higher still, Dorchester, on which everyhistorian of the Thames must dwell as perhaps the most interesting ofall the settlements upon the banks of the river, has also beensuggested. Just above Dorchester, on the Berkshire side, stands thepeculiar isolated twin height which forms so conspicuous a landmarkwhen one gazes over the plain from the summit of the Downs. Suchlandmarks often helped to trace the old roads. And Dorchester has alsoan immemorial antiquity--a pre-historic fortification upon the hillsabove, and fortifications, probably historic, on the Oxford bankbelow, but Dorchester has no ford. 

When all the evidence is weighed it seems more probable that theregular crossing from the Berkshire Hills to the Chilterns waseffected at Streatley. 

Of this there are several proofs. In the first place, the name of theplace suggests the passage of some great way. Place names of this sortare invariably found upon some one of the principal roads of England. In the second place, a lane bearing the traditional name of theIcknield Way can be traced to a point very near the river and thevillage. Another can be recovered beyond the river. The name wouldhardly have been so continued--even with considerable gaps--both uponthe Oxfordshire and the Berkshire side unless the place of regularcrossing had been here. 

Within a mile or two of Streatley this lane begins to descend the sideof the Berkshire Downs. Just before it falls into the Wantage Road andis lost it has begun to curl round the shoulder of the steep hill; butthere is no way of telling at what precise spot it would strike theriver upon the Berkshire side, because a thousand years or so ofbuilding, cultivation, and other changes have obliterated every traceof it. 

Luckily, we have some indication upon the farther bank. A way can thenbe traced here as a lane (and in the gaps as a right of way, as apath, or sometimes only by its general direction) for some miles onthe Oxfordshire side as it approaches Goring and the river coming fromthe Chilterns. And we know the point at which it strikes the village. This point is at the Sloane Hotel close to the railway; the inn isactually built upon the old road. Beyond the railway the track iscontinued in the lane which leads on past the schoolhouse to the oldferry, where there was presumably in Roman times a ford. If we acceptthis track we can conjecture that the vicarage of Streatley, upon theBerkshire bank, stands upon the continuation of the Way, and give theplace where the pre-historic road crossed the river with tolerablecertitude, though it is, I believe, impossible to recover thehalf-mile or so which lies between Streatley vicarage and the pointwhere the Wantage Road and the Icknield Way separated upon thehillside above. 

If the ford lay here the site was certainly well chosen, just below agroup of islands which broadened the stream and made it at onceshallower and less swift, acting somewhat as a natural weir above thecrossing. 

The third crossing place of a great pre-historic road, that of theWatling Street, is believed to correspond with the line of that veryugly suspension bridge which runs from Lambeth to the Horseferry Roadin Westminster. This is, according to the most probable conjecture, the place at which the great road which ran from the Straits of Doverto the north-western ports of the island crossed the Thames. 

Here, of course, there could be no question of a ford; there can onlyhave been a ferry. Such a ferry existed throughout the Middle Ages andup to the building of Westminster Bridge, and produced a large revenuefor the Archbishop of Canterbury. The memory of it is preserved in thename of the street upon the Middlesex shore. The Watling Street isfairly fixed in all its journey from the coast to the Archbishop'spalace on the banks of the river. On the Middlesex shore it is lost, but it may be conjectured to have run in a curve somewhere in theneighbourhood of Buckingham Palace up on the higher ground west of theTybourne, parallel with or perhaps identical with Park Lane until wefind it certainly again at the Marble Arch, whence in the form of theEdgware Road it begins a clear track across North-Western England. 

As for the Fosse Way, it only just touches the valley of the Thames. It crosses the line of the river in a high embankment a mile or sobelow its traditional source at Thames head, but above the point wherethe first water is seen. A small culvert running under that embankmenttakes the flood water in winter down the hollow, but no longer coversa regular stream. 

Besides these four crossings of the old British ways above LondonBridge there is the crossing of the Roman Road at Staines, which mayor may not represent a passage older than the Roman occupation. Wehave no proof of its being older. The river is deep, and, unless thebroken causeway on the Surrey shore is regarded as the remains ofBritish work, there is no trace of a pre-Roman track in theneighbourhood. 

The crossing at Staines was the main bridge over the middle riverduring the Roman occupation; no other spot on the banks (except LondonBridge) is _certainly_ the site of a Roman bridge. 

But apart from these there are two unsolved problems in connectionwith the roads across the Thames Valley in Roman times. The firstconcerns the passage of the upper Thames south of Eynsham; the secondconcerns the road which runs south from Bicester and Alchester. 

As to the first of these, we know that the plain lying to the north ofthe Thames between the Cotswolds and the Chilterns was thoroughlyoccupied. We have also in the Saxon Chronicle a legendary account ofthe occupation of four Roman towns in this plain by the Saxoninvaders. By what avenue did this wealthy and civilised districtcommunicate with the wealthy and civilised south?

It is a question which will probably never be answered. There is notrace remaining of Roman bridges; perhaps nothing was built save ofwood. 

The obvious short-cut from the Roman town of Eynsham across the Withampeninsula to Abingdon bears no signs of a ford approached by Romanwork or of a bridge, nor any record of such things. 

As to the second question, the road from Bicester southward runsstraight to Dorchester. At Dorchester, as we have seen, there was noford, though just below it a Roman ferry has been guessed at. 

There may have been a country road running down along the left ornorth bank of the river to the pre-historic crossing place at Goringand Streatley; but if there was, no trace of it remains, save perhapsin the two place names North Stoke and South Stoke. 

A barrier has yet another quality in history, and that quality isperhaps the most important of all. In so far as it is an obstacle itis also a means of defence. 

All the great rivers of Europe prove this. They are studded with linesof strongholds standing either right upon their banks or close by; andvarious as is the character of the different great rivers in theirphysical conformation, few or none have been unable to furnish sitesfor fortification. For instance, the slow rivers of Northern France, running for the most part through a flat country, were able to affordfortresses for the Gaulish clans in their numerous islands; the originof Melun and Paris, for instance, was of this kind. The sharp rocksalong the Rhone became platforms for castle after castle: Beaucaire, Tarascon, Aries, Avignon, and twenty others all of this sort. 

The Thames, curiously enough, forms an exception; it is an exceptioneven in the list of English rivers, most of which can show a certainnumber of fortifications along their banks. 

In the whole course of the great river above London there are butthree examples of fortification, or at any rate of fortificationdirectly dependent upon the river. Of these the first, at Lechlade, isconjectural; the second, at Windsor, came quite late in history, andthe only one which seems to have been a primeval fortified site wasDorchester. 

There were, of course, plenty of towns and castles susceptible ofdefence. At one time or another every important settlement upon theThames was capable of resistance: Oxford was walled, Wallingford was afortress, Abingdon or Reading could be defended. But these were all, so to speak, artificial. The settlement came first, and after thesettlement the necessity of guarding it from attack, and it was soguarded, not by natural means, but by human construction. The castleat Oxford, for instance, stood upon a mound of earth raised by humanwork. The only considerable place in which the river itself suggesteddefence from the earliest times appears to have been at Dorchester. 

The curious importance of Dorchester in the very origins of Englishhistory and the still more curious way in which it sinks out of sightfor generations, to revive again in the tenth century, is one of thepuzzles of the history of the Thames. 

It is useless to pursue an archæological discussion as to the originof the place, and still more useless to try and determine why, thoughcertainly the most easily defended, it should originally have been the_only_ heavily fortified spot in the whole of the valley. We know thatit was Roman: we know that it was a place of pre-historicfortification before the Romans came: we know that a Roman road rannorthward towards Bicester from it, and we also know, or at least wecan make a very probable guess, that though it was continuouslyimportant, and that the interest of early history is continuallyreturning to it, it can never have been large. 

Perhaps the best conjecture upon the origin of Dorchester is that thestronghold grew up as an out-lier to the great fort over the river atthe top of Sinodun Hill. The exact and regular peninsula between thebend in the Thames and the mouth of the Thames is obviously suited forfortification: the tributary flows just to the east of this peninsula, exactly parallel with the main river beyond, and covers the peninsulanot only with a stream on its east flank, but with a marsh at themouth. One can imagine that the conspicuous heights of the SinodunHills were held, from the very beginning of human habitation in thisdistrict, as a permanent fortress, into which the neighbouring tribescould retire during war, and one can imagine that when the river waslow in summer, and perhaps fordable, the spit of land before it, whichformed an exception to the marshes round about, needed to be protectedas a sort of bastion beyond the stream. This theory will at leastaccount for the two great ridges of earthwork going from one water tothe other and completely cutting off the peninsula, since it is agreedthese works are earlier than the Roman invasion. Whatever its origin, the part which Dorchester plays in the early history of England ismost remarkable. 

The conversion of England was effected by a process of which we knowfar more than of any other series of national events before the Danishinvasions. That process is more exactly recorded, less legendary, andmore consecutively told because it was (to all contemporary watchers)the capital event of the time, and to all posterity the one thing thatexplained men to themselves. 

We know also that, not so much the nucleus of the conversion as thesecure vantage from which it marched outward, was the triangle ofKent. We can believe that the civilisation of Kent was something quiteseparate from the rest of the south-eastern portion of England, andthat the many customary survivals which are, to this day, native tothe county are remaining proofs of its unique character among thepetty kingdoms during the mythical period between the withdrawal ofthe Romans and the arrival of St. Augustine. 

The early hold of civilisation upon Kent is explicable. But when theinfluence of Rome begins to spread again over England you havedistances covered which are astounding; there occur sporadic incidentsof the highest importance in spots where they would be the leastexpected. Among the very first of these is the first baptism of aWest-Saxon King. 

It was certainly at Dorchester that this baptism took place and thechoice of the site, little as we know of the village or city, hasfilled every historian with conjecture. Up to the very landing of St. Augustine we are still dependent upon what is half legendary and verymeagre record. The chief point indeed as regards this part of thecountry is the tradition of a battle fought against the British atBedford by the West Saxons and the occupation of "four towns. " Thissuccess was put down by tradition to the year 571, but everything wasstill so dark that even this success is a legend. 

Within the lifetime of a man you have the baptism of Cynegil, the kingof the West Saxons, at Dorchester, and that baptism takes place lessthan forty years after the complete submission of Kent. 

The Chronicle, in mentioning this date, is no longer upon legendaryground: it is dealing with an event which was kept on record bycivilised men who understood the art of writing, who could speakLatin, who could bear their records to Rome, and, what is more, thefact and the date are confirmed by the Venerable Bede. 

It is imagined by some authorities that the fulness of the story andits apparent accuracy depend upon access to some early ecclesiasticalrecord preserved at Dorchester and now lost. At any rate, Dorchester, whether because it had been, up till then, an unconquered Roman town, or for whatever other reason, becomes at once the ecclesiasticalcentre and one to which, even when this baptism takes place, the Kingof Northumbria was at the pains of travelling southward to, to bepresent as sponsor for the new Christian. 

The story has a special historical interest, because it shows how veryvague were the boundaries and the occupancies of the little wanderingchieftains of this period. It need hardly be pointed out that noregular division into shires can have existed so early, and, as wehave already insisted, the Thames itself was not a permanent boundarybetween any two definable societies, yet those who regard theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle as historical would show one Penda had appeareda few years before as the chief of a group of men with a new name, theMercians--probably a loose agglomeration of tribes occupying themiddle strip of England; a group whose dialect and measures of landare, perhaps, the ancestors of the modern Midland dialect and most ofour measures. Cynegil's baptism could not have taken place interritory controlled by Penda, for he was the champion of all theAnti-Christian forces of the time, and though he had just defeated theWest Saxons, and (according to a later legend) pushed back theirboundary to the line of the Thames, his action, like that of all thelittle kings of the barbaric age in Britain, can have been no morethan a march with a few thousands, a battle, and a retreat. In a word, the true and verifiable story of Cynegil's baptism is one of the manyvaluable instances which help to prove the unreliability of that partof the early Chronicle which does not deal with ecclesiasticalaffairs. 

The priest who received Cynegil into the Church was one Birinus, anItalian, and perhaps a Milanese; he appears, from his first presencein Dorchester, to have fixed the seat of a bishopric in that village. His reasons for choosing the spot are as impossible to discover as arethe origins of any other of the characteristics of the place. It was, in any case, as were so many of the sees of the Dark Ages, a frontiersee--a sort of ecclesiastical fortress, pushed out to the very limitsof the occupation of the enemy. 

Whether Dorchester continued to be a bishopric from this momentonwards we cannot tell; but no less than three hundred yearsafterwards--in the tenth century--it appears again, and this time asthe centre of the gigantic diocese which stretched throughout thewhole of Middle England and right up to the Humber. The Conquest came, the diocese was cut up just afterwards, and the seat of the bishopfinally removed from the village to Lincoln, and with the Conquest theimportance of Dorchester as a fortified position, an importance whichit had held for untold centuries, began to decline in favour ofOxford. 

The artificial chain of fortifications up the Thames Valley, which hadtheir origin under William the Conqueror, will call our attention tomany other spots besides Oxford as these pages proceed, but it isinteresting at this moment to consider Oxford in its early militaryaspect, when it succeeded Dorchester, and came forward as the chiefstronghold of the upper Thames Valley above Wallingford. 

The gravel bank north of the ford, by which what is presumed to havebeen the drovers' road from south to north crossed the river, hadsupported a very considerable population, and had attained a veryconsiderable civil importance, long before the Conquest. It isdifficult to believe that any new, especially that any extensive, centres of population grew up in Anglo-Saxon Britain, upon siteschosen by the barbarians. The Romans had colonised and denselypopulated every suitable spot. The ships' crews of open pirate vesselshad no qualities suitable to the founding of a town; and when there isno direct evidence it is always safer of the two conjectures inEnglish topography to believe that any spot which we find inhabitedand flourishing in the Anglo-Saxon period, even at its close, was nota town developed during the Dark Ages but one which the pirates, whenthey first entered the island, had found already inhabited andflourishing, though sometimes perhaps more British than Roman. Butthough this is always the more historical way of looking at theprobable origin of an English town it must be admitted that there isno direct evidence of any town upon the site of Oxford before theDanish invasions, and the first mention of the place by name is aslate as eleven years after Alfred's death, when it is recorded thatEdward, his son, "took possession of London and of Oxford and of alllands in obedience thereunto. "

This first mention, slight as it is, characterises Oxford as being thetown of the upper Thames Valley at the opening of the tenth century, and we have what is usually a good basis for history--that is, ecclesiastical tradition and a monastic charter--to show us that aconsiderable monastery had existed upon the spot for a century and ahalf before this first mention in the Chronicle. 

There still exists in the modern town, to the west of it, a largeartificial mound, one of those which have been discovered here andthere up and down England, and which are characteristic of a lateSaxon method of fortification. Before the advent of the Normans thesemounds were defended by palisades only, and were used as butoccasional strongholds. It may be conjectured that this Saxon work atOxford dates from somewhat the same period as does the first mentionof the town in the Chronicle. Twelve years later Alfred's grandson ismentioned as dying at Oxford. It may be presumed that his death wouldindicate the presence of a royal palace. We hear nothing more of thistown during the remainder of the tenth century, but we have a longaccount in what is probably an accurate record of the rising of thetownsmen against the Danes in the beginning of the eleventh. TheScandinavians made their last stand in the church of the monastery, and the townsmen burnt it. Five years later a new host of Danes tookand burnt the town; and four years later again, Sweyn, in his terribleconquering march, captured it, after very little resistance, in thesame year in which he took the crown of England. The brief episode ofEdmund Ironside again brings the town into history: he slept here uponhis way to London in the late autumn of 1016, and here, very probably, he was killed. From that moment the fortress (as it now certainly was)enters continually into that last anarchy which was only cured by asecond advent of European civilisation and the success of its armiesat Hastings. 

The great national council of 1018, which may be called the settlementof Canute, was held at Oxford, and in 1036 another national council, of even greater importance, which was held to decide upon thesuccession of Canute's heirs, was again held at Oxford, and it was atOxford that, four years later, the first Harold died. 

Meanwhile, in the near neighbourhood of the city, at Islip, Queen Emmahad, half a lifetime earlier, borne a son, who, after the death of allthese Danes, remained the legitimate heir to the English throne. Islipwas, most probably, not royal, but a private manor of the Queen's, which descended to the Confessor, and it is interesting to note inpassing that it was his gift of this land and of its church toWestminster Abbey which originated the present connection between thetwo--a connection which has now, therefore, behind it nearly ninehundred years of continuity. 

In the few hurried months before Hastings the last of the greatAnglo-Saxon meetings in the town was summoned. It was held at the endof October, 1065, and was that in which Harold's policy was agreed to. Within twelve months Harold himself was dead, and a victoriousinvading army was marching upon Wallingford. 

In all this record it is clear that Oxford held a continually growingplace in the life of England, and especially as a stronghold ofwhoever might be governing England. What battle was fought there, ifany, or how the Normans got it, we do not know, but it is presumedthat it suffered in the fighting because the number and value of itshouses is given in the subsequent Survey as having fallen very largelyindeed. 

It is always well, whenever one comes across the Domesday Survey inhistory, to remember that the whole record is very imperfectlyunderstood. We do not know quite what was being measured: we do notknow, for instance, in the case of a town like Oxford, whether all theinhabited houses were counted; or whether only those who by customgave taxes were counted; nor can we be certain of the meaning of theword _vastus_, save that it has some connection either withdestruction or dilapidation, or lack of occupation, or, possibly, evenremission of taxation. But the theory of a sack is not withoutfoundation, for we know that in the case of York (which was certainlysacked by Tostig in 1065 and then again by William in 1068) what isprobably a destruction of a similar kind, though a rather greater one, is expressed in similar words. 

Whether, however, the number given in the town list of the Conqueroris or is not due to the destruction wrought by the Conquest we must bevery careful not to estimate the population of that time upon thebasis to-day such a list would afford. The figures of Domesday standfor a much larger population than most historians have hitherto beeninclined to grant, as may be shown by considerations to which I shallonly allude here, as I shall have to repeat them more fully upon alater page when I speak of urban life upon the Thames. The nomadicelement in the life of the early Middle Ages; the smallness of thespace allotted for sleeping; the large amount of time spent out ofdoors; the great proportion of collegiate institutions, not onlymonastic but military; the life in common which spread as a habit toso many parts of society beyond the monastic; the large families which(from genealogy) we can trust to be as much a character of the earlyMiddle Ages as they, were not the character of the later Middle Ages, the crowd of semi-servile dependants which would be discovered in anylarge house--all these make us perfectly safe in multiplying by atleast ten the number of households counted in the Survey if we wouldget at the population of those households, and it must be rememberedthat the houses counted, even in those parts of England which werefairly thoroughly surveyed, can only represent a _minimum_ number, whatever was the method of counting. The lists may in some instancesinclude every single household in a place, though from what we know ofthe diversity of local custom this is unlikely. In most places it isfar more likely that the list covered but some portion that by customowed a public tax, and this is especially true of the towns. 

After Dorchester, which was the first of the fortresses of the Thames, so far as we have any knowledge, and after Oxford, which came next, and appears to have been founded since the beginning of recordedhistory in these islands, there remain to be considered the otherstrongholds which held the line of the valley. 

It would be easy to multiply these if one were to consider allfortifications whatsoever connected with the general strategic lineformed by the Thames, but such a catalogue would exceed the boundariesset to this book. It is proposed to consider only those which werestrictly connected with the passage of the stream, and of such thereare but three besides Dorchester and Oxford, for that at Cricklade isdoubtful, and in any case determines a passage which could be alwaysoutflanked upon either side, while the great fortress of the Tower, lying as it does upon the estuarial Thames below bridges, doesdirectly protect a highway. 

These three strongholds directly connected with the inland river areWallingford, Reading and Windsor, and of the three Wallingford andWindsor were more directly military: the last, Reading, appears tohave been but an adjunct to a large and civil population; the fourfoldquality of Reading in the history of the Thames, as a civilsettlement, as a religious centre, as a stronghold, and as one of thevery few examples of modern industrial development in the valley, willbe considered later. We will take each of the three strongholds intheir order down stream. 

What determined the importance of Wallingford is not easy to fixnowadays. The explanation more usually given to the great part whichthis crossing of the Thames played in the early history of Britain isthe double one that it was the lowest continuously practicable fordover the river, and that it held the passage of the great road goingfrom London to the west. 

Now it is true that any traveller making from London to Bath, or theMendip Hills, and the lower Severn would, on the whole, find his mostdirect road to be along the Vale of the White Horse, but theconvenience of this line through Wallingford may easily beexaggerated, especially its convenience for men in early times beforethe valleys were properly drained. Though the ford at Abingdon wasmore difficult than the ford at Wallingford, yet the line throughAbingdon westward along the Farringdon road was certainly shorter thanthe line through Wantage. Whether the old habit, inherited frompre-historic times, of following the chalk ridge had produced aparallel road just at the foot of that ridge and so had madeWallingford, Wantage, and all the southern edge of the Vale of theWhite Horse the natural road to the west, or whether it was that thegreat run of travel ran, when once the Thames had been crossed atWallingford, slightly south-west towards Bath, it is certain that theWallingford and Wantage line is the line of travel in early history. 

There is no record, and but very little basis for conjecture, as tothe origin of the fortifications at Wallingford. Not much is left ofthem, and though there is some Roman work in the place it is workwhich has evidently been handled over and over again. It is certainlysomewhat late in English history that this "Walled Ford" is heardof--with the tenth century. Its first castle is, of course, Norman, and contemporary with that of Oxford--or rather a year later than thatat Oxford, and from the Conquest onward it remains royal. From thattime, also, it is perpetually appearing in English history. It was theplace of confinement of Edward I. When, as Prince Edward, he was theprisoner of Leicester. It was the attempt to succour that prisonerwhich led to his removal to Kenilworth, and finally to that escapewhich permitted him to fight the battle of Evesham. Wallingford passedto Gaveston in Edward the Second's reign, and, remaining continuallywithin the gift of the crown, to the Despenser in the succeedinggeneration, and finally to Isabella, who declared her policy fromwithin the walls of Wallingford when she returned to the country. Itwas next held by her favourite, Mortimer, and we afterwards find it, throughout the fourteenth century, a sort of appanage of theheir-apparent, and especially of the Duchy of Cornwall, to which itwas attached until the Reformation. It was for a moment under thecustody of Chaucer's son: it nursed the childhood of Henry VI. , butwith the beginning of the next century it had already lost itsimportance. After half that century had passed the castle was alreadyfalling into disrepair; much of the masonry of the town and of thefortress, lying squared and convenient to the river, had been moveddown stream for the new buildings at Windsor, and when, nearly acentury later again, the Civil War broke out, it was not until aftersome considerable repair that the place could pretend to stand asiege. It fell to the Parliament, and, before the Restoration, wascarefully destroyed, as were throughout England so many foundations ofher past by the orders of Oliver Cromwell. 

It has often been remarked with surprise that cities and strongholdsonce densely inhabited and heavily built can disappear and leave nomaterial trace to posterity. That they do so disappear should givepause to those historians who are perpetually using the negativeargument, and pretending that the lack of material evidence issufficient to disturb a strong and early tradition. Those who havewatched the process by which abandoned buildings become a quarry willeasily understand how all traces of habitation disappear. Three-quarters of what was once Orford, much of what once was Worsted, has gone, and up and down the country-sides to-day one could witness, even in our strictly disciplined civilisation, the removal, bypurchase or theft, of abandoned material. 

The whole of Wallingford has suffered this fate--the mound, presumablyartificial, upon which the first keep stood, and which was, probably, a palisade mound of Anglo-Saxon times, remains, but there is upon itno remaining masonry. 

Next down stream of the points with a strategic importance in Englishhistory comes Reading. But the strategic importance of Reading was notproduced by the town's possessing a site of national moment: it wasproduced only by local topography. Reading was never (to use a modernterm) a "nodal point" in the communications of England. 

It may be generally laid down that mere strength of position is notedand greedily seized in barbaric times alone. For mere strength ofposition is a mere refuge. A strong position (I do not speak, ofcourse, of tactical and temporary, but of permanent, positions), chosen only because it is strong, will save you during a criticalshort period from the attack of a fierce, unthoughtful, and easilywearied enemy--such as are all barbarians; but it cannot _of itself_fall into a general scheme of defence, nor, _simply because it isstrong_, intercept the advance of an adversary or support a line ofopposition and resistance. Position is always of _advantage_ to afortress, and, in all but highly civilised times, a _necessity_--as weshall see when we come to discuss Windsor--but it is not sufficient. Afortress, when society is organised, and when the feud of one smalltribe or family against another is not to be feared, derives itsprincipal value from a command of established communications, andestablished aggregations of power--especially of economic power. Townsalone can feed and house armies; by roads and railways alone canarmies proceed. 

There are, indeed, examples of a chain of positions so striking that, from their strength alone, a strategic line imposes itself; but theseare very rare. Another, and much commoner, exception to the rule Ihave stated is the growth of what was once a barbaric stronghold, chosen merely for its position, into a larger centre of population, through which communications necessarily lead, and in which stores andother opportunities for armies can be provided. Such places oftenpreserve a continuity of strategic importance, from civilised, throughbarbaric, to civilised times again. Laon is an excellent instance ofthis, and so is Constantine another, and so is Luxembourg athird--indeed they are numerous. 

But, in spite of--or, rather, as is proved by--these exceptions thefortresses of an organised people are found at the conjunction oftheir communications, or at places (such as straits or passes) whichhave the monopoly of communication, or they are identical with greataggregations of population and opportunity, or at least they aresituated in spots from which such aggregations can be commanded. Position is always of value, but only as an adjunct. 

Now Reading, save, perhaps, in barbaric times, when the Thames was themain highway of Southern England, occupied no such vantage until thenineteenth century. To-day, with its large population, its provisionof steam and electrical power, and above all, its command of the mainjunction between the southern and middle railways, Reading would againprove of primary strategic importance if we still considered warfarewith our equals as a possibility. But during all previous centuries, since the Dark Ages, Reading was potentially, as it is still actually, civilian; and, indeed, it is as the typical great town of the ThamesValley that it will be treated later in these pages. 

The long and narrow peninsula between the Kennet and the Thames was anideal place for defence. It needed but a trench from the one marsh tothe other to secure the stronghold. But though this was evident toevery fighter, though it is as such a stronghold that Reading ismentioned first in history, yet the advantage was never permanentlyheld. Armies hold Reading, fall back on the town, fight near it, andraid it: but it is never a great fortress in the intervals of wars, because, while Oxford commanded the Drovers' Road, Wallingford thewestern road, and Windsor (as we shall see in a moment) London itself, Reading neither held a line of supply nor an accumulation of supply, and was, therefore, civilian, though it was nearly as easy to hold asWindsor, as easy as Dorchester, its parallel, easier than Oxford, andfar easier than Wallingford, which had, indeed, no natural defenceswhatsoever. 

Proceeding with the stream, there is no further stronghold till wecome to Windsor. 

Even to-day, and in an England that has lost hold of her past morethan has any rival nation, Windsor seems to the passer-by to possess ameaning. That hill of stones, sharp though most of its modern outlinesare, set upon another hill for a pedestal, gives, even to a modernpatriot, a hint of history; and when it is seen from up-stream, showing its only noble part, where the Middle Ages still linger, ithas an aspect almost approaching majesty. 

The creator of Windsor was the Conqueror. The artificial mound onwhich the Round Tower stands may or may not be pre-historic. Theslopes of the hill were inhabited, like nearly all our English sites, by the Romans, and by the savages before and after the Romans; but thewelter of the Saxon dark ages did not use this abrupt elevation for astronghold. What military reasoning led William of Falaise to discernit at once and there to build his keep?

In order to answer that question let us consider what other points inthe valley were at his disposal. 

Reading we have discussed. The chalk spurs in the gorge by Goring andPangbourne are not isolated (as is that of Chateau Gaillard, forinstance), and are dominated by the neighbouring heights. Theescarpment opposite Henley offered a good site for an eleventh-centurycastle--but the steep cliff of Windsor had this advantage beyond allthe others--that it was at exactly the right distance from London. Windsor is the warden of the capital. 

If the reader will look at a modern geological map, he will see fromWallingford to Bray a great belt of chalk in which the trench of theThames is carved. Alluvials and gravels naturally flank the stream, but chalk is the ground rock of the whole. To the west and to the eastof this belt he will notice two curious isolated patches, detachedfrom the main body of the chalk. That to the west forms the twinheight of the Sinodun Hills, rising abruptly out of the green sand;that to the east is the knoll of Windsor, rising abruptly out of thethick and damp clay. It is a singular and unique patch, almost exactlyround, and as a result of some process at which geology can hardlyguess the circle is bisected by the river. If ever the chalk of thenorth bank rose high it has, in some manner, been worn down. That onthe south bank remains in a steep cliff with which everyone who usesthe river is familiar. It was the summit of this chalk hill piercingthrough the clays that the Conqueror noted for his purpose, and hewas, to repeat, determined (we must presume) by the distance fromLondon. 

The command of a great town, especially a metropolis, is but partiallyeffected by a fortress situated within its limits. In case of apopular revolt, and still more in case the resources of the town areheld by an enemy, such a fortress will be penned in and find itselfsuffering a siege far more rigorous than any that could be laid in anopen country-side. On this account the urban fortresses of the MiddleAges are to be found (at least in large cities) lying upon an extremeedge of the walls and reposing, as far as possible, upon uninhabitedland or upon water, or both. The two classic examples of this ruleare, of course, the Tower and the Louvre, each standing down stream, just outside the wall, and each reposing on the river. 

But in an active time even this precaution fails, and that for tworeasons. First, the growth of the town makes any possible garrison ofthe fortress too small for the force with which it might have to cope;and, secondly, this same growth physically overlaps the exteriorfortress; suburbs grow up beyond the wall, and the castle finds itselfat last embedded in the town. Thus within a hundred and fifty years ofits completion the Louvre was but a residence, wholly surrounded, saveupon the water front, by the packed houses within the new wall ofMarcel. 

A tendency therefore arises, more or less early according to localcircumstance, to establish a fortified base within striking distanceof the civilian centre which it is proposed to command; and strikingdistance is a day's march. The strict alliance between Paris and theCrown forbade such an experiment to the Capetian Monarchy, but, evenin that case, the truth of the general military proposition involvedis proved by the power which Montlhéry possessed until the middle ofthe twelfth century of doing mischief to Paris. In the case of London, and of a population the wealthier of whom were probably for some yearshostile to the Conqueror, the immediate necessity for an exterior basepresented itself, and though the distance from London was indeedconsiderable, Windsor, under the circumstances of that moment, provedthe most suitable point at which to establish the fortress. 

Some centuries earlier or later the exact point for fortificationwould have lain at _Staines_, and Windsor may be properly regarded asa sort of second best to Staines. 

The great Roman roads continued until the twelfth century to be themain highways of the barbaric and mediæval armies. We know, forinstance, from a charter of Westminster's, that Oxford Street wascalled, in the last years of the Saxon Dynasty, "Via Militaria, " andit was this road which was still in its continuation the marching roadupon London from the south and west: from Winchester, which was stillin a fashion the capital of England and the seat of the Treasury. NowStaines marks the spot where this road crossed the river. It was a"nodal point, " commanding at once the main approach to London by landand the main approach by water. 

But there is more than this in favour of Staines. I have already saidthat a fortress commanding a civilian population--an ancient fortress, at least--can do so with the best effect at the distance of an easymarch. Now Staines is not seventeen miles from Tyburn, and a good roadall the way: Windsor is over twenty, and for the last miles there wasno good, hard road in the time of its foundation. 

But, though Staines had all these advantages, it was rejected from alack of position. Position was still of first importance, and remainedso till the seventeenth century. The new Castle, like so many hundredothers built by the genius of the same race, must stand on a steephill even if the choice of such a site involved a long, instead of areasonable, day's march. Windsor alone offered that opportunity, and, standing isolated upon the chalk, beyond the tide, accessible by waterand by road, became to London what, a hundred years later, ChateauGaillard was to become for a brief space to Rouen. 

The choice was made immediately after the Conquest. In the course ofthe Dark Ages whatever Roman farms clustered here had dwindled, theRoman cemetery was abandoned, the original name of the districtforgotten, and the Saxon "Winding Shore" grew up at Old Windsor, twoor three miles down stream. Old Windsor was not a borough, but it wasa very considerable village. It paid dues to its lords to the amountof some twenty-five loads of corn and more--say 100 quarters--and ithad at least 100 houses, since that number is set down in Domesday, and, as we have previously said, Domesday figures necessarily expressa minimum. We may take it that its population was something in theneighbourhood of 1000. 

This considerable place was under the lordship of the abbots ofWestminster. It had been a royal manor when Edward the Confessor cameto the throne; he gave it to his new great abbey. When the Conquerorneeded the whole neighbourhood for his new purpose he exchanged itagainst land in Essex, which he conveyed to the abbey, and he added(for the manorial system was still flexible) half a hide from Cleweron the west side of the Windsor territory. This half-hide gave him hisapproach to the platform of chalk on which he designed to build. 

He began his work quickly. Within four years of Hastings, and longbefore the conquest of the Saxon aristocracy was complete, he held hisCourt at Windsor and summoned a synod there, and, though we do notknow when the keep was completed, we can conjecture, from the rapiditywith which all Norman work was done, that the walls were defensibleeven at that time. Of his building perhaps nothing remains. The forestto the south, with its opportunities for hunting, and the increasingimportance of London (which was rapidly becoming the capital ofEngland) made Windsor of greater value than ever in the eyes of hisson. Henry I. Rebuilt or greatly enlarged the castle, lived in it, wasmarried in it, and accomplished in it the chief act of his life, whenhe caused fealty to be sworn to his daughter, Matilda, and preparedthe advent of the Angevin. When the civil wars were over, and thetreaty between Henry II. And Stephen was signed, Windsor ("Mota deWindsor"), though it does not seem to have stood a siege, was countedthe second fortress of the realm. 

Of the exact place of Windsor in mediæval strategy, of its relationsto London and to Staines, and all we have just mentioned, as also ofthe great importance of cavalry in the Middle Ages, no better examplecan be quoted than the connected episode of April-June 1215, which maybe called--to give it a grandiose name--the Campaign of Magna Charta. It further illustrates points which should never be forgotten in thereading of early English history, though they are too particular forthe general purpose of this book--to wit, the way in which Londonincreased in military value throughout the twelfth and thirteenthcenturies; the strategic importance of the few old national roads aslate as the reign of John, and that power of the defensive, even inthe field, which made general and strategic, as opposed to tactical, attack so cautious, decisive action so rare, and when it _was_decisive, so thorough. 

This book is no place wherein to develop a theme which history willconfirm with regard to the aristocratic revolt against the vice andthe genius of the third Plantagenet. The strategy of the quarrel aloneconcerns us. 

When John's admirable diplomacy had failed (as diplomacy will underthe test of arms), and when his Continental allies had been crushed atBouvines in the summer of 1214, the rebels in England found theiropportunity. The great lords, especially those of the north, took oathin the autumn to combine. The accounts of this conspiracy areimperfect, but its general truth may be accepted. John, who from thismoment lay perpetually behind walls, held a conference in the Templeduring the January of 1215--to be accurate, upon the Epiphany of thatyear--and he struck a compact with the conspirators that there shouldbe a truce between their forces and those of the Crown until LowSunday--which fell that year upon the 26th of April. The great nobles, mistrusting his faith with some justice (especially as he had takenthe Cross), gathered their army some ten days before the expiry of theinterval, but, as befitted men who claimed in especial to defend theCatholic Church and its principles, they were scrupulous not to engagein actual fighting before the appointed day. The size of this army wecannot tell, but as it contained from 2000 to 3000 armed and mountedgentlemen it must have counted at least double that tale of cavalry, and perhaps five-, perhaps ten-fold the number of foot soldiers. Aforce of 15, 000 to 30, 000 men in an England of some 5, 000, 000 (I morethan double the conventional figures) was prepared to enforce feudalindependence against the central government, even at the expense ofceding vast territories to Scotland or of submitting to the nominalrule of a foreign king. Against this army the King had a number ofmercenaries, mainly drawn from his Continental possessions, probablyexcellent soldiers, but scattered among the numerous garrisons whichit was his titular office to defend. 

In the last days of the truce the rebels marched to Brackley andencamped there on Low Monday--the 27th April. The choice of the siteshould be noted. It lies in a nexus of several old marching roads. ThePort Way, a Roman road from Dorchester northward, the Watling Streetall lay within half-an-hour's ride. The King was at Oxford, a day'smarch away. They negotiated with him, and their claims were refused, yet they did not attack him (though his force was small), partlybecause the function of government was still with him and partlybecause the defensive power of Oxford was great. They wisely preferredthe nearest of his small official garrisons-that holding the castle ofNorthampton. They approached it up the Roman road through Towcester. They failed before it after two weeks of effort, and marched on to thenext royal post at Bedford, which was by far the nearest of thenational garrisons. It was betrayed to them. When they were within thegates they received a message from the wealthier citizens of London(who were in practice one with the Feudal Oligarchy), begging them toenter the capital. 

What followed could only have been accomplished: by cavalry, bycavalry in high training, by a force under excellent generalship, andby one whose leaders appreciated the all-importance of London in thecoming struggle. The rebels left Bedford immediately, marched all thatday, all the succeeding night, and early on the Sunday morning, 24thMay, entered London, and by the northern gate. Their entry was noteven challenged. 

From Bedford to St. Paul's is--as the crow flies--between forty andfifty miles: whatever road a man may take would make it nearer fiftythan forty. Bearing, as did this army, towards the east until itstruck the Ermine Street, the whole march must have been well overfifty miles. 

This fine feat was not a barren one: it was well worth the effort andloss which it must have cost. London could feed, recruit, and remountan army of even this magnitude with ease. The Tower was held by aroyal garrison, but it could do nothing against so great a town. 

From London, as though the name of the city had a sort of nationalauthority, the Barons, who now felt themselves to be hardly rebels butalmost co-equals in a civil war, issued letters of mandate to othersof their class and to their inferiors. These letters were obeyed, notperhaps without some hesitation, but at any rate with a finalobedience which turned the scale against the King. John was now in avery distinct inferiority, and even of his personal attendants aconsiderable number left the Court on learning of the defection ofLondon. In all this long struggle nothing but the occupation of thecapital had proved enough to make John feign a compromise. Asexcellent an intriguer as he was a fighter he asked nothing betterthan to hear once more the terms of the Barons. 

He proceeded to _Windsor_, asked for a parley, issued a safeguard tothe emissaries of the Barons, and despatched this document upon the8th June, giving it a validity of three days. His enemies waitedsomewhat longer, perhaps in order to collect the more distantcontingents, and named Runnymede--a pasture upon the right bank of theThames just above _Staines_--as the place of meeting. 

There are those who see in the derivation of the name "Runnymede" anancient use of the meadow as a place of council. This is, of course, mere conjecture, but at any rate it was, at this season of the year, alarge, dry field, in which a considerable force could encamp. TheBarons marched along the old Roman military road, which is still thehigh-road to Staines from London, crossed the river, and encamped onRunnymede. Here the Charta was presented, and probably, though notcertainly, signed and sealed. The local tradition ascribes the site ofthe actual signature to "Magna Charta" island--an eyot just up-streamfrom the field, now called Runnymede, but neither in tradition nor inrecorded history can this detail be fixed with any exactitude. TheCharta is given as from Runnymede upon the 15th June, and for thepurpose of these pages what we have to note is that these two monthsof marching and fighting had ended upon the strategic point ofStaines, and had clearly shown its relation to Windsor and to London. 

In the short campaign that followed, during which John so very nearlyrecovered his power, the capital importance of Windsor reappears. Louis of France, to whom the Barons were willing to hand over what wasleft of order in England, had occupied all the south and west, including even Worcester, and, of course, London. In this occupationthe exception of Dover, which the French were actively besieging, mustbe regarded as an isolated point, but _Windsor_, which John's men heldagainst the allies, threw an angle of defence right down into themidst of the territory lost to the Crown. Windsor was, of course, besieged; but John's garrison, holding out as it did, saved theposition. The King was at Wallingford at one moment during the siege;his proximity tempted the enemy to raise the siege, to leave Windsorin the hands of the royal garrison, and to advance against him, orrather to cut him off in his advance eastward. They marched with theutmost rapidity to Cambridge, but John was ahead of them: and beforethey could return to the capture of Windsor he was rapidly confirminghis power in the north and the east. 

It must not be forgotten in all this description that Windsor washelped in its development as a fortress by the presence to the southof the hill of a great space of waste lands. 

These waste lands of Western Europe, which it was impossible orunprofitable to cultivate, were, by a sound political tradition, vested in the common authority, which was the Crown. 

Indeed they still remain so vested in most European countries. TheCantons of Switzerland, the Communes and the National Governments ofFrance, Italy, and Spain remain in possession of the waste. It is onlywith us that wealthy private owners have been permitted to rob theCommonwealth of so obvious an inheritance, a piece of theft which theyhave accomplished with complete cynicism, and by specific acts whoseparticular dates can be quoted, though historians are very naturallycareful to leave the process but vaguely analysed. Indeed, the lastand most valuable of these waste spaces, the New Forest itself, mighthave entirely disappeared had not Charles I. (the last king in Englandto attempt a repression of the landed class) so forcibly urged thelocal engrosser to disgorge as to compel him, with Hampden and therest, to a burning zeal for political liberty. 

This great waste space to the south of Windsor Hill became, after theConquest, the Forest, and apart from the hunting which it afforded tothe Royal palace, served a certain purpose on the military side aswell. 

To develop a thought which has already been touched on in these pages, mediæval fortification was dual in character: it had either a purelystrategical object, in which case the site was chosen with an eye toits military value, whether inhabited or not, or the stronghold orfortification was made to develop an already existing town or site ofimportance. Of the second sort was Wallingford, but of the first sort, as we have seen, was Windsor. Indeed the distinction is normal to allfortification and exists upon the Continent to-day. For instance, thefirst-class fortress Paris is an example of the second sort, thefirst-class fortress Toul of the first. Again, all German fortresses, without exception, are of the second sort, while all Swissfortification, what little of it exists, is of the first. 

Now where the first category is concerned a waste space is of value, though its dimensions will vary in military importance according tothe means of communication of the time. A stronghold may be said torepose upon that side through which communications are most difficult. 

It is true that this space lying to the south of Windsor was of novery great dimensions, but such as it was, uninhabited and thereforeunprovided with stores of any kind, it prevented surprise from thesouth. 

The next point of strategic importance on the Thames, and the last, isthe Tower. 

Though it is below bridges it must fall into the scheme of this book, because its whole military history and connection with the story ofEngland is bound up with the inland and not with the estuarial river. 

It was, as has already been pointed out, one long day's march fromWindsor--a march along the old Roman road from Staines. This landpassage more than halved the distance by river, it cut off not onlythe numerous large turns which the Thames begins to take betweenMiddlesex and Surrey, but also the general sweep southward of theriver, and it avoided, what another road might have necessitated, thefurther crossing of the stream. 

Long as the march is, there was no fortification of importance betweenone point and the other, and mediæval history is crammed withinstances of armies leaving the Tower to march to Windsor in one day, or leaving Windsor to march to the Tower. 

The position of the Tower we saw in an earlier page to be due to thesame geographical causes as had built up so many of the urbanstrongholds of Europe. It was situated upon the very bank of the riverwhich fed the capital, it was down stream from the town, and it wasjust outside the walls. In a word, it was the parallel of the Louvre. 

Its remote origins are doubtful; some have imagined that they areRoman, and that if not in the first part of the Roman occupation atleast towards the end of those wealthy and populous three centuries, which are the foundation and the making of England, some fortificationwas built on the brow of the little eminence which here slopes down tothe high-water mark. 

I will quote the evidence, such as it is, and the reader will perceivehow difficult it is to arrive at a conclusion. 

Of actual Roman remains all we have is a couple of coins of the end ofthe fourth century (probably minted at Constantinople), a silver ingotof the same period, and a funeral inscription. No indubitably Romanwork has been discovered. 

On the other hand there has been no modern investigation of thosefoundations of the White Tower where, if anywhere, Roman work might beexpected. This exhausts the direct evidence. In sciences such asgeology or the criticism of Sacred Books evidence to this extent wouldbe ample to overset the firmest traditions or the most self-evidentconclusion of common human experience. But history is bound to agreater caution, and it must be reluctantly admitted that the twocoins, the ingot and the bit of stone are insufficient to prove theexistence of a Roman fortress. 

Leaving such material and direct evidence we have the tradition, whichis a fairly strong one, of Roman fortification here, and we have theanalogy, so frequently occurring in space and time throughout thehistory and the area of Western Europe, that Gaul reproduces Rome. What the Conqueror saw (it might be vaguely argued) to be thestrategical position for London, that a Roman emperor would have seen. But against this argument from tradition, which is fairly strong, andthat argument from analogy, which is weak, we have other and contraryconsiderations. 

Rome even in her decline did not build her citadels outside the walls:that was a habit which grew up in the Dark and early Middle Ages, andwas attached to the differentiation between the civic and militaryaspects of the State. 

Again, Roman fortification of every kind is connected with earthworks. So far as we can tell from recorded history the ditch round the Towerwas not dug till the end of the twelfth century. Finally, there isthis strong argument against the theory of a Roman origin to the Towerthat had such a Roman fortress existed an extension of the town wouldalmost certainly have gathered round it. 

One of the features of the break-up of Roman society was the enormousexpansion of the towns. We have evidence of it on every side andnowhere more than in Northern Africa. This expansion took placeeverywhere, but especially and invariably in the presence of agarrison, and indeed the military conditions of the fourth century, with its cosmopolitan and partially hereditary army, fixed inpermanent garrisons and forming as it were a local caste, presupposeda large dependent civilian population at the very gates of the camp orstronghold. Thus you have the Palatine suburb to the south of Lutetiaright up against the camp, and Verecunda just outside Lamboesis. Nowthere is nothing of the sort in the neighbourhood of the Tower. Itseems certain that from the earliest times London ended here cleanlyat the wall, and that except along the Great Eastern Road theneighbourhood of the Tower was agricultural land. 

How then could a tradition have arisen with regard to Romanoccupation? It is but a conjecture, though a plausible one, that whenthe pirate raids grew in severity this knoll down stream wasfortified, while still the ruling class was Latin speaking and whilestill the title of Cæsar was familiar, whether before or after thewithdrawal of the Legions. If this were the case, then, on the analogyof other similar sites, one may imagine something like the following:that in the Dark Ages the masonry was used as a quarry for otherconstructions, that the barbarians would occasionally stockade thesite, though not permanently, and only for the purposes of theirephemeral but constant quarrels; and one may suggest that when thebarbaric period was ended, by the landing of William's army, the placewas still, by a tradition now six hundred years old, a public areaunder the control of the Crown and one such as would lend itself tothe design of a permanent fortification. William, finding it in thiscondition, erected upon it the great keep which was to be the last ofhis fortifications along the line of the river, and the pivot for thecontrol of London. 

This keep is of course the White Tower, which still impresses even ourgeneration with the squat and square shoulders of Norman strength. Itand Ely are the best remaining expressions of the hardy little men, and it fills one, as does everything Norman, from the Tyne to theEuphrates, with something of awe. This building, the White Tower, isthe Tower itself; the rest is but an accretion, partly designed fordefence, but latterly more for habitation. Its name of the "White"Tower is probably original, though we do not actually find the term"La Blaunche Tour" till near the middle of the fourteenth century. Thepresumption that it is the original name is founded upon a muchearlier record--namely, that of 1241, in which not only is it orderedthat the tower be repainted white, but in which mention is also madethat its original colour had been "worn by the weather and by the longprocess of time. " Such a complaint would take one back to the twelfthcentury, and quite probably to the first building of the Keep. Theobject of whitening the walls of the Tower is again explicable by thevery reasonable conjecture that it would so serve as a landmark overthe long, flat stretches of the lower river. It was the lastconspicuous building against the mass of the great town, and there aremany examples of similar landmarks used at the head of estuaries orsea passages. When these are not spires they are almost invariablywhite, especially where they are so situated as to catch the southernor the eastern sun. 

The exact date at which the plan was undertaken we do not know, but itis obviously one with the scheme of building Windsor, and must datefrom much the same period. The order to build was given by theConqueror to the Bishop of Rochester, Gundulph. Now Gundulph was notpromoted to the See of Rochester till 1077. Exactly twenty yearslater, in 1097, the son of the Conqueror built the outer wall. TheKeep was then presumed to be completed, and at some time during thosetwenty years it must have been begun, probably about 1080. That whichwe have seen increasing, the military importance of Windsor, diminished the military importance of the Tower, until, with the closeof the Middle Ages, it had become no more than a prison. It was notindeed swamped by the growth of the town, as was its parallel theLouvre, but the increase of wealth (and therefore of the means ofwar), coupled with the correspondingly increased population, made bothurban fortresses increasingly difficult to hold as mediævalcivilisation developed. 

The whole history of the Tower is the history of military misfortune, which grows as London expands in numbers and prosperity. It probablyheld out under Mandeville when the Londoners (who were always theallies of the aristocracy against the national government) besieged itunder the civil wars of Stephen; but even so there was bad luckattached to it, for when Mandeville was taken prisoner he wascompelled to sign its surrender. Within a generation Longchamp againsurrendered it to the young Prince John; he was for the moment leadingthe aristocracy, which, when it was his turn to reign, betrayed him. It was surrendered to the baronial party by the King as a trust orpledge for the execution of Magna Charta, and though it was put intothe hands of the Archbishop, who was technically neutral, it was fromthat moment the symbol of a successful rebellion, as it had alreadyproved to be in the past and was to prove so often again. 

It was handed over to Louis of France upon his landing, and during thenext reign almost every misfortune of Henry III. Is connected with theTower. He was perpetually taking refuge in it, holding his Court init: losing it again, as the rebels succeeded, and regaining it as theyfailed. This long and unfortunate tenure of his is illumined only byone or two delightful phrases which one cannot but retain as onereads. Thus there is the little written order, which still remains tous for the putting of painted windows into the Chapel of St John, thenorthern one of which was to have for its design "some little Mary orother, holding her Child"--"quandam Mariolam tenenten puerum suum. "There is also a very pleasing legend in the same year, 1241, when thefall of certain new buildings was ascribed to the action of St. Thomas, who was seen by a priest in a dream upsetting them with hiscrozier and saying that he did this "as a good citizen of London, because these new buildings were not put up for the defence of therealm but to overawe the town, " and he added this charming remark: "IfI had not undertaken the duty myself St. Edward or another would havedone it. "

Even when Henry's misfortunes were at an end, and when the Battle ofEvesham was won, the Tower was perpetually unfortunate. A body ofrebels surrounded it, and in the defence were present a great numberof Jews, who had fled from the fighting in the city only to findthemselves pressed for service in defence of the fortress. From thatmoment they make no further appearance in English military historytill the South African War, unless indeed their appearance in chainsthirteen years later in this same Tower as prisoners for financialtrickery can be counted a military event. 

Upon this occasion the siege was raised by the promptitude and energyof Prince Edward--the man who as King was to march to Cærnarvon and tothe Grampians had already in his boyhood shown the energy and themilitary aptitude of his grandfather King John. He was but twentyyears old, yet he had already done all the fighting at Lewes, he hadalready won Evesham, and now, at the end of spring, he made one marchfrom Windsor to the Tower and relieved it. It was almost the last timethat the Tower stood for the success of authority. From this timeonwards it is, as it had been before, the unfortunate symbol ofsuccessful rebellion. Edward II. Had to leave it in his fatal year of1326, the Londoners poured in and incidentally massacred the Bishop ofExeter, into whose hands it had been entrusted. 

In 1460 it surrendered to the House of York, and from that timeonwards becomes more and more of a prison and less and less of afortress. 

The preponderatingly military aspect of the Thames Valley in Englishhistory dwindles with the dwindling of military energy in ourcivilisation, and passes with the passing of a governing class thatwas military rather than commercial. 

Sites which owed their importance to strategical position, and whichhad hence grown into considerable towns, ceased to show any but acivilian character, and even in the only episode of consequencewherein fighting occurred in England since the Middle Ages--theepisode of the Civil Wars--the banks of the Thames, though perpetuallyinfested by either army, saw very little serious fighting, and thatalthough the line of the Thames was the critical line of action duringthe first stage of the war. 

For the Civil Wars as a whole were but an affair upon the flank of thegeneral struggle in Europe: the losses were never heavy, and in thefirst stages one can hardly call it fighting at all. 

The losses at the skirmish of Edge Hill were, indeed, respectable, though most of them seem to have been incurred after the true fightingceased, but with that exception, and especially upon the line of theThames itself, the losses were extraordinarily small. 

One may say that Oxford and London were the two objective points ofthe opposing forces from the close of 1642 to the spring of 1644. TheKing's Government at Oxford, the Parliament in London, were the civilbases, at least, upon which the opposing forces pivoted, and the twointermediate points were Abingdon and Reading. To read thecontemporary, and even the modern, history of the time, one wouldimagine from the terms used that these places were the theatre ofconsiderable military operations. We hear, with every technicalitywhich the Continental struggle had rendered familiar to Englishmen, ofsieges, assaults, headquarters, and even hornworks. But when one looksat dates and figures it is not easy to treat the matter seriously. Here, for instance, is Abingdon, within a short walk of Oxford, andthe Royalists easily allow it to be occupied by Essex in the spring of'44. Even so Abingdon is not used as a base for doing anything moreserious than "molesting" the university town. And it was so held thatRupert tried to recapture it, of all things in the world, withcavalry! He was "overwhelmed" by the vastly superior forces of theenemy, and his attempt failed. When one has thoroughly grasped thisconsiderable military event one next learns that the overwhelmingforces were a trifle over a thousand in number!

Next an individual gentleman with a few followers conceives theelementary idea of blocking the western road at Culham Bridge, andisolating Abingdon upon this side. He begins building a "fort. " Acertain proportion of the handful in Abingdon go out and kill him andthe fort is not proceeded with: and so forth. A military temper ofthis sort very easily explains the cold-blooded massacre of prisonerswhich the Parliament permitted, and which has given to the phrase"Abingdon Law" the unpleasant flavour which it still retains. 

The story of Reading in the earlier part of the struggle is much thesame. Reading was held as a royal garrison and fortified in '43. According to the garrison the fortification was contemptible, according to the procedures it was of the most formidable kind. Indeedthey doubted whether it could be captured by an assault of less than5000 men, a number which appeared at this stage of the campaign soappalling that it is mentioned as a sort of standard of comparisonwith the impossible. The garrison surrendered just as relief wasapproaching it, and after a strain which it had endured for no lessthan ten days; but the capture of Reading was not effected entirelywithout bloodshed; certainly fifty men were killed (counting bothsides), possibly a few more; and the whole episode is a grotesquelittle foot-note to the comic opera upon which rose the curtain of theCivil Wars. It was not till the appearance of Cromwell, with hishighly paid and disciplined force, that the tragedy began. 

Even after Cromwell had come forward as the chief leader, in fact ifnot in name, the apparent losses are largely increased by the randommassacres to which his soldiers were unfortunately addicted. Thusafter Naseby a hundred women were killed for no particular reasonexcept that killing was in the air, and similarly after Philiphaughthe conscience of the Puritans forbade them to keep their word to theprisoners they had taken, who were put to the sword in cold blood: thewomen, however, on this occasion, were drowned. 

After the Civil Wars all the military meaning of the Thamesdisappears. Nor is it likely to revive short of a national disaster;but that disaster would at once teach us the strategical meaning ofthis great highway running through the south of England with itsattendant railways, it would re-create the strategical value of thepoint where the Thames turns northward and where its main railwaysbifurcate; it would provide in several conceivable cases, as itprovided to Charles I. And to William III. , the line of approach onLondon. 

 * * * * *

So far as we have considered the Thames, first as a line ofpre-historic settlements, passing successively into the Roman, thebarbaric and the Norman phases of our history; and secondly, as afield on which one can plot out certain strategical points and showhow these points created the original importance of the towns whichgrew about them. 

In the next part of these notes I propose to consider the economic orcivil development of the Thames above London, and to show how thefoundations of its permanent prosperity was laid. That economicphenomenon has at its roots the action of the Benedictine Order. Itwas the great monasteries which bridged the transition between Romeand the Dark Ages throughout North-Western Europe; it was they thatrecovered land wasted by the barbarian invasions, and that developedheaths and fens which the Empire even in its maturity had neverattempted to exploit. 

The effect of the barbarian invasions was different in differentprovinces of the Roman Empire, though roughly speaking it increased inintensity with the distance from Rome. It is probable that the actualnumbers of the barbarian invaders was small even in Britain, as itcertainly was in Northern Gaul, but we must not judge of the effectproduced upon civilisation by this catastrophe, as though it were amere question of numbers. So large a proportion of the population wasservile, and so fixed had the imagination of everyone become in theidea that the social order was eternal; so entirely had the armybecome a professional thing, and probably a thing of routine divorcedfrom the civilian life round it, that at the close of the fourthcentury a little shock from without was enough to produce a veryconsiderable result. In Eastern Britain, small as the number of theinvaders must necessarily have been, religion itself was almost, ifnot entirely, destroyed, and the whole fabric of Roman civilisationappears to have dissolved--with the exception, of course, of suchirremovable things as the agricultural system, the elements ofmunicipal life, and the simpler arts. Even the language very probablychanged in the eastern part of the island, and passed from what we mayconceive to have been Low Latin in the towns and Celtic dialects inthe country-sides, with possibly Teutonic settlements here and therealong the eastern shore, to a generally confused mass of Teutonicdialects scattered throughout the eastern and northern half of theisland and enclosing but isolated fragments of Celtic speech. 

So far as we can judge the disaster was complete, but it was destinedthat Britain should be recivilised. 

St Augustine landed, and after the struggle of the seventh centurybetween those petty chieftains who sympathised with, and those whoopposed, the order of cultivated European life, the battle was won infavour of that civilisation which we still enjoy. It would have beenimpossible to re-create a sound agriculture and to refound the artsand learning; especially would it have been impossible to refound thestudy of letters, upon which all material civilisation depends, had itnot been for the monastic institution. This institution did more workin Britain than in any other province of the Empire. And it had farmore to do. It found a district utterly wrecked, perhaps halfdepopulated, and having lost all but a vague memory of the old Romanorder; it had to remake, if it could, of all this part of a Europe. Noother instrument was fitted for the purpose. 

The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilisationwhen its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude, whetherexternal or internal in origin, is the accumulation of capital. Thenext difficulty is the preservation of such capital in the midst ofcontinual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that generalcontinuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved experience, towhich a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline of a civilisation, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of all thesedifficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited to a high degree. Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of communities whosewhole temptation was to gather, and who had no opportunity forspending in waste. The religious atmosphere in which they grew upforbade their spoliation, at least in the internal wars of a Christianpeople, and each of the great foundations provided a community oflearning and treasuring up of experience which single families, especially families of barbaric chieftains, could never have achieved. They provided leisure for literary effort, and a strict disciplinaryrule enforcing regular, continuous, and assiduous labour, and theyprovided these in a society from which exact application of such akind had all but disappeared. 

The monastic institution, so far as Western Europe was concerned, wascomparatively young when the work in Britain was begun. The fifthcentury had seen its inception; it was still embryonic in the sixth;the seventh, which was the date of its great conquest of the Englishcountry-sides, was for it a period of youth and of vigour as fresh aswas, let us say, the thirteenth century for the renaissance of civillearning. We must not think of these early foundations as we think ofthe complicated, wealthy, somewhat restricted and privileged bodies ofthe later Middle Ages. They were all more or less of one type, andthat type a simple one. They all sprang from the same Benedictinestem. It was the quality of all to be somewhat independent inmanagement, and especially to work in large units, and out of the verymany which sprang, up all over the island three particularly concernthe Thames Valley. Each of them dates from the very beginnings ofAnglo-Saxon history, each of them has its roots in legend, and each ofthem continued for close upon a thousand years to be a capitaleconomic centre of English life. These three great Benedictinefoundations are WESTMINSTER, CHERTSEY, and ABINGDON. 

When civilisation returned in fulness with the Norman Conquest, another great house of the first importance was founded--at Reading;and, much later, a fourth at Sheen. To these we shall turn in theirplace, as also to the string of dependent houses and small foundationswhich line the river almost from its source right down to London:indeed the only type of religious foundation which historic notes suchas these can afford to neglect is the monastery or nunnery built in atown, and for the purposes of a town, after the civic life of a townhad developed. These very numerous houses (most numerous, of course, in Oxford), such as the Observants of Richmond and a host of others, do not properly enter into the scheme we are considering. They are notcauses but effects of the development of civilisation in the ThamesValley. 

Abingdon, Westminster, and Chertsey are all ascribed by tradition, andeach by a very vital and well-documented tradition, to the seventhcentury: Abingdon and Chertsey to its close; Westminster, with lessassurance, to its beginning. All three, we may take it, did arise inthat period which was for the eastern part of this island a time whenall the work of Europe had to be begun again. Though we know nothingof the progress of the Saxon pirates in the province of Britain, andthough history is silent for the hundred and fifty years covered bythe disaster, yet on the analogy of other and later raids from theNorth Sea we may imagine that no inland part of the country sufferedmore than the valley of the Thames. All that was left of the Romanorder, wealth and right living, must have appeared at the close ofthat sixth century, when the Papal Mission landed, something asappears the wrecked and desolate land upon the retirement of a flood. To cope with such conditions, to reintroduce into the ravaged anddesecrated province, which had lost its language in the storm, all itsculture, and even its religion, a new beginning of energy and ofproduction, came, with the peculiar advantages we have seen it topossess for such a work, the monastic institution. For two centuriesthe great houses were founded all over England: their attachment toContinental learning, their exactitude, their corporate power ofaction, were all in violent contrast to, and most powerfullyeducational for, the barbarians in the midst of whom they grew. It maybe truly said that if we regard the life of England as beginning anewwith the Saxon invasion, if that disaster of the pirate raids beconsidered as so great that it offers a breach of continuity in thehistory of Britain, then the new country which sprang up, speakingTeutonic dialects, and calling itself by its present name of England, was actually created by the Benedictine monks. 

It was within a very few years of St. Augustine's landing thatWestminster must have been begun. There are several versions of thestory: the most detailed statement we have ascribes it to theparticular year 604, but varied as are the forms in which the history, or rather the legend, is preserved, the truth common to all is thefoundation quite early in the seventh century. It was very probablysupported by what barbaric Government there was in London at the timeand initiated, moreover, according to one form of the legend, and thatnot the least plausible, by the first bishop of the see. The site wasat the moment typical of all those which the great monasteries of theWest were to turn from desert places to gardens: it was a waste tractof ground called "Thorney, " lying low, triangular in shape, bounded bythe two reedy streams that descended through the depression which nowruns across the Green Park and Mayfair, and emptied themselves intothe Thames, the one just above, the other 100 or 200 yards below, thesite of the Houses of Parliament. 

The moment the foundation was established a stream of wealth tendedtowards it: it was at the very gate of the largest commercial city inthe kingdom and it was increasingly associated, as the Anglo-Saxonmonarchy developed, with the power of the Central Government. Thisprocess culminated in the great donation and rebuilding of Edward theConfessor. 

The period of this new endowment was one well chosen to launch thefuture glory of Westminster. England was all prepared to be permeatedwith the Norman energy, and when immediately after the Conquest came, the great shrine inherited all the glamour of a lost period, while itestablished itself with the new power as a sort of symbol of thecontinuity of the Crown. There William was anointed, there was hispalace and that of his son. When, with the next century, the seat ofGovernment became fixed, and London was finally established as thecapital, Westminster had already become the seat of the monarchy. 

Chertsey, next up the river, took on the work. LikeWestminster--though, by tradition, a few years later thanWestminster--its foundation goes back to the birth of England. Itshistory is known in some detail, and is full of incident, so that itmay be called the pivot upon which, presumably, turned the developmentof the Thames Valley above London for two hundred years. Its site isworth noting. The rich, but at first probably swampy, pasturage uponthe Surrey side was just such a position as one foundation afteranother up and down England settled on. To reclaim land of this kindwas one of the special functions of the great abbeys, and Chertsey maybe compared in this particular to Hyde, for instance, or to the Valeof the Cross, to Fountains, to Ripon, to Melrose, and to many others. It was in the new order of monastic development what Staines, itsneighbour, had been in the old Roman order--the mark of the firststage up-river from London. 

The pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of theSaxon invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfredand the positive mission of the town of Paris, swept it completely. Its abbot and its ninety monks were massacred, and it was not tilllate in the next century, about 950, that it arose again from itsruins. It was deliberately re-colonised again from Abingdon, and fromthat moment onwards it grew again into power. Donations poured uponit; one of them, not the least curious, was of land in Cardiganshire. It came from those Welsh princes who were perpetually at war with theEnglish Crown: for religion was in those days what money is now--athing without frontiers--and it seemed no more wonderful to the MiddleAges that an English monastery should collect its rents in an enemy'sland than it seems strange to us that the modern financier should drawinterest upon money lent for armament against the country of hisdomicile. Here also was first buried (and lay until it was removed toWindsor) the body of Henry VI. 

The third of the great early foundations is Abingdon, and in a way itis the greatest, for, without direct connection with the Crown, by themere vitality of its tradition, it became something more even thanChertsey was, wielding an immense revenue, more than half that ofWestminster itself, and situated, as it was, in a small up-valleytown, ruling with almost monarchical power. There could be even lessdoubt in the case of Abingdon than there was in the case of Chertseythat it was the creator of its own district of the Thames. It stoodright in the marshy and waste spaces of the middle upper river, commanding a difficult but an important ford, and holding the gate ofwhat was to be one of the most fruitful and famous of English vales. It can only have been from Abingdon that the culture and energyproceeded which was to build up Northern Berkshire and Oxfordshirebetween the Saxon and the Danish invasions. There only was establisheda sufficient concentration of capital for the work and of knowledgefor the application of that wealth. 

Like its two peers at Chertsey and at Westminster, Abingdon beginswith legend. We are fairly sure of its date, 675, but the anchorite ofthe fifth century, "Aben, " is as suspicious as the early Anglo-SaxonChronicle itself, and still wilder are the fine and striking storiesof its British origin, of its destruction under the persecution ofDiocletian and of its harbouring the youth of Constantine. But thestories are at least enough to show with what violence the pomp andgrandeur of the place struck the imagination of its historians. 

Abingdon was, moreover, probably on account of its distance fromLondon, more of a local centre, and, to repeat a word already used, more of a "monarchy" than the other great monasteries of the ThamesValley. This is sufficiently proved by a glance at the ecclesiasticmap, such as, for instance, that published in "The Victoria History ofthe County of Berkshire, " where one sees the manors belonging toAbingdon at the time of the Conquest all clustered together andoccupying one full division of the county, that, namely, included inthe great bend of the Thames which has its cusp at Witham Hill. Abingdon was the life of Northern Berkshire, and it is not fantasticto compare its religious aspect in Saxon times over against the King'stowns of Wantage and Wallingford to the larger national aspect ofCanterbury over against Winchester and London. 

Even in its purely civic character, it acquired a position which noone of the greater northern monasteries could pretend to, through thebuilding of its bridge in the early fifteenth century. The twin fordscrossing this bend of the river were, though direct and important, difficult; when they were once bridged and the bridges joined by thelong causeway which still runs across Andersey Island between the oldand the new branches of the Thames, travel was easily diverted fromthe bridge of Wallingford to that at Abingdon, and the great westernroad running through Farringdon towards the Cotswolds and the valleyof the Severn had Abingdon for its sort of midway market town. 

These three great Benedictine monasteries form, as it were, the threenurseries or seed plots from which civilisation spread out along theThames Valley after the destruction wrought by the first and worstbarbarian invasions. All three, as we have seen, go back to the verybeginning of the Christian phase of English history; the origins ofall three merge in those legends which make a twilight between thefantastic stories of the earlier paganism and the clear records of theChristian epoch after the re-Latinisation of England. An outpostbeyond these three is the institution of St Frideswides at Oxford. Beyond that point the upper river, gradually narrowing, losing itsimportance for commerce and as a highway, supported no greatmonastery, and felt but tardily the economic change wrought by thefoundations lower down the stream. 

Chertsey and Westminster certainly, and Abingdon very probably, weredestroyed, or at least sacked, in the Danish invasions, but theirroots lay too deep to allow them to disappear: they re-arose, and ageneration before the Conquest were again by far the principal centresof production and government in the Thames Valley. Indeed, with theexception of the string of royal estates upon the banks of the river, and of the town of Oxford, Chertsey, Westminster and Abingdon were theonly considerable seats of regulation and government upon the Thames, when the Conquest came to reorganise the whole of English life. 

With that revolution it was evident that a great extension not only ofthe numbers, but especially of the organisation and power, of themonastic system would appear: that gaps left uninfluenced by it in theline of the Thames would be filled up, and all the old foundationsthemselves would be reconstructed and become new things. 

The Conquest is in its way almost as sharp a division in the historyof England as is the landing of St Augustine. In some externals itmade an even greater difference to this island than did the advent ofthe Roman Missionaries, though of course, in the fundamental thingsupon which the national life is built, the re-entry of England intoEuropean civilisation in the seventh century must count as a fargreater and more decisive event than its first experience of unitedand regular government under the Normans in the eleventh. Moreoveralthough the Conquest largely changed the language of the island, introduced a conception of law in civil affairs with which theAnglo-Saxon aristocracy were quite unfamiliar, and began to floodEngland with a Gallic admixture which flowed . Uninterruptedly forthree hundred years, yet it did not change the intimate philosophy ofthe people, and it is only the change of the intimate philosophy of apeople which can have a revolutionary consequence. The Conquest foundEngland Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in rather an isolatedway, thoroughly European. The Normans organised that feudality, extirpated whatever was unorthodox, or slack in the machinery of thereligious system, and let in the full light of European civilisationthrough a wide-open door, which had hitherto been half-closed. 

The effect, therefore, of the Conquest was exercised upon the visibleand mutable things of the country rather than upon the nourishinginward things: but it was very great, and in nothing was it greaterthan in its inception of new buildings and the use everywhere ofstone. Under the Normans very nearly all the great religiousfoundations of England re-arose, and that within a generation. Newhouses also arose, and the mark of that time (which was a secondspring throughout Europe: full of the spirit of the Crusades, and acomplete regeneration of social life) was the rigour of new religiousorders, and especially the transformation of the old Benedictinemonotony. 

Chief, of course, of these religious movements, and the pioneer ofthem all, was the institution of Cluny in Burgundy. 

Cluny did not rise by design. It was one of those spontaneous growthswhich are characteristic of vigorous and creative times. Those who areacquainted with the Burgundian blood will not think it fantastic toimagine the vast reputation of Cluny to have been based upon rhetoric. It was perhaps the sonorous Burgundian facility for expression and theinheritance of oratory which belonged to Burgundian soil tillBossuet's birth, and which still belongs to it, that gave Cluny a sortof spell over the mind of Western Europe, and which made Cluny amaster in the century which preceded the great change of the Crusades. From Cluny as a mother house proceeded communities instinct with thediscipline and new life of the reformed order, and though it has beenremarked that these communities were not numerous, in comparison tothe vigour of the movement, yet it should also be noted that they werenearly always very large and wealthy, that they were in a particularand close relation to the civil government of the district in whicheach was planted, and that their absolute dependence upon the motherhouse, and their close observance of one rule, lent the whole ordersomething of the force of an army. 

The Cluniac influence came early into the Thames Valley. By thebeginning of the twelfth century, and within fifty years of theConquest, this new influence was found interpolated with and imposedupon the five centuries that had hitherto been wholly dependent uponthe three great Benedictine posts. This Cluniac foundation, the firstof the new houses on the Thames, was fixed upon the peninsula ofReading. 

It was in 1121 that the son of the Conqueror brought the Cluniac orderto the little town. From the moment of the foundation of the abbey itattracted, in part by its geographical position, in part by the factthat it was the first great new foundation upon the Thames, and inpart by the accident which lent a special devotion or power to oneparticular house and which was in this case largely due to thediscipline and character of the Cluniac order, Reading took on a veryhigh position in England. It had about it, if one may so expressoneself, something more modern, something more direct and politicalthan was to be found in the old Benedictine houses that had precededit. The work it had to do was less material: the fields were alreadydrained, the life and wealth of the new civilisation had begun, andthroughout the four hundred years of its existence the function ofReading was rather to entertain the Court, to assist at parliaments, and to be, throughout, the support of the monarchy. It sprang at onceinto this position, and its architecture symbolised to some extent therapid command which it acquired, for it preserved to the end thecharacteristics of the early century in which it was erected: theNorman arch, the dog-tooth ornaments, the thick walls, the barbariccapitals of the early twelfth century. 

Before the thirteenth it was in wealth equal to, and in public reputethe superior of, any foundation upon the banks of the Thames with theexception of Westminster itself, and it forms, with the threeBenedictine foundations, and with the later foundation of Osney, thelast link in the chain of abbeys which ran unbroken from stage tostage throughout the whole length of the river. And with it ends thestory of those first foundations which completed the recivilisation ofthe Valley. 

Reading was not the only Cluniac establishment upon the Thames. Another, and earlier one, was to be found at Bermondsey; but itsproximity to London and its distance down river forbid it having anyplace in these pages. It was founded immediately after the Conquest;Lanfranc colonised it with French monks; it became an abbacy at thevery end of the fourteenth century, and was remarkable for itscontinual accretion of wealth, an accretion in some part due to thegrowing importance of London throughout its existence. At the end ofthe thirteenth century it stands worth £280. At the time of itsdissolution, on the first of January 1538, in spite of the much highervalue of money in the sixteenth century as compared with thethirteenth, it stands worth over £500: £10, 000 a year. 

A relic of its building remained (but only a gatehouse) till 1805. 

Osney also dated from the early twelfth century, and was almostcontemporary with Reading. 

It stood just outside the walls of Oxford Castle to the west, and uponthe bank of the main stream of the Thames, and owed its foundation tothe Conqueror's local governing family of Oilei. Though at the momentof its suppression it hardly counted a fifth of the revenues ofWestminster (which must be our standard throughout all thisexamination), yet its magnificence profoundly affected contemporaries, and has left a great tradition. It must always be remembered thatthese great monasteries were not only receivers of revenue as are ourmodern rich, but were also producers or, rather, could be producerswhen they chose, and that therefore the actual economic power of anyone foundation might always be higher, and often was very considerablyhigher, than the nominal revenue, the dead income, which passed to thespoliators of the sixteenth century. When a town is sacked the armygets a considerable loot, but nothing like what the value was of thecity as it flourished before the siege. 

At any rate, whether Osney owed its magnificence to internal industry, to a wise expenditure, or to a severity of life which left a largesurplus for ornament and extension, it was for 400 years the principalbuilding upon the upper river, catching the eye from miles away up byEynsham meadows and forming a noble gate to the University town forthose who approached it from the west by the packway, of which tracesstill remain, and over the bridges which the Conqueror had built. Sodeep was the impress of Osney upon the locality, and even upon thenational Government, that Henry proposed, as in the case ofWestminster, to make of the building one of his new cathedrals, and toestablish there his new See of Oxford. The determination, however, lasted but for a very short time. In a few years the financialpressure was too much for him; he transferred the see to the oldChurch of St Frideswides, where it still remains, and gave up Osney toloot. It was looted very thoroughly. 

The smaller monasteries need hardly a mention. At the head of themcomes Eynsham, worth more than half as much as Osney, and a veryconsiderable place. Founded as a colony or adjunct to Stow, inLincolnshire, it outlived the importance of the parent house, and wasat the height of its prosperity immediately before the Dissolution. 

Eynsham affords a very good instance of the way in which the fabric inthese superb temples disappeared. As late as the early eighteenthcentury there was still standing the whole of the west front; the twohigh towers, the splendid west window, and the sculptured doorwayswere complete, though they remained but as a fragment of a ruinedbuilding. A century and a half passed and the whole had disappeared, carted away to build walls and stables for the local squires, or soldby the local squires for rubble. 

Of the little priory at Lechlade very little is known, save that itwas founded in the thirteenth century and had disappeared long beforethe Reformation, while of that at Cricklade we know even less, savethat it humbly survived and was counted in the "bag" at only fourpounds a year. 

With Dorchester, which had existed from the twelfth century, and whichwas worth almost half as much as Eynsham, and with the considerableCell of Hurley which attached to Westminster, the list is complete. Itis interesting to know that the church at Dorchester was saved by thelocal patriotism of one man, who left half his fortune for thepurchase of it, and that not in order to ruin it and to sell thestones of it, but in order to preserve it: a singular man. 

In a general survey of monastic influence in the Valley of the Thames, it would be natural to omit the foundations which belonged to thelater Middle Ages. It was in the Dark Ages that the great Benedictinework was done, the pastures drained, the woods planted, thesettlements established. It was in the early Middle Ages, in thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries and in the first half of thefourteenth--in a word, before the Black Death--that the work of thenew and vigorous foundations, and the revived energy of the olderones, spread Gothic architecture, scholastic learning, and the wholereinvigorated social system of the time, from Oxford to Westminster;and the historian who notes the social and economic effects ofmonasticism in Western Europe, however enthusiastic he may be indefence of that force, cannot with truth lend it between the BlackDeath and the Reformation a vigour which it did not possess. It hadtended to become, in the fifteenth century, a fixed social institutionlike any other, one might almost say a bundle of proprietary rightslike any other. And though it is easy now to perceive what ruin wascaused by the sudden destruction, the contemporaries of the last ageof Great Houses were perpetually considering their privilege and theirimmovable tradition rather than the remaining functions which themonasteries fulfilled in the State. 

On this account historical notes dealing with the development of theThames Valley would naturally omit a reference to foundations existingonly from the close of the Middle Ages. But an exception must be madeto this rule in the case of Sheen. 

Sheen was a Charterhouse, and it merits observation not only from thepeculiar characteristics of the Carthusian Order, but also from itsconsiderable position so near to Westminster and not yet overshadowedby the greatness either of that abbey or of Chertsey. It received, from its land in England alone, a revenue of close upon two-thirds ofthat which Westminster enjoyed. Recent in its origin (it had existedfor only just over 100 years when Henry VIII. Attacked it), notwithout that foreign flavour which, rightly or wrongly, was ascribedin this island to the Carthusian Order, rigid in doctrine, and of amagnificent temper in the defence of religion, these Carthusians, liketheir brethren in London, formed a very natural target for the King'sattack. I include them only because notes upon the mediævalfoundations, would be quite imperfect were there no mention of Sheen, late as the origin of the community was, and little as it had to dowith the historic development of the valley. 

This completes the list of the greater foundations; with the lesserones it would only be possible to deal in pages devoted to theMonastic Institution alone. The very numerous communities of friars, and the hospitals in the towns upon the Thames, cannot be mentioned, the little nunneries of Ankerwick, Burnham, and Little Marlow, thecommunities, early and late, of Medmenham and Cholsey, the priories ofLechlade and of Cricklade (which might have occupied a larger spacethan was available), must be passed over. Even Godstow, famous as itis from the early legend of Rosamond, and considerable as was itsfunction both of education and of retreat, cannot be included in thelist of those principal foundations which alone take rank asoriginators of the prosperity of the valley. 

Several of these smaller houses went in the dissolution to swell therevenues of Bisham, the new community which Henry, as he said, intended to take the place of much that he had destroyed; and Bishamwould be very well worth a considerable attention from the reader hadit survived. But it did not survive. Hardly was it founded when Henryhimself immediately destroyed it, and, as we shall see later, Bishamaffords one of the most curious and instructive examples of the way inwhich that large monastic revenue, which it was certainly intended tokeep in the hands of the Crown, and which, had it been so kept, wouldhave given to England the strongest Central Government in Europe, drifted into the hands of the squires, multiplied perhaps by ten thewealth of their class, and transformed the Government of England intothat oligarchy which was completed in the seventeenth century, andwhich, though permeated and transformed by Jewish finance, is standingin a precarious strength to this day. 

Westminster, Chertsey, Sheen, Reading, Abingdon, and Osneydisappeared. 

One writes the list straight off without considering, taking it forgranted that everything which could have roused the cupidity of thatgeneration necessarily disappeared: and as one writes it one remembersthat, after all, Westminster survived. Its survival was an accident, which will be further considered. But that survival, so far fromredeeming, emphasises and throws into relief the destruction of therest. 

Of these enduring monuments of human energy and, what is moreimportant still in the control of energy, human certitude, whatbesides Westminster survived? Of Chertsey there is perhaps a gatewayand part of a wall; of Sheen nothing; of Reading a few flints builtinto modern work; of Abingdon a gateway, and a buttress or two thatlong served to support a brewhouse; of Osney nothing, contrariwise, electric works and the slums of a modern town. All these wereWestminsters. In all of these was to be discovered that patientprocess of production which argues the continuity, and therefore thedignity, of human civilisation. Each had the glass which we can nolonger paint, the vivid, living, and happy grotesque in sculpturewhich only the best of us can so much as understand; each had athousand and another thousand details of careful work in stone meantto endure, if not for ever, at least into such further centuries asmight have the added faith and added knowledge to restore them ingreater plenitude. The whole thing has gone. It has gone to nopurpose. Nothing has been built upon it save a wandering host of richand careworn men. 

Suppose a man to have gone down the Thames when the new discussionswere beginning in London and (as was customary even at the close ofthe Middle Ages) were spreading from town to town with a rapidity thatwe, who have ceased to debate ideas, can never understand. Let such atraveller or bargeman have gone down from Cricklade to the Tower, howwould the Great Houses have appeared to him?

The upper river would have been much the same, but as he came to thatpart of it which was wealthy and populous, as he turned the corner ofWitham Hill, he would already have seen far off, larger and a littlenearer than the many spires of Oxford, a building such as to-day wenever see save in our rare and half-deserted cathedral country towns. It was the Abbey of Osney. It would have been his landmark, asHereford is the landmark for a man to-day rowing up to Wye, or the newspire of Chichester for a man that makes harbour out of the channelpast Bisham upon a rising tide. And as he passed beneath it (for, ofthe many branches here, the main stream took him that way) he wouldhave seen a great and populous place with nothing ruinous in it, allwell ordered, busy with men and splendid; here again that which we nowlook upon as a relic and a circumstance of repose was once alive andstrong. 

Upon his way beneath the old stone bridge which crossed the ford, andshooting between the lifted paddles of the weirs, he would, once belowOxford, have seen much the same pastures that we see to-day; but in afew hours Abingdon, the next to Osney, would have fixed his eyes asOsney had before. 

Abingdon would have been to him what Noyon is on the Oise, or any ofour river cathedrals in Western Europe--an apse pointing up stream, though rounded and lacking the flying buttresses of the Gothic, for itwas thick, broad, and Norman. Here also, as one may believe, from itssituation, trees would have shrouded somewhat what he saw. There arefew such riverside apses in Christian Europe that are not screened inthis manner by trees planted between the stream and them. But as hedrifted farther down, before he reached the bridge, the west frontwould have burst upon him, quite new, exceedingly rich and proud, astrict example, one may believe, of the Perpendicular, and of what wasfor the first time, and for a moment only, a true English Gothic. Itwould have stood out before him, catching the sun of the afternoon inits maze of glass. It would have seemed a thing to endure; within hislifetime it was to be utterly destroyed. 

Once more in the many reaches between Abingdon and Wallingford, thesights would have been those which a man sees now. And though atWallingford he would have had before him a town of brilliant red tilesand timberwork, and a town perhaps larger than that which we seeto-day, yet (could such a man come to life again) the contrast wouldnot strike him here, and still less in the fields below, so much aswhen he came near to Reading. 

That everything else of age in Reading has disappeared one need notsay, but were that traveller here to-day, the thing that he would mostseek for and most lack would be the bulk of the building at thefarther end of the town. 

One can best say what it was by saying that it was like Durham. It istrue that Durham Cathedral stands upon a noble cliff overhanging aravine, while Reading Abbey stood upon a small and irregular hillwhich hardly showed above the flat plains of the river meadows, but inmassiveness of structure and in type of architecture Reading seems tohave resembled Durham more nearly than any other of our greatmonuments, and to emphasise its parallelism to Durham is perhaps thebest way to make the modern reader understand what we have lost. 

Nothing that he had seen in this journey would more have sunk into themind of a contemporary man, nothing that he would lack were heresuscitated to-day would leave a want more grievous. In thedestruction of Reading the people of this country lost something whichnot even their aptitude for foreign travel can replace. 

Windsor, as he passed, stood up above the right of him, not verydifferent from what we still admire as we come down from Bray and lookup to the jutting fore-tower which is worthy of Coucy. But down belowWindsor (after whose bridge we to-day see nothing whatever of value), just after he had passed the wooden bridge of Staines and shot theweir of that town, the river bent southward. 

The traveller would have found Pentonhook already forming or formed, and when he had got round it he would have seen soaring above him downstream the great mass of Chertsey Abbey. If Reading had the solidityand the barbaric grandeur of Durham, Chertsey had in an ecclesiasticalway the vastness of Windsor, and must have seemed like a town toanyone approaching it thus down the river. The enclosed area of theabbey buildings alone covered four acres. 

This impression which such a traveller would have received of thegreat religious houses was enhanced by something more than themagnitude and splendour of the buildings. Divided as was opinion atthat moment upon their value to the State, and jealous as had becomelandless men of the long traditions and privileges of the monks, thesestill represented not only their own wealth but the generalaccumulation of capital and the continued prosperity of the rivervalley. It is true to say, in spite of the difficulty of appreciatingsuch a truth in the light of our knowledge of what was to follow, thatthe destruction of such foundations would have seemed to the travellerbefore the Dissolution inconceivable. Nevertheless it came. 

These notes are not the place in which to discuss that most difficultof all historical problems--I mean the causes which led the nation toabandon in a couple of generations the whole of its traditions and toadopt, not spontaneously but at the bidding of a comparatively smallbody of wealthy men, a new scheme of society. But it is of value toconsider the economic aspect of the thing, and to show what it wasthat Henry desired to seize when his policy of Dissolution wassecretly formed. 

The economic function of the monastic system in the Middle Ages, andespecially in the later Middle Ages, is one to which no sufficientattention has been given by historians. 

They collected, as does no modern agency, wealth from very varioussources, scattered up and down the whole of the kingdom, and oftenfarther afield, throughout Europe, and exercised the whole economicpower so drawn together in one centre, and so founded a permanentnucleus of wealth in the place where the community resided. 

We are indeed to-day accustomed to a similar effect in the action ofour wealthy families. The rents of the London poor, a toll upon theproduce of Egypt, of the Argentine, or of India, all flow into somecountry house in the provinces, where it revives in an effectivedemand for production, or lends to the whole countryside a wealthwhich, of itself, it could never have produced. The neighbourhood ofAylesbury, the palaces of the larger territorials, are modern examplesof this truth, that the economic power of a district does not residein its productive capacity, but in its capacity for effective demand. And it is undoubtedly true that if there were anything permanent inmodern society we should be witnessing in the wealthier quarters ofParis and London, in the Riviera in the holiday part of Egypt, and incertain centres of provincial luxury in England, in France, and inWestern Germany, the foundation of a permanent economic superiority. 

But nothing in modern society has any roots. Where to-day is some oneof these great territorial houses in fifty years there may be nothingbut decay. Fashion may change from the Riviera to some other part ofthe Mediterranean littoral, and with fashion will go the concentrationof wealth which accompanies it. 

In the Middle, and especially in the latter Middle, Ages it wasotherwise. The great religious houses not only tended to accumulatewealth and to perpetuate it in the same hands (they could not gambleit away nor disperse it in luxury; they could hardly waste it bymismanagement), but they were also permanently fixed on one spot. 

Such an institution as Reading, for example, or as Abingdon, went onperpetually receiving its immense revenues for generation aftergeneration, and were under no temptation or rather had no capacity forspending it elsewhere than in the situation where their actualbuildings were to be found. 

In this way the great monastic houses founded a tradition of localwealth which has profoundly affected the history of the Thames Valley. And if that valley is still to-day one of the chief districts whereinthe economic power of England is concentrated, it owes that positionmainly to the centuries during which the great foundations exercisedtheir power upon the banks of the river. 

The growth of great towns, one of the last phases of our nationaldevelopment, one which finds its example in the Thames Valley aselsewhere, and one to which we shall allude before closing these notesupon the river, has somewhat obscured the quality of this originalaccumulation of wealth along the Thames. But when we come to considerthe figures of the census at an earlier time, before moderncommercialism and the railway had drawn wealth and population intofewer and larger centres, we shall see how considerable was the stringof towns which had grown up along the stream. And we shall especiallysee how fairly divided among them was the population, and, it may bepresumed, the wealth and the rateable value, of the valley. 

The point just mentioned in connection with the larger monasticfoundations, and their artificial concentration of economic power, deserves a further elaboration, for the economic importance of adistrict is one of the aspects of geography which even modern analysishas dealt with very imperfectly. 

Economists speak of the economic importance of such-and-such a spotbecause material of use to man-kind is there discovered. Thus, peoplecommonly point to the economic importance of the valleys all round thePennine Range in England because they contain coal and metals, and tothe economic importance of a small district in South Wales for thesame reason. 

A further consideration has admitted that not only places where thingsuseful to mankind are discovered, but places naturally fitted fortheir exchange have an economic importance peculiarly their own. Indeed, the more history is studied from the point of view ofeconomics, the more does this kind of natural opportunity emerge, andthe less does the political importance of purely productive areasappear. The mountain districts of Spain, the Cornish peninsula, werecentres of metallic industry of the first importance to the Romans, but they remained poor throughout the period of Roman civilisation. To-day the farmer in the west of America, the miner and the clerk inJohannesburg, are perhaps more numerous, but as a political force nowealthier for the opportunities of their sites: the economic powerwhich they ultimately produce is first concentrated in the centres ofexchange where the wealth they produce is handled. 

Now there is a third basis for the economic importance of a district, and as this third basis is indefinitely more important than the othertwo, it has naturally been overlooked in the analysis of theuniversities. This basis is the basis of residence. Given that aconqueror, or a seat of Government established by routine, isestablished in a particular place and chooses there to remain; orgiven that the pleasure attached to a particular site--its naturalpleasures or the inherited grandeur of its buildings or what not--makeit an established residence for those who control the expenditure ofwealth, then that place will acquire an economic importance which hasfor its foundation nothing more material than the human will. Thitherwealth, wherever produced, will flow, and there will be discoveredthat ultimate motive force of all production and of all exchange, theeffective demand of those possessors who alone can set the industrialmachine in motion. 

This has been abundantly true in every period of the world's history, whenever commerce existed upon a considerable scale, or whenever amilitary force sufficiently universal was at the command of wealthymen. 

It is particularly true to-day. To-day not the natural centres ofexchange, still less the natural centres of production, determine whatplaces in the world shall be wealthy and what shall not. The surplusof the wealth produced by the Egyptian fellaheen is carefullycollected by English officials and largely consumed in Paris; thewealth produced by the manufacturers of North England is largely spentin the south of England and upon the Continent; until their recent andsuccessful revolt, the wealth produced by the Irish peasantry waslargely spent in London and upon the Riviera. 

The economic importance, then, of the Thames Valley has notdiminished, but increased since South England ceased to be the mainfield of production. 

The tradition of Government, the habitual residence of the wealthy anddirecting classes of the community, have centred more and more inLondon. The old establishment of luxury in the Thames Valley hasperpetually increased since the decline of its industrial andagricultural importance, and undoubtedly, if it were possible to drawa map indicating the proportion of economic _demand_ throughout thecountry, the Valley of the Thames would appear, in proportion to itspopulation, by far the most concentrated district in England, althoughit contains but one very large town, and although it is innocent ofany very important modern industry. 

It is interesting, in connection with this economic aspect of theThames Valley, to note that, alone of the great river valleys ofEurope, it has no railway system parallel to its banks. There is noseries of productive centres which could give rise to such a railwaysystem. The Great Western Railway follows the river now some distanceupon one side, now some distance upon the other, as far as Oxford; butit does not depend in any way upon the stream, and where the course ofthe stream is irregular it goes on its straight course, throwing outbranch lines to the smaller towns upon the banks: for the railwaydepends, so far as this section is concerned, upon the industries ofthe Midlands and of the west. Were you to cut off the sources ofcarriage which it draws upon from beyond the Valley of the Thames itcould not exist. 

The Scheldt, the Rhine, the Rhone, the Garonne, the Seine, the Elbe, are all different in this from the Thames. The economic power of ourmain river valley is chiefly a spending power. It produces little and, though it exchanges more of human wealth, it is the artificialmachinery of exchange rather than the physical movement of goods thatenriches it. 

Now this habit of residence, this settlement of the concentrated powerof demand upon the banks of the Thames, was the work of the monastichouses. It may be argued that, with the commercial importance ofLondon, and with its attainment of the position of a capital, theresidence of such economic power would necessarily have spread up theThames Valley. It is doubtful whether any such necessity as thisexisted. In Roman times the Thames certainly did not lead up thus inthe line of wealth from London, and though it is true that watercarriage greatly increased in importance after the breakdown of Romancivilisation, yet the medium by which that water carriage was utilisedwas the medium of the Benedictine foundations. They it was whoestablished that continuous line of progressive agriculturaldevelopment and who prepared the way for the later yet more continuousline of the full monastic effort which succeeded the Conquest. 

A list of monastic institutions upon the river, if we exclude thefriars, the hospitals, and such foundations as made part of town oruniversity life, is as follows:--a priory at Cricklade, another atLechlade, the Abbey at Eynsham (sufficiently near the stream to beregarded as riparian), the Nunnery and School of Godstow, the greatAbbeys of Osney and Rewley, the Benedictine Nunnery at Littlemore, thegreat Abbey of Abingdon, the Abbey of Dorchester, Cholsey (but thishad been destroyed before the Conquest, and was never revived), theAugustinian Nunnery at Goring, the great Cluniac Abbey at Reading, theCell of Westminster at Hurley, the Abbey of Medmenham, the Abbey ofBisham just opposite Marlow, and the Nunnery of Little Marlow; theNunnery of Burnham, which, though nearly a mile and a half from thestream, should count from the position of its property as a riparianfoundation, the little Nunnery of Ankerwike, the great BenedictineAbbey of Chertsey, the Carthusians of Sheen, and the Benedictines ofWestminster, to which may be added the foundation of Bermondsey. 

When the end came the total number of those in control of such widepossessions was small. 

Indeed it was perhaps no small cause of the unpopularity, such as itwas, into which the same monasteries had locally fallen, that so mucheconomic power was concentrated in so few hands. The greaterfoundations throughout the country possessed but a little more than3000 religious, and even when all the nuns, friars, and professedreligious of the towns are counted, we do not arrive at more than 8000in religion in an England which must have had a population of at least4, 000, 000, and quite possibly a much larger number; nor could the mobsforesee that the class which would seize upon the abbey lands wouldconcentrate the means of production into still fewer hands, until atlast the mass of Englishmen should have no lot in England. 

Moreover, it would be an error to consider the numbers of thereligious alone. The smaller foundations, and especially the conventsof nuns, did certainly support but small numbers, and this probablyaccounts for the ease with which they were suppressed, but, on theother hand, their possessions also were small. In the case of thegreat foundations, though one can count but 3000 monks and canons, thenumber of them must be multiplied many times if we are to arrive atthe total of the communities concerned. Reading, Abingdon, and therest were little cities, with a whole population of direct dependantsliving within the walls, and a still larger number of familieswithout, who indirectly depended upon the revenues of the abbey fortheir livelihood. 

Another and perhaps a better way of presenting to a modern reader theoverwhelming economic power of the mediæval monastic system, especially its economic power in the Valley of the Thames, would be toadd to such a list of houses a map of that valley showing the manorsin ecclesiastical hands, the freeholds and leaseholds held by thegreat abbeys, in addition to the livings that were within their gift;in a word, a map giving all their different forms of revenue. 

Such a map would show the Valley of the Thames and its tributariescovered with ecclesiastical influence upon every side. 

Even if we confined ourselves to the parishes upon the actual banks ofthe river, the map would present a continuous stretch of possessionsupon either side from far above Eynsham down to below bridges. 

The research that would be necessary for the establishment of such acomplete list would require a leisure which is not at the disposal ofthe present writer, but it is possible to give some conception of whatthe monastic holdings were by drawing up a list confined to but asmall part of these holdings and showing therefore _a fortiori_ whatthe total must have been. 

In this list I concern myself only with the eight largest houses inthe whole length of the river. I do not mention parishes from whichthe revenues were not important (though these were numerous, for theabbeys held a large number of small parcels of land). I do not mentionthe very numerous holdings close to the river but not actually upon it(such as Burnham or Watereaton), nor, which is most important of all, do I count even in the riparian holdings such foundations as were notthemselves set upon the banks of the Thames. Whatever Thames land paidrent to a monastery not actually situated upon the banks of the river, I omit. Finally the list, curtailed as it is by all these limitations, concerns only the land held at the moment of the Dissolution. Scoresof holdings, such as those of Lechlade, which was dissolved inCatholic times, Windsor, which was exchanged as we have seen at thetime of the Conquest, I omit and confine myself only to the lands heldat the time of the Dissolution. 

Yet these lands--though they concern only eight monasteries, though Imention only those actually upon the banks of the river, and though Iomit from the list all small payments--put before one a series ofnames which, to those familiar with the Thames, seems almost like avoyage along the stream and appears to cover every portion of thelandscape with which travellers upon the river are familiar. Thus wehave Shifford, Eynsham, South Stoke, Radley, Cumnor, Witham, Botley, the Hinkseys, Sandford, Shillingford, Swinford, Medmenham, Appleford, Sutton, Wittenham, Culham, Abingdon, Goring, Cowley, Littlemore, Cholsey, Nuneham, Wallingford, Pangbourne, Streatley, StantonHarcourt; and all this crowd of names upon the upper river is arrivedat without counting such properties as attached to the greatmonasteries within towns, as, for example, to the monasteries ofOxford. It is true that not all these names represent completemanorial ownership. In a number of cases they stand for portions ofthe manor only, but even in this list ten at least, and possiblytwelve, stand for complete manorial ownership. Then one must addSonning, Wargreave, Tilehurst, Chertsey, Egham, Cobham, Richmond, Ham, Mortlake, Sheen, Kew, Chiswick, Staines, etc. , of which many of themost important, such as Staines, are full manorial possessions. 

It is clearly evident, from such a very imperfect and rapidly drawnlist, what was the economic power of the great houses, and one mayconclude, even from the basis of such imperfect evidence, that thedirecting force of economic effort throughout the Thames Valley was tobe found, right up to the Dissolution, in the chapter houses ofReading, of Chertsey, and of Westminster, of Abingdon and of thelesser houses. 

In a word, the business of Henry might be compared to what may be infuture the business of some democratic European Government when itlays its hands upon the fortunes of the great financial houses, butwith this double difference, that the confiscation to which Henry benthimself was a confiscation of capital whose product did not leave thecountry, and could not be used for anti-national purposes, as alsothat it was the confiscation of wealth which never acted secretly andwhich had no interest, as have our chief moneylenders, in politicalcorruption. It was a vast undertaking and, in the truest sense of theword, a revolutionary one, such as Europe had not seen until thatmoment, and perhaps has not seen since. 

It was effected with ease, because there did not reside in the publicopinion of the time any strong body of resistance. 

The change of religion, in so far as a change was threatened (and uponthat the mass of the parish priests themselves, and still more themass of the laity, were very hazy), did not affect the mind of apeople famous throughout Europe for their intense and oftensuperstitious devotion; but in some odd way the segregation of thegreat communities, their vast wealth, and perhaps an externalcontradiction between their original office and their presentprivilege, forbade any united or widespread enthusiasm in theirdefence. 

Englishmen rose upon every side when they thought that the vitalmysteries of the Faith were threatened. The risings were only put downby the use of foreign mercenaries and by the most execrable cruelty, nor would even these means have sufficed had the rebels formed a clearplan, or had the purpose of Henry himself in matters of religion beendefinite and capable of definite attack. But the country, though readyto fight for Dogma, was not ready to fight for the monasteries. Itmight, perhaps, have fought if the attack upon them had been directand universal. If Henry had laid down a programme of suppressingreligious bodies in general, he probably could not have carried itout, but he laid down no such programme. The Dissolution of thesmaller houses was imagined by the most devout to be a statesmanlikemeasure. Many of them, like Medmenham, were decayed; their wealth wasnot to be used for the private luxury of the King or of nobles; it wasto swell the revenues of the greater foundations or to be applied topious or honourable public use. But the example once given, the attackupon the greater houses necessarily followed; and the whole episode isa vivid lesson in the capital principle of statesmanship that men aregoverned by routine and by the example of familiar things. Renderpossible to the mass of men the conception that the road, theyhabitually follow is not a necessity of their lives, and you may exactof them almost any sacrifice or hope to see them witness withoutdisgust almost any enormity. 

Moreover, the great monasteries were each severally tricked. The onewas asked to surrender at one time, another at another; the one forthis reason, the other for that. The suppression of Chertsey, theexample perpetually recurring in these pages, was solemnly promised tobe but a transference of the community from one spot to another; thenwhen the transference had taken place the second community wasruthlessly destroyed. There is ample evidence to show that eachcommunity had its special hope of survival, and that each, until quitethe end of the process, regarded its fate, when that fate fell uponit, as something exceptional and peculiar to itself. Some, or rathermany, purchased temporary exemption, doubtless secure in the beliefthat their bribe would make that extension permanent. Their paymentswere accepted, but the contracts depending upon them were neverfulfilled. 

When the Dissolution had taken place, apart from the private loot, which was enormous, and to which we shall turn a few pages hence, amethodical destruction took place on the part of the Crown. 

In none of the careless waste which marked the time is there a worseexample than in the case of Reading. The lead had already beenstripped from the roof and melted into pigs; the timbers of the roofhad already been rotting for nearly thirty years, when Elizabeth gaveleave for such of them as were sound to be removed. Some were used inthe repairing of a local church; a little later further leave wasgiven for 200 cartloads of freestone to be removed from the ruins. Butthey showed an astonishing tenacity. The abbey was still a habitationbefore the Civil Wars, and even at the end of the eighteenth century avery considerable stretch of the old walls remained. 

Westminster was saved. The salvation of Westminster is the moreremarkable in that the house was extremely wealthy. 

Upon nothing has more ink been wasted in the minute research of modernhistory than upon an attempted exact comparison between modern andmediæval economics. 

It is a misfortune that those who are best fitted to appreciate theeconomic problems and science of the modern world are, either by raceor religion, or both, cut off from the mediæval system, and even whenthey are acquainted with the skeleton, as it were, of that body ofChristian Europe, are none the less out of sympathy with, or evenignorant of, its living form and spirit. 

The particular department of that inquiry which concerns anyone whotouches the vast economic revolution produced by the Dissolution ofthe monasteries is the comparison of values (as measured in theprecious metals) between the early sixteenth century and the earlytwentieth. 

No sensible man needs to be told that such a comparison is one of thevery numerous parts of historical inquiry in which a better result isarrived at in proportion as the matter is more generally and largelyobserved. It is one in which detail is more fatal to a man even thaninaccuracy, and it is one in which hardly a single observer who hasbeen really soaked in his subject has avoided the most ludicrousconclusions. 

Again, no man of common sense need be told that a rigid multiple isabsolutely impossible of discovery. The search for such a multiple islike a search for an index number which shall apply to all the varyingeconomic habits of the modern world. One cannot say: "Multiply pricesby 10" or "Multiply prices by 20, " and thus afford the modern reader asound basis; but one can say, after some observation: "Multiply bysuch-and-such a multiple" (wherever very large and varied expenditureis concerned) and you will certainly have a minimum; though how much_more_ such expenditure may have represented in those very differentand far simpler social circumstances cannot be precisely determined. What, then, is the rough multiple that will give us our minimum?

The inquiry has been prosecuted by more than one authority upon thebasis of wheat. One may say that wheat in normal years in the earlysixteenth century stood at about an eighth of wheat in what I may callthe normal years of the nineteenth, before the influx of Colonialproduce began to be serious, and before the depreciation of silvercombined with other causes to disturb prices. 

Those who have taken wheat for their basis, recognising, as even theymust do, that 8 is far too low a multiple, are willing to grant 10, and sometimes even 12, and this way of calculating, largely because itis a ready rule, has entered into many books upon the Reformation. Theearly Tudor penny is turned into the modern shilling. 

But this basis of calculation is false, because the eating of wheatenbread was not then the universal thing it is to-day. The Englishproletarian of to-day is, in comparison with the large well-to-doclass of his fellow-citizens, a far poorer man than his ancestry everwere. Wheaten bread is, indeed, his necessity, but good fresh meat(for example) is an exception for him. 

Now the Englishmen of earlier times made beef a necessity, and yet wefind that beef will permit a higher multiple than wheat. Beef willgive you a multiple of 12, and just as wheat, giving you a multiple of8, permits a somewhat higher general multiple, so beef, giving you amultiple of 12, permits a higher one. So if we were to make beef ourstaple instead of wheat we should get a multiple of 13 or 14 by whichto turn the money of the first third of the sixteenth century into themoney of our own time. 

But beef, in its turn, is not a fair standard; during much of the yearpork had, under the circumstances of the time, to be eaten instead offresh meat. Pork is to-day almost the only meat all the year round ofmany labourers on the land. Now pork gives a still higher multiple: itgives 20. For the pound that you would now give in Chichester Marketfor a breeding sow, you gave in the early years of the sixteenthcentury a shilling. So here you have another article of commonconsumption which gives you a multiple of 20. 

Strong ale gives you a higher multiple still--one of nearly 24. Youcould then get strong ale at a penny a gallon. You will hardly get itat two shillings a gallon to-day; and yet it is made of the samematerials. The small ale of the hayfield will give you almost anymultiple you like; it is from eightpence to ninepence a gallon now: itwas often given away in the sixteenth century as water would be. 

The consideration of but a few sets of prices such as those we havequoted shows that the ordinary multiple might be anything between 8and 24, with a prejudice in favour of the higher rather than the lowerfigure. But there are other lines of proof which converge upon thematter, and which permit a greater degree of certitude. For instance, even after the rise in prices in the early part of Elizabeth's reign, while sixpence a week is thought low for the board and lodging of aworking man, a shilling is thought very high, and is only given in thecase of first-rate artisans; and if we consider the pre-Reformationperiod, when the position of the labourer was, of course, much betterthan it was under Elizabeth, or ever has been since, we find somethingof the same scale. A penny a day is thought a rather mean allowance, but twopence a day is a first-rate extra board wage. 

Again, in Henry VIII. 's first poll tax it is taken for granted thatmany labourers have less than a pound a year in actual wages, and thatwages over this sum, up to two pounds, for instance, form a sort ofaristocracy of labour that can afford to pay taxation. Of course somepart of the wages so counted were paid in part board and lodging, especially in the agricultural industries, but still, the reception of240 pence for a year's work in money gives you a multiple of far morethan 20: you will not get a man about a house and garden for less thanthirty pounds though you feed and house him, and the unhoused outsidelabourer gets, first and last, over fifty pounds at the least. 

When the Reformation was in full swing the currency was debased almostout of recognition, and before the death of Edward VI. Prices arerendered so fictitious by inflation that they are useless for ourpurpose. It is only with the currency of Elizabeth that they becametrue measures of value once more. 

It is useless, therefore, to follow the inquiry after the Dissolutionof the monasteries, for not only was the currency at sixes and sevens, but true prices were also rapidly rising with the influx of preciousmetals from Spain and America. 

I have said enough in this very elementary sketch to show that ageneral multiple of 20, when one considers wages as well as staplefoods, is as high as can be fixed safely, while a general multiple of12 is certainly too low. 

But even to multiply by 20 is by no means enough if one is toappreciate the social meaning of such-and-such a large income in thefirst part of Henry VIII. 's reign. 

A brief historical essay, such as is this, is no place in which todiscuss any general theory of economics; were there space to do so, even in an elementary fashion, it would be possible to show how theincrease of wealth in a state is, on account of the increasedelasticity in circulation of the currency, almost independent of themovement of prices. But without going into formulæ; of thiscomplexity, a couple of homely comparisons will suffice to show what amuch larger thing a given income was in the early sixteenth century, than its corresponding amount in values is to-day. 

Consider a man with some £2000 a year travelling through modernEurope. Prices, in the competition of modern commerce and the ease ofmodern travel, are levelled up very evenly throughout the area that hetraverses. Yet such a man, should he settle in a village of Spanishpeasants, would appear of almost illimitable wealth, because he wouldhave at his command an almost indefinite amount of those simplenecessities which form the whole category of their consumable values. Or again, let such a man settle in a place where the variety ofconsumable values is large, but where the distribution of wealth isfairly equal, and the small income, therefore, a normal socialphenomenon--as, for instance, among the lower middle class ofParis-there again his £2000 a year would be of much greater effectthan in a society where wealth was unequally divided, for it wouldproduce that effect in a medium where the satisfaction of nearly everyindividual around him was easily reached upon perhaps a tenth of suchan income. 

When all this is taken into consideration we can begin to see what thegreat monasteries were at the time of their dissolution. It is hardlyan exaggeration to multiply the list of mere values by 20 to bring itinto the terms of modern currency. A place worth close on £2000 a year(as was, for instance, Ramsey Abbey) meant an income of not far shortof £40, 000 a year in our money, to go by prices alone. And that£40, 000 a year was spent in an England in which nine-tenths of theluxury of our modern rich was unknown, in which the squire was usuallybut three or four times richer than one of his farmers, in which greatwealth, where it existed, attached rather to an office than to aperson. In general, the multiple of 20 must be further multiplied by acoefficient which is not arithmetically determinable, but which we seeI to be very large by a general comparison of the small, poor, andequable society of the early sixteenth century with the complex, huge, wealthy, and wholly iniquitous society of our own day. 

Supposing, for instance, we take the high multiple of 20, and say thatthe revenues of Westminster at its dissolution in the first days of1540 were some £80, 000 a year in our modern money, we are farunderestimating the economic position of Westminster in the State. There are to-day many private men in London who dispose of as great anincome, and who, for all their ostentation, are not remarkable; butthe income of Westminster in the early sixteenth century, when wealthwas far more equally divided than it is now, and when the accumulationof it was far less, was a very different matter to what we mean to-dayby £80, 000 a year. It produced more of the effect which we mightto-day imagine would be produced by a million. The fortune of but veryfew families could so much as compare with it, and the fortunes ofindividual families, especially of wealthy families, were, during theexistence of a strong king, highly perilous, and often cut short;nothing could pretend to equal such an economic power but the Crown, which then was, and which remained until the victory of thearistocracy in the Civil Wars, by far the richest legal personality inBritain. The temptation to sack Westminster was something like thetemptation presented to our financial powers to-day to get at therubber of the Congo Basin or at the unexploited coal of NorthernChina. 

By a miracle that temptation was withstood. For the moment Henryintended to construct a bishopric with its cathedral out of the oldcorporation and abbey. He might have done so and yet have yieldedimmediately after to his cupidity, as he did with the Cathedral ofOsney. It ended in the form which it at present maintains. The greaterpart of its revenues were, of course, stolen, but the fabric wasspared and enough income was retained to permit the continuous life ofWestminster to our own time. 

Men are slow to conceive what might have been--nay, what almost_was_--in their national history; it seems difficult to our generationto imagine Westminster Abbey absent only from the national life; yetAbingdon is gone, all but a gateway, Reading all but a few ruinedwalls, Chertsey has utterly disappeared, so has Osney, so hasSheen--to mention the great river houses alone: Westminster alonesurvives, and the only reason it survives is that it had about it atthe time of the destruction of the monasteries a royal flavour, andthat its existence helped to bolster up the Tudors. But for that itwould have been sold like the rest, the lead would have been strippedfrom its roof, the glass broken and thrown aside, and a Cecil or aHoward would have built himself a palace with the stones. It is but achance that the words "Westminster Abbey" mean more to us to-day than"Woburn Abbey, " "Bewley Abbey" or any one of the scores of "Abbeys, ""Priories, " and the rest, which are the names of our country houses. 

Chertsey and Abingdon were less fortunate than Westminster. 

Chertsey, indeed, has so thoroughly disappeared that it might be takenas a symbol of all that England had been for the thirty generationssince Christianity had come to her, and then, in two generations ofmen, ceased suddenly to be. There is, perhaps, not one in a thousandof the vague Colonials who regard Westminster Abbey as a sort ofinevitable centre for Britishers and Anglo-Saxons, who has so much asheard of Chertsey. There is perhaps but one in a hundred of historicalstudents who could attach a definite connection to the name, and yetChertsey came next in the list of the great Benedictine Abbeys;Chertsey also was coeval with England. 

Chertsey went the way of them all. The last abbot, John Cordery, surrendered it in the July of 1537, but he and his community were notimmediately dispersed, they were taken off to fill that strange newfoundation of Bisham, of which we shall hear later in connection withthe river, and which in its turn immediately disappeared. Not a yearhad passed, the June of 1538 was not over, when the new community atBisham was scattered as the old one at Chertsey had been. 

Of the abbey itself nothing is left but a broken piece of gateway, andthe few stones of a wall. But a relic of it remains in Black CherryFair, a market granted to the abbey in the fifteenth century andformerly held upon St. Anne's Hill and upon St. Anne's Day. 

The fate of this monastery has something about it particularly tragic, for the abbot and the monks of Chertsey when they surrendered did soin the full expectation of continuing their monastic life at Bisham, and if Bisham was treacherously destroyed immediately after the faultdoes not lie at their door. 

With Abingdon it was otherwise. The last prior was perhaps the leaststeadfast of all the many bewildered or avaricious characters thatmeet us in the story of the Dissolution. He was one Thomas Rowland, who had watched every movement of Henry's mind, and had, if possible, gone before. He did not even wait until the demand was made to him, but suggested the abandonment of the trust which so many generationsof Englishmen had left in his hands, and he had a reward in the giftnot only of a very large pension but also of the Manor of Cumnor, which had been before the destruction of the religious orders thesanatorium or country house of the monks. He obtained it: and from histime on Cumnor has borne an air of desolation and of murder, nor doesany part of his own palace remain. 

When any organised economic system disappears, there is nothing moreinteresting in history than to watch the process of its replacement:for example, the gradual disappearance of pagan slavery, and itsreplacement by the self-governing peasantry of the Middle Ages, withall the consequence of that change, affords some of the best readingin Continental records. But the Dissolution of the English monasterieshas this added interest, that it was an immediate, and therefore anoverwhelming, change; there was hardly a warning, there was no delay. Suddenly, not within the lifetime of a man, but within that of aParliament, from one year to another, a good quarter of the wholeeconomic power of the nation was utterly transformed. Nothing like ithas been known in European history. 

What filled the void so made? The answer to this question is, theOligarchy: the landed class which had been threatening for so long toassume the Government of England stepped into the shoes of the greathouses, and by this addition to their already considerable powerachieved the destruction of the monarchy and within 100 yearsproceeded to the ordering of the English people under a small group ofwealthy men, a form of Government which to this day England alone ofall Christian nations suffers or enjoys. 

This general statement must not be taken to mean that the oligarchicsystem, whose basis lies in the ownership of land, was immediatelycreated by the Dissolution of the great monasteries. The developmentof the territorial system of England, of which system the banks of theThames afford as good a picture as any in England, can be tracedcertainly from Saxon, and conjecturally from Roman, times. 

The Roman estate was, presumably, the direct ancestor of the manor, and the Saxon thegns were perhaps most of them in blood, and nearlyall of them in social constitution, descended from the owners of theRoman Villas which had seen the petty but recurrent pirate invasionsof the fifth and sixth centuries. 

But though the manorial arrangement, with its village lords and theirdependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West, and could befound on the Rhine, in Gaul, and even in Italy, in Saxon England ithad this peculiarity, that there was no systematic organisation bywhich the local land-owner definitely recognised a feudal superior, and through him the power of a Central Government. Or rather, thoughin theory such recognition had grown up towards the end of the Saxonperiod, in practice it hardly existed, and when William landed thewhole system of tenure was in disorder, in the sense that the locallord of the village was not accustomed to the interference of asuperior, and that no groups of lords had come into existence by whichthe territorial system could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and thewhole of it attached to one central point at the royal Court. 

Such a system of groups _had_ arisen in Gaul, and to that differenceultimately we owe the French territorial system of the present day, but William the Norman's new subjects had no comprehension of it. 

It was upon this account that even those manors which he handed overto his French kindred and dependants were scattered, and that, thoughhe framed a vigorous feudal rule centring in his own hands, theancient customs of the populace, coupled with the lack of any bondbetween scattered and locally independent units, forbade that rule toendure. 

William's order was not a century old when the recrudescence of theformer manorial independence was felt in the reign of Henry II. Underthe personal unpopularity of his son, John, it blazed out intosuccessful revolt, and, in spite of the veil thrown over underlyingand permanent customs by such strong feudal kings as the first and thethird Edwards, the independence and power of the village landlordremained the chief and growing character of English life. It expresseditself in the quality of the local English Parliament, in the supportof the usurping Lancastrian dynasty--in twenty ways that converge andmingle towards the close of the Middle Ages. 

But after the Dissolution of the monasteries this power of the squirestakes on quite a different complexion: the land-owning class, from afoundation for the National Government, became, within two generationsof the Dissolution, the master of that Government. 

For many centuries previous to the sixteenth the old funded wealth ofthe Crown had been gradually wasting, at the expense of the CentralNational Government and to the profit of the squires. But thealienation was never complete. There are plenty of cases in which theCrown is found resuming the proprietorship of a manor to which it hadnever abandoned the theoretical title. With the Tudors such casesbecome rarer and rarer, with the Stuarts they cease. 

The cause of this rapid enfeeblement of the Crown lay largely in thechanged proportion of wealth. The King, until the middle of thesixteenth century, had been far wealthier than any one of hissubjects. By a deliberate act, the breaking up of ecclesiasticaltenure, the Crown offered an opportunity to the wealthier of thosesubjects so enormously to increase their revenues as to overshadowitself; in a little more than a century after the throwing open of themonastic lands the King is an embarrassed individual, with every issueof expenditure ear-marked, every source of it controlled, and his veryperson, as it were, mortgaged to a plutocracy. The squires had notonly added to their revenues the actual amounts produced by the sitesand estates of the old religious foundations, they had been able bythis sudden accession of wealth to shoot ahead in their competitionwith their fellow-citizens. The _counterweight_ to the power of thelocal landlord disappeared with the disappearance of the monastery. 

To show how the religious houses had furnished a powerfulcounterweight by which the Central Government and the populace couldcontinue to oppose the growing power of the landed oligarchy, we maytake all the southern bank of the Thames from Buscot to Windsor. Wefind at the time of the Conquest twelve royal manors and fifteenreligious; only the nine remaining were under private lords. Four anda half centuries later, at the time of the Dissolution, the royalmanors have passed for the most part into private hands, but themanors in the hands of the religious houses have actually increased innumber. 

At this point it is important to note an economic phenomenon whichappears at first sight accidental, but which, on examination, is foundto spring from calculable political causes. At the moment of theDissolution it was apparently in the power of the Crown to haveconcentrated the revenues of all these monastic manors into its ownhands, and this typical stretch of country, the Berkshire shore, showshow economically powerful the Central Government of England might havebecome had the property surrendered to the Crown been kept in thehands of the King. 

The modern reader will be tempted to inquire why it was not so kept. 

Most certainly Henry intended to keep, if not the whole of it (for hemust reward his servants, and he was accustomed to do things largely), yet at least the bulk of it in the Royal Treasury, and had he beenable to do so the Central Government of England would have become byfar the strongest thing in Europe. It is conceivable, though inconsideration of the national character doubtful, that with sopowerful an instrument of government, England, instead of standingaside from the rapid bureaucratic recasting of European civilisationwhich was the work of the French Crown, might have led the way in thatchief of modern experiments. One can imagine the Stuarts, had theypossessed revenue, doing what the Bourbons did: one can imagine themodern State developing under an English Crown wealthier than anyother European Government, and the re-birth of Europe happening justto the north, instead of just to the south, of the Channel. 

But the speculation is vain. As a fact, the whole of the new wealthslipped rapidly from between the fingers of the English King. 

When of three forces which still form an equilibrium two arestationary and one is pressing upon these two, then, if either of thestationary forces be removed, that which was pressing upon bothoverwhelms the stationary force that remains. The monastic system hadbeen marking time for over 100 years, and in certain political aspectsof its power had perhaps slightly dwindled. The monarchy, for all itssplendour, was in actual resources no more than it had been for somegenerations. Pressing upon either of these two institutions was therising and still rising force of the squires. It is not wonderful thatunder such conditions the spoil fell to the younger and advancingpower. 

Consider, for example, the extraordinary anxiety of so apparentlypowerful a king as Henry for the formal consent of the Commons to hisacts. It has been represented as part of the Tudor national policy andwhat not, but those who write thus have not perhaps smiled, as has thepresent writer, over the names of those who sat for the English shiresin the Parliament which assented to the Dissolution of the greatmonastic houses. Here is a Ratcliffe from Northumberland, and aCollingwood; here is a Dacre, a Musgrave, a Blenkinsop; the Constablesare there, and the Nevilles from Yorkshire; the Tailboys of Lincoln, aSchaverell, a Throgmorton, a Ferrers, a Gascoyne; and of course, inevitably, sitting for Bedfordshire, a hungry Russell. 

Here is a Townshend, a Wingfield, a Wentworth, an Audley--all fromEast Anglia--a Butler; from Surrey a Carew, and that FitzWilliam whoseappetite for the religious spoils proved so insatiable; here is aBlount out of Shropshire; a Lyttleton, a Talbot (and yet _another_Russell!), a Darrell, a Paulet, a Courtney, (to see what could bepicked up in his native county of Devon), and after him a Grenfell. These are a few names taken at random to show what humble sort of"Commons" it was that Henry had to consider. They are significantnames; and the "Constitution" had little to do then, and has little todo now, with their domination. Wealth was and is their instrument ofpower. 

That such men could ultimately force the Government is evident, butwhat is remarkable, perhaps, is the extraordinary rapidity with whichthe Crown was stripped of its new wealth by the gentry, and this canonly be explained in two ways:

First, there was the rapid change in prices which rose from theSpanish importation of precious metals from America, the effect ofwhich was now reaching England; and, secondly, the Tudor character. 

As to the first, it put the National Government, dependent as it stilllargely was upon the customary and fixed payments, into a perpetualembarrassment. Where it still received nothing but the customaryshilling, it had to pay out three for material and wages, whose pricehad risen and was rising. In this embarrassment, in spite of everysubterfuge and shift, the Crown was in perpetual, urgent, andincreasing need. Rigid and novel taxes were imposed, loans were raisedand not repaid, but something far more was needed to save thesituation, with prices still rising as the years advanced. Ready moneyfrom those already in possession of perhaps half the arable land ofEngland was an obvious source, and into their pockets flowed, as bythe force of gravitation, the funded wealth which had once supportedthe old religion. Hardly ever at more than ten years' purchase, sometimes at far less, the Crown turned its new rentals into readymoney, and spent that capital as though it had been income. 

The Tudor character was a second cause. 

It is a pleasing speculation to conceive that, if some character otherthan a Tudor had been upon the throne, not all at least of thisnational inheritance would have been dissipated. One can imagine acharacter--tenacious, pure, narrow and subtle, intent upon dignity, and with a natural suspicion of rivals--which might have saved somepart of the estates for posterity. Charles I. , for example, had hebeen born 100 years earlier, might very well have done the thing. 

But the Tudors, for all their violence, were fundamentally weak. Therewas always some vice or passion to interrupt the continuity of theirpolicy--even Mary, who was not the offspring of caprice, had inheritedthe mental taint of the Spanish house--and before the last of thefamily had died, while still old men were living who, as children, hadseen the monasteries, nearly all this vast treasure had found its wayinto the pockets of the squires. In the middle of the seventeenthcentury every one of these villages is under a private landlord:before the close of it even the theoretical link of their feudaldependence upon the Crown is snapped: and the two centuries betweenthat time and our own have seen the power of the new landlordssteadily maintained and latterly vastly increased. 

Apart from the transfer of the monastic manors there was yet anotherway in which the Dissolution of the religious houses helped on theestablishment of the landed oligarchy in the place of the old NationalGovernment. The monasteries had owned not only these full manorialrights, but also numerous parcels of land scattered up and down inmanors whose lordship was already in private hands. These parcels, like the small lay freeholds, which they resembled, formed nuclei ofresistance to the increasing power of the squires. 

The point is of very considerable importance, though not easy to seizefor anyone unacquainted with the way in which the territorialoligarchy has been built up or ignorant of the present conditions ofEnglish village life. 

At the close of the Middle Ages the lord of a manor in England, thoughpossessed of a larger proportion of the land than were his colleaguesin other countries, but rarely could claim so much as one half of theacreage of a parish; the rest was common, in which his rights werestrictly limited and defined, to the advantage of the poor, and alsoside by side with common was to be found a number of partially andwholly independent tenures, over which the squire had little or nocontrol, from copyholds which did furnish him occasional sums ofmoney, to freeholds which were practically independent of him. 

The monasteries possessed parcels of this sort everywhere. To give butone example: Chertsey had twenty acres of freehold pasturage in theManor of Cobham; but it is useless to give examples of a thing whichwas as common as the renting of a house to-day. Now these smallparcels formed a most valuable foundation upon which the independenceof similar lay parcels could repose. The squire might be tempted tobully a four-acre man out of his land, but he could not bully theAbbot of Abingdon, or of Reading. And so long as these small parcelswere sanctioned by the power of the great houses, so long they werecertain to endure in the hands even of the smallest and the humblestof the tenants. To-day in a modern village where a gentleman possessessuch an island of land, better still where several do, there at oncearises a tendency and an opportunity for the smaller men to acquireand to retain. The present writer could quote a Sussex village in thecentre of which were to be found, but thirty years ago, more thanhalf-a-dozen freeholds. They disappeared: in its prosperity "TheEstate" extinguished them. The next heir in his embarrassment hashanded over the whole lump to a Levantine for a loan. Had the OldSquire spared the small freeholds they would have come in aspurchasers and would have increased their number during the lateryears when the principal landlord, his son, was gradually falling intopoverty and drink. 

When the monasteries were gone the disappearance of the small mengradually began. It was hastened by the extinction of that oldtradition which made the Church a customary landlord exacting quitrents always less than the economic value of the land, and, what withthe security of tenure and the low rental, creating a large tenantright. This tenant right vested in the lucky dependants of the Churchdid indeed create intense local jealousies that help to account formuch of the antagonism to the monastic houses. But the future showedthat the benefits conferred, though irregular and privileged, weremore than the landless men could hope to expect when they hadexchanged the monk for the squire. 

Finally, the Dissolution of the religious houses strengthened thesquires in the mere machinery of the constitution. Before thatDissolution the House of Lords was a clerical house. Had you enteredthe Council of Henry VII. When Parliament sat at Westminster you wouldhave seen a crowd of mitres and of croziers, bishops and abbots of thegreat abbeys, among whom, here and there, were some thirty lay lords. This clerical House of Lords, sprung largely from the populace, possessed only of life tenure, was a very different thing from theHouse of Lords that succeeded the Dissolution. _That_ immediatelybecame a committee, as it were, of the landed class; and a committeeof the landed class the House of Lords remained until quite the lastfew years, when the practice of purchase has admitted to it brewers, money-lenders, Colonial speculators, and, indeed, anyone who canfurnish the sum required by a woman or a secret party fund. A concreteexample is often of value in the illustration of a general process, and at the expense of a digression I propose to lay before the readeras excellent a picture as we have of the way in which the Dissolutionof the monasteries not only emphasised the position of the existingterritorial class, but began to recruit it with elements drawn fromevery quarter, and, while it established the squires in power, taughtthem to be careless of the origin or of the end of the familiesadmitted to their rank. 

For this purpose I can find no better example than that of the familyof Williams, which by the licence of custom we have come to call"Cromwell"; the most famous member of this family stands out inEnglish history as the typical squire who led the Forces of his Orderagainst the impoverished Monarchy, and so reduced that emblem ofGovernment to the simulacrum which it still remains. 

Putney, by Thames-side, was the home of their very lowly beginnings. 

Of the descent of the Williams throughout the Middle Ages nothing isknown. Much later they claimed relationship with certain heads of theWelsh clans, but the derivation is fantastic. At any rate a certainWilliams was keeping a public-house in Putney in the generation whichsaw the first of the Reformers. His name was Morgan, and the "ApWilliam" or "Williams" which he added to that name was an affix due tothe Welsh custom of calling a man by his father's name; for surnameshad not yet become a rule in the Principality. He may have come, andprobably did, from Glamorganshire, and that is all we can say abouthim; though we must admit some weight in Leland's contemporaryevidence that his son, Richard, was born in the same county, at aplace called Llanishen. Anyhow, there he is, keeping his public-housein the first years of the sixteenth century by the riverside atPutney. 

There lived in the same hamlet (which was a dependency of the manor ofWimbledon) a certain Cromwell or Crumwell, who was also called Smith;but this obscure personage should most probably be known by the firstof these two names, for his humble business was the shoeing of horses, and the second appellation was very probably a nickname arising fromthat trade. He also added beer-selling to his other work, and thiscommon occupation may have formed a link between him and hisneighbour, Morgan ap William. 

The next stage in the story is not perfectly clear. Smith or Crumwellhad a son and two daughters, the son was called Thomas, and thedaughter that concerns us was called Katherine. It is highly probable, according to modern research into the records of the manor, thatMorgan ap William married Katherine. But the matter is still in somedoubt. There are not a few authorities, some of them painstaking, though all of them old, who will have it that the blacksmith's son, Thomas, loved Morgan ap William's sister, instead of its being theother way about. It is not easy to establish the exact relationshipbetween two public-house keepers who lived as neighbours in a dirtylittle village 400 years ago. 

Thomas proceeded to an astonishing career; he left his father's forge, wandered to Italy, may have been present at the sack of Rome, and wasat last established as a merchant in the city of London. When one says"merchant" one is talking kindly. His principal business then, asthroughout his life, was that of a usurer, and he showed throughouthis incredible adventures something of that mixture of simplicity andgreed, with a strange fixity in the oddest of personal friendships, which amuses us to-day in our company promoters and Africanadventurers. His abilities recommended him to Wolsey, and when thatgreat genius fell, Cromwell was, as the most familiar of historicaltraditions represents him, faithful to his master. 

Whether this faithfulness recommended him to the King or not, it isdifficult to say. Probably it did, for there is nothing that a carefulplotter will more narrowly watch in an agent than his record offidelity in the past. 

Henry fixed upon him to be his chief instrument in the suppression ofthe monasteries. His lack of all fixed principle, his unusual power ofapplication to a particular task, his devotion to whatever orders hechose to obey, and his quite egregious avarice, all fitted him for thework his master ordered. 

How the witty scoundrel accomplished that business is a matter ofcommon history. Had he never existed the monasteries would have fallenjust the same, perhaps in the same manner, and probably with the samedespatch. But fate has chosen to associate this revolution with hisname--and to his presence in that piece of confiscation we owe thepresence in English history of the great Oliver; for Oliver, as willbe presently seen, and all his tribe were fed upon no other food thanthe possessions of the Church. Cromwell, in his business ofsuppressing the great houses, embezzled quite cynically--if we canfairly call that "embezzlement" which was probably countenanced by theKing, to whom account was due. Indeed, it is plainly evident from thewhole story of that vast economic catastrophe which so completelyseparates the England we know from the England of a thousandyears--the England of Alfred, of Edward I. , of Chaucer, and of theFrench Wars--it is evident from the whole story, that the flood ofconfiscated wealth which poured into the hands of the King's agentsand squires was a torrent almost impossible to control; Henry VIII. Was glad enough to be able to retain, even for a year or two, one halfof the spoils. 

We know, for instance, that the family of Howard (which was thenalready of more than a century's standing) took everything they couldlay their hands on in the particular case of Bridlington--pyxes, chalices, crucifixes, patens, reliquaries, vestments, shrines, everysaleable or meltable thing, and the cattle and pigs into the bargain, and never dreamt of giving account to the King. 

With Cromwell, the embezzlement was more systematic: it was a methodof keeping accounts. But our interest lies in the fact that theprocess was accompanied by that curious fidelity to all with whom hewas personally connected, which forms so interesting a feature in thesardonic character of this adventurer. It is here that we touch againupon the family of Morgan ap William, the public-house keeper ofPutney. 

When Cromwell was at the height of his power he lifted out from theobscurity of his native kennel a certain Richard Williams, calling himnow "cousin" and now "nephew. " We may take it that the boy was anephew, and that the word "cousin" was used only in the sense ofgeneral relationship which attached to it at that time. If Cromwellhad been a man of a trifle more distinction, or of tolerable honesty, we might even be certain that this young fellow was the legitimate sonof his sister Katherine, and, indeed, it is much the more probableconclusion at which we should arrive to-day. But Cromwell himselfobscured the matter by alluding to his relative as "Williams (aliasCromwell), " and there must necessarily remain a suspicion as to thebirth and real status of his dependant. 

In 1538 this young Richard Williams got two foundations handed over tohim--both in Huntingdon, and together amounting in value to about £500a year. 

We have seen on an earlier page how extremely difficult or impossibleit is to estimate exactly in modern money the figures of theDissolution. We have agreed that to multiply by twenty for a maximumis permissible, but that even then we shall not have anything like thetrue relation of any particular income to the general standard ofwealth in a time when England was so much smaller than our England ofto-day, and in an England where wealth had been until that moment sowell divided, and especially in an England where the objects both ofluxury and expenditure were so utterly different to our own: where alltextile fabric was, for instance, so much dearer in proportion to foodthan it is now, and where yet a man could earn in a few weeks' labourwhat would with us be capital enough to stock a small farm. 

It is safe to say, however, that when Cromwell had got his youngrelation--whatever that relationship was--into possession of the twofoundations in Huntingdon, he had set him up as a considerable localgentleman, and whether it was the inheritance of the Cromwell bloodthrough his mother, or something equally unpleasant in the heredity ofhis father, Morgan, young Williams ("alias Cromwell") did not stickthere. 

Early in 1540 he swallowed bodily the enormous revenues of RamseyAbbey. 

Now to appreciate what that meant we must return to the case we havealready established in the case of Westminster. Westminster almostalone of the great foundations remains with a certain splendourattached to it; we cannot, indeed, see all the dependencies as theyused to stand to the south of the great Abbey. We cannot see thelively and populous community dependent upon it; still less can weappreciate what a figure it must have cut in the days when London wasbut a large country town, and when this walled monastic communitystood in its full grandeur surrounded by its gardens and farms. Butstill, the object lesson afforded by the Abbey yet remains visible tous. We can see it as it was, and we know that its income must haverepresented in the England at that time infinitely more in outwardeffect than do to-day the largest private incomes of our Englishgentry: a Solomon Joel, for instance, or a Rothschild, does not occupyso great a place in modern England as did Westminster, at the close ofthe Middle Ages, in the very different England of its time. 

Well, Ramsey was the equivalent of half Westminster, and youngWilliams swallowed it whole. He was not given it outright, but theprice at which he bought it is significant of the way in which themonastic lands were distributed, and in which incidentally thesquirearchy of England was founded. He bought it for less than threeyears' purchase. Where he got the money, or indeed whether he paidready money at all, we do not know. If he did furnish the sum down wemay suspect that he borrowed it from his uncle, and we may hope thatthat genial financier charged but a low rate of interest to one whomhe had so signally favoured. 

Contemporaneously with this vast accession of fortune, which madeWilliams the principal man in the county, Cromwell, now Earl of Essex, fell from favour, and was executed. The barony was revived for his sonfive months after his death and was not extinguished until the firstyears of the eighteenth century, but with this, the direct lineage ofthe King's Vicar-General, we are not concerned: our business is withthe family of Williams. 

Young Williams did not imitate his protector in showing any startlingfidelity to the fallen. He became a courtier, was permanently infavour with the King and with the King's son, and died established inthe great territorial position which he had come into by so singularan accident. 

His son, Henry, maintained that position, and possibly increased it. He was four times High Sheriff of the two counties; he receivedElizabeth, his sovereign and patroness, at his seat at Hinchinbrooke(one of the convents), and in general he played the rôle with which weare so tediously familiar in the case of the new and monstrousfortunes of our own times. 

He was in Parliament also for the Queen, and it was his brother whomoved the resolution of thanks to Elizabeth for the beheading of MaryQueen of Scots. 

He died in 1603, and even to his death the alias was maintained. "Williams (alias Cromwell)" was the legal signature which guaranteedthe validity of purchases and sales, while to the outer world CROMWELL(alias Williams) was the formula by which the family gently thrustitself into the tradition of another and more genteel name. The wholething was done, like everything else this family ever did, by amixture of trickery and patience; he obtained no special leave fromChancery as the law required; he simply used the "Williams" in publicless and less and the "Cromwell" more and more. When he died, his sonsafter him, Robert and Oliver, had forgotten the Williamsaltogether--in public--and in the case of such powerful men it wasconvenient for the neighhours to forget the lineage also; so with theend of the sixteenth century these Williams have become Cromwells, _pur et simple_, and Cromwells they remain. But still the old cautionclings to them where the law, and especially where money, isconcerned; even Robert's son, who grew to be the Lord Protector, signs_Williams_ when it is a case of securing his wife's dowry. Of Robertand Oliver, sons of Henry, and grandsons of the original Richard, Oliver, the elder, inherited, of course, the main wealth of thefamily, but Robert also was portioned, and as was invariably the casewith the Williams' (alias Cromwell), the portion took the form ofmonastic lands. 

Many more estates of the Church had come into the hands of this highlyaccretive family in the half century that had passed since thedestruction of the monasteries. [Thus at the very end of the centurywe find Oliver telling the abbey land of Stratton to a haberdasher inLondon for £3000. ]

The portion of this younger brother, Robert, consisted of religiousestates in the town of Huntingdon itself, and it is highlycharacteristic of the whole tribe that the very house in which theLord Protector was born was monastic, and had been, before theDissolution, a hospital dedicated to the use of the poor. For the LordProtector was the son of this Robert, who by a sort of atavism hadadded to the ample income derived from monastic spoil the profits of abrewery. It was Mrs Cromwell who looked after the brewery, and someappreciable part of the family revenues were derived from it when, in1617, her husband died, leaving young Oliver, the future LordProtector, an only son of eighteen, upon her hands. 

The quarrels between young Oliver and old Oliver (the absurdly wealthyhead of the family) would furnish material for several divertingpages, but they do not concern this, which is itself but a digressionfrom the general subject of my book. 

The object of that digression has been to trace the growth of but onegreat territorial family, from the gutter to affluence in the courseof less than 100 years; to show how plain "Williams" gradually andsecretly became "Cromwell"--because the new name had about it aflavour of nobility, however parvenu; to show how the whole of theirvast revenues depended upon, and was born from, the destruction ofmonastic system, and to show by the example of one Thames-side familyhow rapidly and from what sources was derived that economic power ofthe squires which, when it came to the issue of arms, utterlydestroyed what was left of the national monarchy. 

The new _régime_ had, however, other features about it which must notbe forgotten. For instance, in this growth of a new territorial bodyupon the ruins of the monastic orders, in this sudden and portentousincrease of the wealth and power of the squires of England, themutability of the new system is perhaps as striking as any other ofits characteristics. 

Manors or portions of manors which had been steadily fixed in thepossession and customs of these undying corporations for centuriespass rapidly from hand to hand, and though there is sometimes a lullin the process the uprooting reoccurs after each lull, as thoughcontinuity and a strong tradition, which are necessarily attached forgood or for evil to a free peasantry, were as necessarily disregardedby a landed plutocracy. There is not, perhaps, in all Europe a similarcomplete carelessness for the traditions of the soil and for theattachment of a family to an ancestral piece of land as is to be foundamong these few thousand squires. The system remains, but theindividual families, the particular lineages, appear withoutastonishment and are destroyed almost without regret. Aliens, Orientals and worse, enter the ruling class, and are received withoutsurprise; names that recall the Elizabethans go out, and are notmourned. 

We are accustomed to-day, when we see some village estate in our owncountry pass from an impoverished gentleman to some South African Jew, to speak of the passing of an old world and of its replacement by anew and a worse one. But an examination of the records which followthe Dissolution of the monasteries may temper our sorrow. The woundthat was dealt in the sixteenth century to our general nationaltraditions affected the love of the land as profoundly as it didreligion, and the apparent antiquity which the trees, the stones, anda certain spurious social feeling lend to these country houses iswholly external. 

Among the riparian manors of the Thames the fate of Bisham is verycharacteristic of the general fate of monastic land. It wassurrendered, among other smaller monasteries, in 1536, though itenjoyed an income corresponding to about £6000 a year of our money, and of course very much more than £6000 a year in our modern way oflooking at incomes. It was thus a wealthy place, and how it came to beincluded in the smaller monasteries is not quite clear. At any rate itwas restored immediately after. The monks of Chertsey were housed init, as we have already seen, and the revenues of several of thesmaller dissolved houses were added to it; so that it was at themoment of its refoundation about three times as wealthy as it had beenbefore. The prior who had surrendered in 1536, one Barlow, was madeBishop of St Asaphs, and in turn of St. Davids, Bath and Wells, andChichester; he is that famous Barlow who took the opportunity of theReformation to marry, and whose five daughters all in turn married theProtestant bishops of the new Church of England. But this is by theway. The fate of the land is what is interesting. From Anne of Cleves, whose portion it had been, and to whom the Government of the greatnobles under Edward VI. Confirmed it after Henry VIII. 's death, itpassed, upon her surrendering it in 1552, to a certain Sir PhilipHoby. He had been of the Privy Council of Henry VIII. Upon his deathit passed to his nephew, Edward Hoby; Edward was a Parliamentarianunder Elizabeth, wrote on Divinity, and left an illegitimate son, Peregrine, to whom he bequeathed Bisham upon his death in 1617. Itneed hardly be said that before 100 years were over the son wasalready legitimatised in the county traditions; his son, Edward, wascreated Baron just after the Restoration, in 1666. The succession waskept up for just 100 years more, when the last male heir of the familydied in 1766. He was not only a baron but a parson as well, and on hisdeath the estate went to relatives by the name of Mill, or, as wemight imagine, "Hoby" Mill. It did not long remain with them. Theydied out in 1780 and the Van Sittarts bought it of the widow. 

Consider Chertsey, from which Bisham sprang. The utter dispersion ofthe whole tradition of Chertsey is more violent than that perhaps ofany other historical site in England. The Crown maintained, as we haveseen to be the case elsewhere, its nominal hold upon the foundationsof the abbey and of what was left of the buildings, though that holdwas only nominal, and it maintained such a position until 1610--thatis, for a full lifetime after the community was dispersed. But thetradition created by FitzWilliam continued, and the Crown was ready tosell at that date, to a certain Dr. Hammond. The perpetual mobilitywhich seems inseparable from spoils of this kind attachesthenceforward to the unfortunate place. The Hammonds sell after theRestoration to Sir Nicholas Carew, and before the end of theseventeenth century the Carews pass it on to the Orbys, and the Orbyspass it on to the Waytes. The Waytes sell it to a brewer of London, one Hinde. So far, contemptuous as has been the treatment of thisgreat national centre, it had at least remained intact. With Hinde'sson even that dignity deserted it. He found it advisable to distributethe land in parcels as a speculation; the actual emplacement of thebuilding went to a certain Harwell, an East Indian, in 1753, and hisson left it by will to a private soldier called Fuller, who wassuspected of being his illegitimate brother. Fuller, as might beexpected, saw nothing but an opportunity of making money. He redividedwhat was left intact of the old estate, and sold that again by lots in1809; a stockbroker bought the remaining materials of a house whoseroots struck back to the very footings of our country, sold them forwhat they were worth--and there was the end of Chertsey. 

Then there is also Radley: which begins as an exception, but fails. Itwas a manor of Abingdon, and after the Dissolution it fell a prey tothat one of the Seymours who proved too dirty and too much even forhis brother and was put to death in 1549. It passed for the moment, aswe have seen several of these riverside manors do, into the hands ofMary. But upon her death Elizabeth bestowed it upon a certainStonehouse, and the Stonehouses did come uncommonly near to founding afamily that should endure. Nor can their tradition be said to havedisappeared when the name changed and the manor passed to the nephewof the last Stonehouse, by name Bowyer. But Bowyer did not retain it. He gradually ruined himself: and it is amusing at this distance oftime to learn that the cause of his ruin was the idea that coalunderlay his property. Everyone knows what Radley since became: it waspurchased by an enthusiast, and is now a school springing from hisfoundation. 

Or consider the two Hinkseys opposite Oxford, both portions ofAbingdon manors; they are granted in the general loot to two worthiesbearing the names of Owen and Bridges: a doctor. 

These were probably no more than vulgar speculators upon apremium--"Stags, " as we should say to-day--for a few years afterwardswe find a Williams in possession of one of the Hinkseys; he isfollowed by the Perrots, and only quite late, and by purchase, do wecome to the somewhat more dignified name of Harcourt. The otherHinksey, after still more varied adventures, ends up in the hands ofthe Berties, obscure south-country people who date from a richProtestant marriage of the time. 

Cholsey, again, with its immemorial traditions of unchangingecclesiastical custom, receiving its priests in Saxon times from theMont St. Michel upon the marches of Brittany, and later holding as amanor from the Abbot of Reading, remains with the Crown but a very fewyears. In 1555 Mary handed it over to that Sir Robert Englefield whowas promptly attainted by her successor. It gets in the hands of theKnowleses, then of the Rich's, and ends up with the family ofEdwardes-seventeenth-century Welshmen, who, by a plan of wealthymarriages, became gentlemen, and have now for 100 years and more beenpeers, under the title of Kensington. 

The mention of Sir Robert Englefield leads one to what is perhaps thebest example in the whole Thames Valley of this perpetual chop andchange in the holding of English land; that example is to bediscovered at Pangbourne. 

Pangbourne also was monastic; and the manor held, as did Cholsey, ofReading Abbey. In the race for the spoils Dudley clutched it in 1550. When he was beheaded, three years later, and it passed again to theCrown, Mary handed it (as she had handed Cholsey) to Sir RobertEnglefield. His attainder followed. Within ten years it changes handsagain. Elizabeth in 1563 gave it to her cofferer, a Mr Weldon. Thispersonage struck no root, nor his son after him, for in 1613, whilestill some were alive who could remember the old custom and immemorialmonastic lordship of the place, Weldon the younger sold it to acertain Davis. 

Davis, one would hope--in that seventeenth century which was soessentially the century of the squires, and in that generation alsowherein the squires wiped out what was left of the Crown and left theKing a salaried dependant of the governing class--Davis might surelyhave attempted to found a family and to achieve some sort of dignityof tradition. He probably made no such an attempt, but if he did hefailed; for only half-a-century later the unfortunate place changeshands again, and the Davises sell it to the Breedons. 

The Breedons showed greater stability. They are actually associatedwith Pangbourne for over a century, but even this experiment inlineage broke down, through the extinction of the direct line. In1776, by a sham continuity consonant to the whole recent story ofEnglish land, it passes to yet another family on the condition oftheir assuming the name of Breedon--which was not their own. 

All up and down England, and especially in this Thames Valley, whichis in all its phases so typical and symbolical of the rest of thecountry, this stir and change of tenure is to be found, originatingwith the sharp changes of 1540, and continuing to our own day. 

Anywhere along this Berkshire shore of the Thames the process may betraced; even the poor little ruined nunnery of Ankerwike shows it. Thesite of that quiet and forgotten community was seized under Edward VI. By Smith the courtier. Then you find it in the pockets of the Salters, after them of the Lysons. The Lysons sell it to the Lees, and finallyit passes by marriage to the Harcourts. 

The number of such examples that could be taken in the Valley of theThames alone would be far too cumbersome for these pages. One canclose the list with Sonning. 

Sonning, which had been very possibly the see of an early bishopric, and which was certainly a country house of the Bishop of Salisbury, did not pass from ecclesiastical hands by a theft, but it was none theless doomed to the same mutability as the rest. In 1574 it wasexchanged with the Crown for lands in Dorset. The Crown kept it for anunusually long time, considering the way in which land slipped onevery side from the control of the National Government at this period. It is still royal under Charles I. , but it passes in 1628 to Halsteadand Chamberlain. In little more than twenty years it is in the handsof the family of Rich. Then there is a lull, just as there was in thecase of Pangbourne, and a continuity that lasts throughout theeighteenth century. But just as a tradition began to form it wasbroken, and in the first years of the nineteenth century Sonning issold to the Palmers. 

Parallel to the rise of the squires and their capture of Englishgovernment has gone the development of the English town system. Andthis, the last historical phase with which we shall deal in thesepages, is also very well and typically illustrated in the history ofthe Thames Valley. That valley contains London, which is, of course, not only far the largest but in its way the fullest example of what ispeculiarly English in the development of town life; and it contains, in the modern rise of Oxford and Reading, two of the very bestinstances to show how the English town in its modern aspect has sprungfrom the industrial system and from the introduction of railways. Forneither has any natural facilities for production, and the growth ofeach in the nineteenth century has been wholly artificial. 

The most recent change of all, with which these notes will end, is, one need hardly say, this industrial transformation. It has made acompletely new England, and it nourishes the only civilised populationin the world which is out of touch with arms, and with the physicallife and nature of the country it inhabits, and the only population inwhich the vast majority are concerned with things of which they haveno actual experience, and feel most strongly upon matters dictated tothem at second or third hand by the proprietors of great journals. 

What that new England will become none of us can tell; we cannot eventell whether the considerable problem of maintaining it as anorganised civilisation will or will not be solved. All the conditionsare so completely new, our whole machinery of government so thoroughlypresupposes a little aristocratic agricultural state, and our strongattachment to form and ritual so hampers all attempts atreorganisation, that the way in which we shall answer, if we doanswer, the question of this sphinx, cannot as yet even be guessed at. 

But long before the various historical causes at work had begun toproduce the great modern English town, long before the use of coal, the development of the navy, and, above all, the active politicaltransformation of our rivals during the eighteenth century, had givenus that industrial supremacy which we have but recently lost, theEnglish town was a thing with characteristics of its own in Europe. 

In the first place, it was not municipal in the Roman sense. The sharpdistinction which the Roman Empire and the modern French Republic, and, from the example of that republic, the whole of Western Europe, establish between town and country, comes from the fact that Europeanthought, method of government, and the rest, were formed on theMediterranean: but the civilisation of the Mediterranean was one ofcity states; the modern civilisation which has returned to Romantraditions is, therefore, necessarily municipal. A man's first countryin antiquity was his town; he died for his town; he left his wealth tohis town; the word "civilisation, " like the word "citizen, " and like ahundred words connected with the superiority of mankind, are drawnfrom the word for a town. To be political, to possess a police, torecognise boundaries--all this was to be a townsman, and the variousdistricts of the Empire took their proper names, at least, from thenames of their chief cities, as do to-day the French and the Italiancountrysides. 

Doubtless in Roman times the governing forces of Britain attempted asimilar system here. But it does not seem ever to have taken root inthe same way that it did beyond the Channel. The absence of amunicipal system in the fullest sense is one of the very few thingswhich differentiates the Roman Britain from the rest of the Empire, others being a land frontier to the west, and the large survival ofaboriginal dialects. 

The Roman towns were not small, indeed Roman London was very large;they were not ill connected with highroads; they were certainlywealthy and full of commerce; but they gave their names to nodistricts, and their municipal institutions have left but very fainttraces upon posterity. 

The barbarian invasions fell severely upon the Roman cities ofBritain, in some very rare cases they may have been actuallydestroyed, but in the much more numerous cases where we may bereasonably sure that municipal life continued without a breakthroughout the incursions of the pirates, their decay was pitiful; andwhen recorded history begins again, after a gap of two hundred years, with the Roman missionaries of the sixth and seventh centuries, wefind thenceforward, and throughout the Saxon period, many of the townsliving the life of villages. 

The proportion that were walled was much smaller than was the caseupon the Continent, and even the most enduring emblem and the mosttenacious survival of the Roman Imperial system--namely, the Bishopseated in the chief municipality of his district--was not universal toEnglish life. 

It is characteristic of Gregory the Great that he intended, or isbelieved to have intended, Britain, when he had recivilised it, to beset out upon a clear Latin model, with a Primate in the chief city andsuffragans in every other. But if he had such a plan (and it wouldhave been a typically Latin plan) he must have been thinking of aBritain very different from that which his envoys actually found. Whenthe work was accomplished the little market town of Canterbury was theseat of the Primate; the old traditions of York secured for it asecond archbishop, great London could not be passed over, but smallvillages in some places, insignificant boroughs in others, were thesites of cathedrals. Selsey, a rural manor or fishing hamlet, was theepiscopal centre of St. Wilfrid and his successors in their governmentof Sussex; Dorchester, as we have seen, was the episcopal town, orrather village, for something like half England. In the names of itsofficers also and in the methods of their government the Anglo-Saxontown was agricultural. 

With the advent of the Normans, as one might expect, municipal life tosome extent re-arose. But it still maintained its distinctivelyEnglish character throughout the Middle Ages. Contrast London orOxford, for instance, in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, with contemporary Paris. In London and Oxford the wall is built oncefor all, and when it is completed the town may grow into suburbs asmuch as it likes, no new wall is built. In Paris, throughout itshistory, as the town grows, the first concern of its Government is tomark out new limits which shall sharply define it from the surroundingcountry. Philip Augustus does it, a century and a half later EtienneMarcel did it; through the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth, the custom is continued: through the nineteenth also, and to-day newand strict limits are about to be imposed on the expanded city. 

Again the metropolitan idea, which is consonant to, and the climax of, a municipal system, is absent from the story of English towns. 

Until a good hundred years after the Conquest you cannot say where thetrue capital of England is, and when you find it at last in London, the King's Court is in a suburb outside the walls and the Parliamentof a century later yet meets at Westminster and not in the City. 

The English judges are not found fixed in local municipal centres, they are itinerant. The later organisation of the Peace does notdepend upon the county towns; it is an organisation of rural squires;and, most significant of all, no definite distinction can ever bedrawn between the English village and the English town neither inspirit nor in legal definition. You have a town like Maidenhead, whichhas a full local Government, and yet which has no mayor for centuries. Conversely, a town having once had a mayor may dwindle down into avillage, and no one who respects English tradition bothers tointerfere with the anomaly. For instance, you may to-day in Orfordenjoy the hospitality, or incur the hostility, of a Mayor andCorporation. 

On all these accounts the banks of the Thames, until quite the latestpart of our historical development, presented a line of settlements inwhich it was often difficult to draw the distinction between thevillage and the town. 

Consider also this characteristic of the English thing, that theboroughs sending Members to Parliament first sent them quite haphazardand then by prescription. 

Simon de Montfort gets just a few borough Members to his Parliamentbecause he knows they will be on his side; and right down to theTudors places are enfranchised--as, for example, certain Cornishboroughs were--not because they are true towns but because they willsupport the Government. Once returning Members, the place has a rightto return them, until the partial reform of 1832. It is a right likethe hereditary right of a peer, a quaint custom. It has no relation tomunicipal feeling, for municipal feeling does not exist. Old Sarum maylose every house, Gatton may retain but seven freeholders, yet eachsolemnly returns its two Members to Parliament. 

From the first records that we possess until the beginning of thenineteenth century, the line of the Thames was a string of largevillages and small towns, differing in size and wealth far less thantheir descendants do to-day. In this arrangement, of course, thevalley was similar to all the rest of England, but perhaps theprosperity of the larger villages and the frequency of the markettowns was more marked on the line of the Thames than in any othercountryside, from the permanent influx of wealth due to the royalcastles, the great monastic foundations, and the continual stream oftravel to and from London which bound the whole together. 

Cricklade, Lechlade, Oxford, Abingdon, Dorchester, Wallingford, Reading, and Windsor--old Windsor, that is--were considerable placesfrom at least the period of the Danish invasions. They formed theobjective of armies, or the subject matter of treaties or importantchanges. But the first standard of measure which we can apply is thatgiven us by the Norman Survey. 

How indecisive is that standard has already been said. We do notaccurately know what categories of wealth were registered in Domesday. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, barbaric in this as in most other matters, would have it that the Survey was complete, and applied to all thelanded fortune of England. That, of course, is absurd. But we do havea rough standard of comparison for rural manors, though it is a veryrough one. Though we cannot tell how much of the measurements and ofthe numbers given are conventional and how much are real, though we donot know whether the plough-lands referred to are real fields ormerely measures of capacity for production, though historians arecondemned to ceaseless guessing upon every term of the document, andthough the last orthodox guess is exploded every five or sixyears--yet when we are told that one manor possessed so many ploughsor paid upon so many hides, or had so many villein holdings whileanother manor had but half or less in each category; and when we seethe dues, say three times as large in the first as in the second, thenwe can say with certitude that the first was much more important thanthe second; _how_ much more important we cannot say. We can, to repeatan argument already advanced, affirm the inhabitants of any givenmanor to be at the very least not less than five times the number ofholdings, and thus fix a _minimum_ everywhere. For instance, we can becertain that William's rural England had not less than 2, 000, 000, though we cannot say how much more they may not have been--3, 000, 000, 4, 000, 000, or 5, 000, 000. In agricultural life--that is, in the oneindustry of the time--Domesday does afford a vague statement to therural conditions of England at the end of the eleventh century, and, dark as it is, no other European nation possesses such a minute recordof its economic origins. 

But with the towns the case is different. There, except for theminimum of population, we are quite at sea. We may presume that thehouses numbered are only the houses paying tax, or at least we maypresume this in some cases, but already the local customs of each townwere so highly differentiated that it is quite impossible to say withcertitude what the figures may mean. It is usual to take the taxablevalue of the place to the Crown and to establish a comparison on thatbasis, but it is perhaps wiser, though almost as inconclusive, toconsider each case, and all the elements of it separately, and toattempt, by a co-ordination of the different factors given to arriveat some sort of scale. 

Judged in this manner, Wallingford and Oxford are the early towns ofthe Thames Valley which afford the best subjects for survey. 

Wallingford in Domesday counted, closes and cottages together, justunder 500 units of habitation. It is, of course, a matter ofconjecture how much population this would stand for. A minimum ishere, as elsewhere, easily established. We may presuppose that aclose, even of the largest kind, was but a private one; we may nextaverage the inhabitants of each house at five, which is about theaverage of modern times, and so arrive at a population of 2500. Butthis minimum of 2500 for the population of Wallingford at the time ofthe Conquest is too artificial and too full of modern bias to bereceived. Not even the strongest prejudice in favour of underratingthe wealth and population of early England, a prejudice which has forit objects the emphasising of our modern perfection, would admit soludicrous a conclusion. But while we may be perfectly certain that thepopulation of Wallingford was far larger than this minimum, to obtaina maximum is not so easy. We do not know, with absolute certainty, whether the whole of the town has been enumerated in the Survey, though we have a better ground for supposing it in this case than inmost others. Such numerous details are given of holdings which, thoughsituated in the town, counted in the property of local manors that weare fairly safe in saying that we have here a more than commonlycomplete survey. The very cottages are mentioned, as, for example, "twenty-two cottages outside the wall, " and their condition isdescribed in terms which, though not easy for us to understand, clearly signify that they could be taken as paying the full tax. 

The real elements of uncertainty lie, first in the number of peoplenormally inhabiting one house at that time, and secondly, in the exactmeaning of the word "haga" or "close. "

As to the first point, we may take it that one household of five wouldbe the least, ten would be the most, to be present under the roof ofan isolated family; but we must remember that the Middle Agescontained in their social system a conception of community which notonly appeared (and is still remembered) in connection with monasticinstitutions, but which inspired the whole of military and civil life. To put it briefly, a man at the time of the Conquest, and forcenturies later, would rather have lived as part of a community thanas an individual householder, and conversely, those indices ofimportance and social position which we now estimate in furniture andother forms of ostentation were then to be found in the number ofdependants surrounding the head of the house. A merchant, for example, if he flourished, was the head of a very numerous community; everyparish church in a town represented a society of priests and of theirservants, and of course a garrison (such as Wallingford pre-eminentlypossessed) meant a very large community indeed. We are usually safe, at any rate in the towns, if we multiply the known number of tenementsby ten in order to arrive at the number of souls inhabiting theborough. To give the Wallingford of the Conquest a minimum of 5000, ifwe were certain that 500 (or, to speak exactly, 491) was the number ofsingle units of taxation within the borough, would be to set thatminimum quite low enough. 

The second difficulty is that of establishing the meaning of the word"haga. " In some cases it may represent one single large establishment. But on the other hand we can point to six which between them covered awhole acre, and no one with the least acquaintance of mediævalmunicipal topography, no one, for instance, who knows the history oftwelfth-century Paris, would allow one-sixth of an acre to a singleaverage house within the walls of a town. A close would have one ormore wells, it is true; some closes certainly would have gardens, butthe labour of fortification, and the privilege of market, were each ofthem causes which forbade any great extension of open spaces, save inthe case of privileged or wealthy communities or individuals. 

From what we know of closes elsewhere, it is more probable that theseat Wallingford were the "cells" as it were of the borough organism. Aman would be granted in the first growth of the town a unit of landwith definitely established boundaries, which he would probablyenclose (the word "haga" refers to such an enclosure), and though atfirst there might be only one house upon it, it would be to hisinterest to multiply the tenements within this unit, which unitrendered a regular, customary and unchanging due to its varioussuperiors, whatever the number of inhabitants it grew to contain. 

If we turn to a comparison based upon taxation we have equaldifficulties, though difficulties of a different sort. We saw in thecase of Old Windsor that a community of perhaps 1000, probably ofmore, but at any rate something more like a large village than a town(and one moreover not rated as a town), paid in dues the equivalent ofthirty loads of wheat. Wallingford paid the equivalent of only twentyor twenty-two. But on the other hand the total Farm of the Borough, the globular price at which the taxes could be reckoned upon to yielda profit, was equivalent to no less than 400 such loads. 

Judged by the number of hagæ we should have a Wallingford about fivetimes the size of Old Windsor. Judged by the taxable capacity weshould have an Old Wallingford of more than ten times the size of OldWindsor. 

Here again a further element of complexity enters. It was quite out ofthe spirit of the Middle Ages to estimate dues, whether to a feudalsuperior or to the National Government, or even minor payments made toa true proprietorial owner at the full capacity of the economic unitconcerned. All such payment was customary. Even where, in the laterMiddle Ages, a man indubitably owned (in our modern sense of the word"owned") a piece of freehold land, and let it (in our modern sense ofthe word "let"), it would not have occurred to him or his tenant thatthe very highest price obtainable for the productive capacity of theland should be paid. The philosophy permeating the whole of societycompelled the owner and the tenant, even in this extreme case, to acustomary arrangement; for it was an arrangement intended to bepermanent, to allow for wide fluctuations of value, and therefore tobe necessarily a minimum. If this was the case in the later MiddleAges where undoubted proprietary right was concerned, still more wasit the case in the early Middle Ages with the customary feudal dues;these varied infinitely from place to place, rising in scale fromthose of privileged communities wholly exempt to those of places suchas we believe Old Windsor to have been, which paid (and these were theexceptions), not indeed every penny that they could pay (as they wouldnow have to pay a modern landlord), but half, or perhaps more thanhalf, such a rent. 

Where Wallingford stood in this scale it is quite impossible to say, and we can only conclude with the very general statement that theWallingford of the Conquest consisted of certainly more than 5000souls, more probably of 10, 000, and quite possibly of more than10, 000. 

Having taken Wallingford with its minute and valuable record as a sortof unit, we can roughly compare it with other centres of populationsupon the river at the same date. 

Old Windsor we have already dealt with, and made it out from a fifthto a tenth of Wallingford. Reading was apparently far smaller. IndeedReading is one of the puzzles of the early history of the ThamesValley. We have already seen in discussing these strategical pointsupon the river what advantages it had, and yet it appears onlysporadically in ancient history as a military post. The Danes hold iton the first occasion on which we find the site recorded, in thelatter half of the ninth century: it has a castle during the anarchyof the twelfth, but it is a castle which soon disappears. Itfrequently plays a part in the Civil Wars of the seventeenth, but thepart it plays is only temporary. 

And Reading presents a similar puzzle on the civilian side. It issituated at the junction of two waterways, one of which leads directlyfrom the Thames Valley to the West of England, yet it does not seem tohave been of a considerable civil importance until the establishmentof its monastery; and even then it is not a town of first-class sizeor wealth, nor does it take up its present position until quite latein the history of the country. 

At the time of the Domesday Survey it actually counts, in the numberof recorded enclosures at least, for less than a third of Old Windsor;and we may take it, after making every allowance for possibleomissions or for some local custom which withdrew it from the taxingpower of the Crown, for little more than a village at that moment. 

The size of Oxford at the same period we have already touched upon, but since, like every other inference founded upon Domesday, thematter has become a subject of pretty violent discussion, it willbear, perhaps, a repeated and more detailed examination at this place. 

Let us first remember that the latest prejudice from which ourhistorical school has suffered, and one which still clings to its moreorthodox section, was to belittle as far as possible the generalinfluence of European civilisation upon England; to exalt, forexample, the Celtic missionaries and their work at the expense of StAugustine, to grope for shadowy political origins among the pirates ofthe North Sea, to trace every possible etymology to a barbaric root, and to make of Roman England and of early Medieval England--that is, of the two Englands which were most fully in touch with the generallife of Europe--as small a thing as might be. 

In the light of this prejudice, which is the more bitter because it isclosely connected with religion and with the bitter theologicalpassions of our universities, we are always safe in taking the largeras against the smaller modern estimates of wealth, of population andof influence, where either of these civilisations is concerned, and, conversely, we are always safe in taking at the lowest modern estimatethe numbers and effect of the barbaric element in our history. 

To return to the ground we have already briefly covered, and toestablish a comparison with Wallingford, the word "haga, " which we sawto be of such doubtful value in the case of Wallingford, is replacedin Oxford by the word "mansio. " The taxable units so enumerated arejust over 600, but of these much more than half are set down asuntaxable or imperfectly taxable under the epithets "Uasta, " "Uastæ. "What that epithet means we do not know. It may mean anything between"out of repair, " "excused from taxation because they do not come up toour new standard of the way in which a house in a borough should bekept up, and because we want to give them time to put themselves inorder, " down to the popular acceptation of the word as meaning"ruined, " or even "destroyed. "

We know that at the close of the eleventh century, or indeed at anytime before the thirteenth, the small man who lived under his own roofwould live in a very low house, and that, space for space of groundarea, the cubical contents of these poor dwellings would be less thanthose of modern slums. On the other hand, we know that the populationwould live much more in the open air, slept much more huddled, andalso that a very considerable proportion--what proportion we cannotsay, but probably quite half of a Norman borough--was connected withthe huge communal institutions--military, ecclesiastical, and for thatmatter mercantile, as well--which marked the period. We know that theoccupied space stood for very much what is now enclosed by the line ofthe old walls, and we know that under modern conditions this space, inspite of our great empty public buildings, our sparsely inhabitedwealthy houses, and our college gardens, can comfortably hold some5000 people. We can say, therefore, at a guess, but only at a guess, that the Oxford of the Conquest must have had some 3000 people in itat the very least, and can hardly have had 10, 000 at the most. Theseare wide limits, but anyone who shall pretend to make them narrower isimposing upon his readers with an appearance of positive knowledgewhich is the charlatanism of the colleges, and pretends to exactknowledge where he possesses nothing but the vague basis ofantiquarian conjecture. 

It is sufficiently clear (and the reading of any of our most positivemodern authorities upon Domesday will make it clearer) that no sort ofstatistical exactitude can be arrived at for the population of theboroughs in the early Middle Ages. But when we consider that Readingis certainly underestimated, and when we consider the detail in whichwe are informed of Old Windsor, Wallingford, and Oxford, with theneglect of Abingdon, Lechlade, Cricklade, and Dorchester, one canroughly say that the Thames above London possessed in Staines, Windsor, Cookham, probably Henley, perhaps Bensington, Dorchester, Eynsham, and possibly Buscot, large villages varying from somehundreds in population to a little over 1000, not defended, notreckoned as towns, and agricultural in character. To these we may addChertsey, Ealing, and a few others whose proximity to London makes itdifficult for us to judge except in the vaguest way their trueimportance. 

In another category, possessing a different type of communal life, already thinking of themselves as towns, we should have Cricklade, Lechlade, Abingdon, and Kingston among the smaller, though probablypossessing a population not much larger than that of the largervillages; while of considerable centres there were but three: Readingthe smallest, almost a town, but one upon which we have no true orsufficient data; Wallingford the largest, with the population of aflourishing county town in our own days, and Oxford, a place which, though in worse repair, ran Wallingford close. 

Henley affords an interesting study. At the time of the Conquest, Bensington was no longer, Henley not yet, a borough. To trace thegrowth of Henley is especially engrossing, because it is one of thevery rare examples of a process which earlier generations ofhistorians, and notably the popular historians like Freeman and theRev. Mr Green, took to be a common feature in the story of thisisland. They were wrong, of course, and they have been widely anddeservedly ridiculed for imagining that the greater part of ourEnglish boroughs grew up since the barbarian invasions upon wasteplaces. On the contrary most of our towns grew up upon Roman andpre-Roman foundations, and are continuous with the pre-historic past. But Henley forms a very interesting exception. 

It was a hamlet which went with the manor of Bensington, and thatpoint alone is instructive, for it points to the insignificance of theplace. When the lords of Bensington went hunting up on Chiltern theyfound on the far side of the hill, it may be presumed, a littleclearing near the river. This was all that Henley was, and it isprobable that even the church of the place was not built until quitelate in the Christian period; there is at any rate an old traditionthat Aldeburgh is the mother of Henley, and it is imagined by thosewho wrote monographs upon the locality that this tradition points tothe church of Aldeburgh as the mother church of what was at first achapel upon the riverside. 

When we first hear of Henley it is already called a town, and the dateof this is the first year of King John, 1199. 

It must be remembered that the river had been developed and changed inthat first century of orderly government under the Normans. Indeed oneof the reforms which the aristocracy made much of in their revolt, andwhich is granted in Magna Charta, is the destruction of the King'sweirs upon the Thames. But the weirs cannot have been permanentlydestroyed; though the public rights over the river were curtailed byMagna Charta, the system of regulation was founded and endured. It isprobably this improvement on the great highway which led to the growthof Henley, and when Reading Minster had become the great thing it waslate in the twelfth century, Henley must have felt the effect, for itwould have afforded the nearest convenient stage down the river fromthe new and wealthy settlement round the Cluniac Abbey. In thethirteenth century--that is, in the first hundred years after theearliest mention we have of the place--Henley became rapidly more andmore important. It seems to have afforded a convenient halting placewhenever progress was made up river, especially a royal progress fromWindsor. Edward I. Stayed there constantly, and we possess a record ofthree dates which are very significant of this kind of journey. In theDecember of 1277 the King goes up river. On the sixteenth of the monthhe slept at Windsor, on the seventeenth at Henley, the next day atAbingdon; and in his son's time Henley has grown so much that itcounts as one of the three only boroughs in the whole of Oxfordshire:Oxford and Woodstock are the two others. 

It was in the thirteenth century also that a bridge was thrown acrossthe river at this point--that is, Henley possessed a bridge longbefore Wallingford, and at a time when the river could be crossed byroad in but very few places. The granting of a number of indulgences, and the promises of masses in the middle of the thirteenth century forthis object, give us the date; and, what is perhaps equallyinteresting, this early bridge was of stone. 

It is usual to think of the early bridges over the Thames as woodenbridges. Aft older generation was accustomed to many that stillremained. This was true of the later Middle Ages, and of the torporand neglect in building which followed the Reformation. But it was nottrue of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The bridge at Henley, like the bridge of Wallingford and the later bridge of Abingdon, wasof stone. 

It was allowed to fall into decay, and when Leland crossed the riverat this point it was upon a wooden bridge, the piers of which stoodupon the old foundation. How long that wooden bridge had existed in1533, when Leland noticed it, we cannot tell, but it remained of wooduntil 1786, when the present bridge replaced it. 

In spite of the early importance of the town, it was not regularlyincorporated for a long time, but was governed by a Warden, the firston the list being the date of 1305, within the reign of Edward I. Thecharter which gave Henley a Mayor and Corporation was granted as lateas the reign of Henry VIII. And but a few years before Leland's visit. From that moment, however, the town ceased to expand, either inimportance or in numbers; the destruction of Reading Abbey and of theCell of Westminster at Hurley just over the river, very possiblyaffected its prosperity. At the beginning of the nineteenth century ithad a population of less than 3000, and sixty years later it had notadded another 1000 to that number. 

Maidenhead follows, for centuries, a sort of parallel course to thedevelopment of Henley. 

Recently, of course, it has very largely increased in population, andin this it is an example in a minor degree of what Reading and Oxfordare in a major degree--that is, of the changes which the railway hasmade in the Thames Valley. But until the effect of the railway beganto be felt Maidenhead was the younger and parallel town to Henley. 

For example, though we cannot tell exactly when Maidenhead Bridge wasbuilt, we may suppose it to have been some few years after HenleyBridge. It already exists and is in need of repair in 1297. HenleyBridge is founded more than a generation earlier than that. 

"Maidenhythe, " as it was called, has been thought to have been beforethe building of this bridge a long timber wharf upon the river, butthat is only a guess. There must have been some local accumulation ofwealth or of traffic or it would not have been chosen as a site forthe new bridge which was somewhat to divert the western road. 

Originally, so far as we can judge, the main stream of gravel crossedthe Thames at Cookham, and again at Henley. Why this double crossingshould have been necessary it is useless to conjecture unless onehazards the guess that the quality of the soil in very early timesgave so much better going upon the high southern bank of the riverthat it was worth while carrying the main road along the bank, even atthe expense of a double crossing of the stream. If that was the caseit is difficult to see how a town of the importance of Marlow couldhave grown up upon the farther shore; that Marlow was important weknow from the fact that it had a Borough representation in Parliamentin the first years of that experiment before the close of thethirteenth century. 

At any rate, whatever the reason was, whether from some pre-historicconditions having brought the road across the peninsula at this point, or, as is more likely, on account of some curious arrangement ofmediæval privilege, it is fairly certain that, in the centuries beforethe great development of the thirteenth, travel did come across theriver in front of Cookham, recross it in front of Henley, and so makeover the Chilterns to the great main bridge at Wallingford, which ledout to the Vale of the White Horse and the west country. 

The importance of Cookham in this section of the road is shown inseveral ways. First the great market, in Domesday bringing incustomary dues to the King of twenty shillings--and what twentyshillings means in Domesday in mere market dues one can appreciate byconsidering that all the dues from Old Windsor only amounted to tenpounds. Then again it was a royal manor which, unlike most of theothers, was never alienated; it was not even alienated during the ruinand breakdown of the monarchy which followed the Dissolution of themonastic orders. 

To this day traces remain of the road which joined this market to thesecond crossing at Henley. 

We may presume that the importance of Cookham was maintained for sometwo centuries after the Conquest, until it was outflanked and thestream of its traffic diverted by the building of the bridge atMaidenhead. 

Just as this bridge came later than the Bridge at Henley, so it wasinferior to it in structure; it was, as we have seen, of timber, butsuch as it was, it was the cause of the growth of Maidenhead much morethan was the bridge at Henley the cause of the growth of Henley. Thefirst nucleus of municipal government grows up in connection with theBridge Guild; the Warden and the Bridge Masters remain the head of theembryonic corporation throughout the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, and even when the town is incorporated (shortly before theclose of the seventeenth century), by James II. , the maintenance andguardianship of the wooden bridge remained one of the chiefoccupations of the new corporation. 

It was just after the granting of the Charter that the army of WilliamIII. Marched across this bridge on its way to London, an episode whichshows how completely Maidenhead held the monopoly of the Western road. The present stone bridge was not built to replace the old wooden oneuntil the last quarter of the eighteenth century, parallel in this asin everything else to the example of Henley; and this position ofinferiority to Henley, and of parallel advance to that town, isfurther seen in the statistics of population. In 1801, when Henleyalready boasted nearly 2000 souls, Maidenhead counted almost exactlyhalf that number. The later growth of the place is quite modern. 

The antiquity of the crossing of the Thames at Cookham is supported bya certain amount of pre-historic evidence, worth about as much as suchevidence ever is, and about as little. Two Neolithic flint knives havebeen found there, a bronze dagger sheath and spear-head, a bronzesword, and a whole collection or store of other bronze spear-heads. Such as it is, it is a considerable collection for one spot. 

Cookham has not only these pre-historic remains; it has also fragmentsof British pottery found in the relics of pile dwellings near theriver, and two Roman vases from the bed of the stream; it has furtherfurnished Anglo-Saxon remains, and, indeed, there are very few pointsupon the river where so regular a continuity of the historic and thepre-historic is to be discovered as in the neighbourhood of this oldford. 

In was in the course of the Middle Ages, and after the Conquest, thatnew Windsor rose to importance. It is not recognised as a boroughbefore the close of the thirteenth century; it is incorporated in thefifteenth. 

Reading certainly increased considerably with the continual stream ofwealth that poured from the abbey; it possessed in practice a workingcorporation before the Dissolution, was famous for its cloth longbefore, and had become, in the process of years, an important townthat rivalled the great monastery which had developed it; indeed it isprobable that only the privileges, the conservatism, of the abbeyforbade it to be recognised and chartered before the Reformation. 

Abingdon also grew (but with less vigour), also had a manufactory ofcloth, though of a smaller kind, and was also worthy of incorporationat the end of the Middle Ages. 

Staines cannot take its place with these, for in spite of its highstrategical value, of its old Roman tradition, of its proximity toLondon and the rest, Staines was throughout the Middle Ages, and tilllong after, rather a village than a town. Though a wealthy place it ispurely agricultural in the Domesday Survey, and the comparativeinsignificance of the spot is perhaps explained by the absence of abridge. That absence is by no means certain. Staines after all was onthe great military highway leading from London westward, and it musthave been necessary for considerable forces to cross the river herethroughout the Dark Ages and the early Middle Ages, as did forinstance, at the very close of that period, the barons on their way toRunnymede; and far earlier the army that marched hurriedly from Londonto intercept the Danes in 1009, when the pagans were coming up theriver, and whether by the help of the tide or what not, managed to getahead of the intercepting force. But if a bridge existed so early asthe Conquest, we have no mention of it. The first allusion to a bridgeis in the granting of three oaks from Windsor for the repairing of itin 1262. It may have existed long before that date, but it issignificant that in the Escheats of Edward III. , and as late as thetwenty-fourth year of his reign--that is, after the middle of thefourteenth century--it is mentioned that the bridge existed since thereign of Henry III. , which would convey the impression that in 1262the bridge had first needed repairing, being built, perhaps, in theearlier years of the reign and completed, possibly, but a little afterthe death of King John. 

This bridge of Staines was most unfortunate. It broke down again andagain. Even an experiment in stone at the end of the last century wasa failure, because the foundations did not go deep enough into the bedof the river. An iron absurdity succeeded the stone, and luckily brokedown also, until at last, in the thirties of the nineteenth century, the whole thing was rebuilt, 200 yards above the old traditional site. 

Staines is of interest in another way, because it marks one of thoseboundaries between the maritime and the wholly inland part of a riverwhich is in so many of the English valleys associated with someimportant crossing. The jurisdiction of the port of London over theriver extended as high as the little island just opposite the mouth ofthe Colne. On this island can still be seen the square stone shaftwhich is at least as old as the thirteenth century (though it standson more modern steps), and which marks this limit, as it does also theshire mark between Middlesex and Buckingham. 

We have, after the Dissolution it is true, and when the financialstanding of most of these places had been struck a heavy blow, avaluable estimate for many of them in the inquiry ordered by Pole in1555. This estimate gives Abingdon less than 1500 of population, Reading less than 3000, Windsor about 1000; and in general one may saythat with the sixteenth century, whether the population wasdiminishing (as certainly contemporary witnesses believed), or whetherit had increased beyond the maximum which England had seen before theBlack Death, at any rate the relative importance of the variouscentres of population had not very greatly changed during those longfive centuries of customary rule and of firm tradition. The towns andvillages which Shakespeare would have passed in a journey up theriver, though probably shrunk somewhat from what they had been in, letus say, the days of Edward I. Or of his grandson, when the Middle Ageswere in their full vigour and before the Black Death had ruined ourcountrysides, were still a string of some such large villages andsmall walled boroughs as his ancestry had seen for many hundred years, disfigured only and changed by the scaffolded ruins here and there ofthe great religious foundations. Windsor, Wallingford, Reading, Abingdon, and even Oxford, were towns appearing to him much asLechlade to-day remains or Abingdon still. As for the riversidevillages their agricultural and native population was certainly largerthan that which they now possess; and in general the effect producedupon such a journey was of a sort of even distribution of populationgradually increasing from the loneliness of the upper river to thegrowing sites between Windsor and London, but in no part exaggerated;larger everywhere in proportion to the importance of the stream, or ofagricultural or of strategical position, and forming together oneunited countryside, bound together even in its architecture by thecommon commerce of the river. 

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did little to disturb thisequilibrium or to destroy this even tradition. The opening up of thewaterways and the great improvement of the highroads, and the buildingof bridges, and the expansion of wealth at the end of the eighteenthcentury had indeed some considerable effect in increasing thepopulation of England as a whole, but the smaller country towns, inthe south at least, and in the Thames Valley, seem to have benefitedfairly equally from the general change. The new canals, entering atOxford and at Reading, gave a certain lead to both those centres, andeven the Severn Canal, entering at Lechlade, did a little for thatup-river town. The new fashion of the public schools (which had nowlong been captured by the wealthier classes) also increased theimportance of Eton, and towards the close of the period the nowrapidly expanding capital had overfed the villages within reach ofLondon with a considerable accession of population. But it isremarkable how evenly spread was even this industrial development. 

The twin towns of Abingdon and Reading, for instance, twinmonasteries, twin corporations, had for all these centuries preservedtheir ratio of the up-country town and the larger centre that was theneighbour of London and Windsor. In the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, in spite of the general increase of population, that ratiowas still well preserved: it is about three to one. But the Railwayfound one and left the other. 

The Railway came, and in our own generation that ratio began to changeout of all knowledge. It grows from four, five, six, to _seven_ toone. After a short halt you have eight, nine and at last--after eightyyears--more than _ten_ to one. The last census (that of 1901) is stillmore significant: Abingdon positively declines, and the last ratio is_twelve_. 

It is through the Railway, and even then long after its first effectmight have been expected, that the Valley of the Thames, later thanany other wealthy district in England, loses, as all at last aredoomed to lose, its historic tradition, and suffers the socialrevolution which has made modern England the unique and perilous thingit is among the nations of the world. 

INDEX

Abbots. See under separate monasteries. 

Aben, legend of, at Abingdon, 98. 

Abingdon, 9, 23, 37, 87, 88, 93, 97-99, 102, 139. 

Abingdon and Reading, change in ratio of population of, 198. 

Ad Pontes, Roman name of Staines, 33. 

Alfred, his boundary neglects the Thames, 34. 

Andersey Island, opposite Abingdon, 99. 

Ankerwike, nunnery of, 109, 168. 

Anne of Cleves obtains Bisham, 163. 

Barbarian invasions, 90, 91, 94, 95. 

Barlow, Prior of Bisham, becomes Bishop of St. Asaphs, 163. 

Barons give Tower to Archbishop in trust for Magna Charta, 84. 

Barwell obtains Chertsey, 165. 

Benedictine Order, 89-100. 

Bermondsey, Cluniac Abbey of, 104, 105. 

Berties obtain Hinksey, 166. 

Birinus receives Cynegil into the Church, 52. 

Bisham, dissolution of, 110, 163, 164. 

Blackcherry Fair, at Chertsey, 139. 

Bowyer obtains Radley, 165. 

Brackley, strategical importance of, 72. 

Breedons obtain Pangbourne, 167. 

Bridge, London, 17-21. 

Bridlington Priory, movables of, embezzled by Howards, 156. 

Britain, conversion of, position of Dorchester in, 49; first barbarian invasion of, 90, 91. 

Burford, early name of Abingdon Ford, 23. 

Burgundy, character of that province, 103. 

Burnham, nunnery of, mentioned, 109. 

Buscot, a royal manor in eleventh century, 28. 

Canal, Thames and Severn, building of, 15. 

Canterbury, Archbishop of, holds Tower in pledge for Magna Charta, 84; St. Thomas of (see St. Thomas). 

Canute at Oxford, 55. 

Carew obtains Chertsey, 164. 

Charterhouse, Sheen, 108. 

Chateau Gaillard compared to Windsor, 69. 

Chaucer's son custodian of Wallingford, 60. 

Chertsey, foundation of, 96; Abbey, sack of, 137; fate of land of, 159-165. 

Cholsey, Priory of, 109, 166. 

Churn joins Thames at Cricklade, 39. 

Civil War, destruction of Wallingford Castle under, 66; of King and Parliament, 86-89. 

Cluny, 102, 103. 

Cobham, Manor of, twenty acres possessed by Chertsey in, 149. 

Commons, Dissolution House of, significant names in, 146, 147. 

Conquest, Norman, See of Dorchester removed to Lincoln, 52, 102. 

Constantine, legend of, at Abingdon, 98. 

Conversion of Britain, position of Dorchester in, 49. 

Cookham, early importance of, 191-194. 

Cricklade, importance of, 38-41; small Priory of, 107; ford at, 22. 

"Cromwell, " Oliver. See Williams, his destruction of Wallingford Castle, 61. 

Cromwell, or Smith of Putney, family of, 153-161. 

Crown, loses its manors, 144; British, might have led the modern period in Europe, 145-146; cause of ruin of, weakness of Tudor character, 148. 

Culham, attempted fortification of bridge of, 87. 

Cumnor granted to Thomas Rowland, 139. 

Currency, 134. 

Cynegil, baptism of, at Dorchester, 50, 51. 

Danes at Oxford, 54, 55. 

Danish invasions destroy Chertsey, 97. 

Davis obtains Pangbourne, 167. 

Diocletian, his boundaries, 33; legend of, at Abingdon, 98. 

Dissolution and destruction of monasteries, 110-152. 

Domesday Survey, Oxford in, 56-58; Survey, ambiguity of, 57; indecision of, 176, 177. 

Dorchester, 33, 47-52, 107, 108. 

Dover, isolated defence of, 75. 

Drainage of swamps, monastic work in, 97, 98. 

Dudley obtains Pangbourne, 167. 

Durham, appearance of, before the Dissolution, compared to Reading, 114. 

Duxford, ford at, 22. 

Ealing, tidal river passable at, 24. 

Eaton, meaning of place name, 31. 

Economic aspect of Dissolution, 115-137; aspect of monastic system, 116-118; of the rise of gentry, 143, 144. 

Edge Hill, battle of, 88. 

Edmund Ironside at Oxford, 55. 

Edward the Confessor, manorial lord of Old Windsor, 70; the Confessor rebuilds Westminster Abbey, 96. 

Edward I. , prisoner in youth at Wallingford, 60; his march when a prince to the Tower from Windsor, 85. 

Edward II. Leaves the Tower, 85. 

Edwardes obtains Cholsey, 166. 

Elizabeth restores purity of currency, 134. 

England, history of, dependent on river system, 1-3. 

Englefield, Sir Robert, obtains Cholsey, 167; obtains Pangbourne, 167. 

Essex occupies Abingdon, 87. 

Essex, earldom of, conferred on Thomas Cromwell, 158. 

Eynsham, 10; monastery of, 107. 

Fawley, parish with special water front, 9. 

Fords, 22-34, 33, 99. 

Forest, Windsor, 70, 77, 78. 

Fortifications, rareness of, along Thames, 47; on Thames, examples of, 47; theory of, 62, 63; mediæval, never urban, 66, urban, Louvre an example of, 67. 

Fosse Way, 38, 44. 

Fuller obtains Chertsey, 165. 

Fyfield, example of parish with special water front, 10. 

Gentry, territorial, their origins before Reformation, 141-143; See Oligarchy. 

Godstow, nunnery of, mentioned, 109. 

Goring, track of Icknield Way through, 42. 

Gundulph, Bishop of Rochester, 83. 

Hammond obtains Chertsey, 164. 

Harold, his council at Oxford, 56. 

Henley, growth of, 187-190. 

Henry I. Enlarges Windsor, 70. 

Henry II. At Wallingford, 37. 

Henry III. , his misfortunes connected with the Tower, 83. 

Henry VI. , his childhood passed at Wallingford, 61; buried at Chertsey, 97. 

Henry VIII. Loses the spoils of the Dissolution, 145. 

Hinchinbrooke, seat of the Williamses, 159. 

Hind obtains Chertsey, 165. 

Hinkseys, fate of land of, 166. 

Hoby, Edward, son of Sir Philip Hoby, 163. 

Hoby, Sir Philip, obtains Bisham, 163; Peregrine, son of Sir Philip Hoby, 164. 

Horseferry Road, Westminster, 44. 

Howards, noble family of, embezzled property, 155. 

Huntingdon, two foundations in, given to Richard Williams, 156. 

Icknield Way, 38, 40-44. 

Islip, birth of the Confessor there, 55; a private manor of Queen Emma, 55. 

Jews in Tower, 85. 

Joel, Solomon, contrasted with gentry of the Dissolution, 158. 

John, King, 71-76. 

Kelmscott, loneliness of neighbourhood of, due to nature of soil, 7. 

Knowles obtain Cholsey, 166. 

Lanfranc colonises Bermondsey Abbey, 105. 

Lechlade, small Priory of, 107. 

Lincoln succeeds Dorchester as a see, 52. 

Little Marlow, nunnery of, mentioned, 109. 

Littlemore, example of parish with special water front, 10, 11. 

London, 65-68, 73, 86, 87, 89. 

Longchamps surrenders Tower, 84. 

Long Wittenham, ford at, 23. 

Lords, House of, utterly transformed by Dissolution of monasteries, 151. 

Louis of France called in by barons, 75. 

Magna Charta, 29, 71-76, 84. 

Maidenhead, probable origin of name, 32; growth of, 190-194. 

Mandeville holds Tower, 83. 

Manors, in monastic hands in Thames Valley, 124-126; English, probably Roman in origin, certainly Saxon, 141, 142; royal lapse of, 144; mutability of ownership in, after Dissolution, 161-169. 

Matilda, fealty sworn to, at Windsor, 70. 

Medmenham, Priory of, 109. 

Mill, family of, succeeds Hobys at Bisham, 164. 

Monasteries, system of, 91-93. 

Monastic foundations on Thames, list of, 122, 123. 

Monastic possessions in Thames Valley, list of, 125-126. 

Monastic system, 108, 116, 117, 127, 148, 150. 

Montlhéry, originally dominated Paris as Windsor London, 67. 

Mont St. Michel, connection with Cholsey, 166. 

Morgan, first known of the Williamses, 152. 

"Mota de Windsor, " 70. 

Mortimer holds Wallingford, 60. 

Municipal system, English, different from that of other countries, 170-175; Roman, 171; in Roman Britain, 172. 

Naseby, battle of, women massacred after, by Puritans, 88, 89. 

Norman Conquest, 52, 82, 93. 

Normandy, modern boundaries of, fixed by Diocletian, 33. 

Nuneham Morren, example of parish with special water front, 11. 

Observants at Richmond, 93. 

Ock, River, original marsh at mouth of, 8. 

Offa, Wallingford mentioned under, 37. 

Oilei builds Osney, 105. 

Old Windsor, 69, 70. 

Oligarchy rose on ruins of Catholicism, 140-152. 

Orby obtains Chertsey, 164. 

Osney, Abbey of, at Oxford, 105; loot of, by Henry VIII. , 106; appearance of, before Dissolution, 112, 113. 

Owen obtains Hinksey, 166. 

Oxford, 22, 31, 53, 58, 86, 87, 106, 183-186. 

Oxford Street, Roman military road into London, 68. 

Pangbourne, ford at, 34; held of Reading Abbey, 167; fate of land of, 167. 

Paris, dominated by Montlhéry as London by Windsor, 67; an example of fortification following residence, 77. 

Parishes, shape of, 8, 11. 

Penda, his opposition to Christianity, 51. 

Peregrine Hoby, 164. 

Perrots obtain Hinksey, 166. 

Philiphaugh, battle of, massacre of women after, by Puritans, 89. 

Place names, on the Thames, 30, 32, 33; Celtic, rare in Thames Valley, 30; Roman, disappeared in Thames Valley, 32. 

Pole, his estimate of population, 196. 

Population, of Abingdon and Reading, typical of change in nineteenth century, 198; of Oxford in early times, 56, 57. 

Prices and values at time of Dissolution compared with modern, 130-136. 

Priory of Medmenham, 109. 

Puritans, their massacre of the women after battle of Philiphaugh, 88, 89. 

Radley, fate of land of, 165, 166. 

Ramsey Abbey, given to Richard Williams, 157; value of, 158. 

Reading, 64, 88, 103, 104, 113, 114, 129, 166, 167, 182. 

Reading and Abingdon, change in ratio of population of, typical of nineteenth century, 198. 

Religious, numbers of, at time of suppression, 122, 123. 

Richard Williams or "Cromwell" born at Llanishen, 152. 

Riches obtained Cholsey, 166. 

Rivers, importance of, in English history, 1-3; as early highways, 5-8; military value of, 46, 47. 

Roads, original, of Britain, four in connection with Thames Valley, 37; original in Thames Valley, 38. 

Rochester, Bishop of, builds Tower for the Conqueror, 83. 

Roman, place names disappeared in Thames Valley, 34; occupation of Britain, thoroughness of, 45, 46; origins of Wallingford, 60; work, none certain in Tower, 79; origins of Tower discussed, 79, 81, 82; origin of English manors probable, 141, 142; fortification, urban, 66; occupation of Windsor, 65; municipal system, 171. 

Roman Britain, municipal system of, 172. 

Roman roads, 68. 

Rowland, Thomas, last Abbot of Abingdon, 139. 

Royal manors, lapse of, 144. 

Runnymede, conjectured etymology of, 75; meeting of barons and John at, 75. 

Rupert, Prince, attempts to recapture Abingdon, 87. 

St. Augustine begins the civilisation of England, 91. 

St. Frideswides receives new Protestant bishopric of Oxford, 106. 

Saxon Chronicle, first mention of Oxford in, 54. 

Saxon origin of first part of place names on Thames, 31; of Oxford Castle, 54; of English manors probable, 141, 142. 

Seymour, obtains Chertsey, 165; obtains Radley, 165. 

Sheen, monastery of, late foundation of, 108. 

Sinodun Hills, fortification of, 48; geological parallel to Windsor, 66. 

Sir Philip Hoby obtains Bisham, 163. 

Somerford Keynes, ford at, 22. 

Sonning, fate of land of, 168, 169. 

Squires, English, their origins and rise before Reformation, 140-143. 

Staines, 45, 68, 69, 74, 194, 196. 

Stephen, Civil Wars under, Tower besieged during, 83. 

Stonehouse obtains Radley, 165. 

Stow, in Lincolnshire, mother house at Eynsham, 106. 

Stratton, monastic lands of, sold by Oliver Williams, 161. 

Streatley, 33, 34, 48. 

Sweyn at Oxford, 55. 

Taxes a basis for calculation of prices, 133, 134. 

Tenant right under monastic system, 150. 

Thames, surface soil of valley of, 7-9; estuary of, unimportant in early history, 13; probably a boundary under Diocletian, 33; a boundary between counties, 34; points at which it is crossed, 36, 37; traffic upon, begins after entry of Churn at Cricklade, 39, 40; absence of traces of Roman bridges on, 46; military value of, 46, 47; imaginary voyage down, before Dissolution, 111-115. 

Thames Valley, in Civil Wars, 86-89; affords William III. His approach to London, 89; affords Charles I. His approach to London, 89; economic importance of sites therein, produced by the monastic system, 117-121; railway of, draws its prosperity from beyond the valley, 121; towns of, 169-190. 

Thomas Rowland, last Abbot of Abingdon, 150. 

Thorney, original site of Westminster Abbey, 95. 

Tower, the, its importance in campaign in Magna Charta, 74, 78-86; compared to Louvre, 79; White, true Tower of London, 79, 82; military misfortunes of, 83, 84; Jews in, 85. 

Towns of Thames Valley, 160-199. 

Van Sittarts succeed Mills at Bisham, 164. 

Wages a basis for calculation of prices, 133, 134. 

Waite obtains Chertsey, 164. 

Wallingford, 22, 24, 37, 58-62, 75, 76, 177-182. 

Waste land, social and strategical importance of, in Europe, 75, 76. 

Water front, examples of parishes seeking, 8-11. 

Watling Street, 38; place of crossing Thames by, 44; identical with Edgware Road, 44. 

Weldon obtains Pangbourne, 167. 

Welsh land left to Chertsey, 97. 

Westminster Abbey, 63-97, 130, 137. 

Westminster, 95, 69, 93, 95, 96, 130. 

White Tower, 79, 82, 83. 

William the Conqueror, crosses at Wallingford, 37; his choice of Windsor Hill, 65; exchanges Windsor with monks of Westminster, 69; builds Tower of London, 82; anointed at Westminster, 96. 

William Rufus completes Tower, 82. 

William III. , his approach to London afforded by Thames Valley, 89. 

Williams obtains Hinksey, 166. 

Williams, family of, rise of, 152-162. 

Williams, Henry, son of Richard, his career, 159. 

Williams, Oliver, uncle of Protector, 160. 

Williams, Richard, is given two monastic foundations by his uncle, 156; gets the revenues of Ramsey Abbey, 157. 

Williams, Robert, grandson of Richard, father of the Protector, 160. 

Wimbledon, manorial rolls of, evidence of William's marriage in, 153. 

Windsor, 65-78, 85.