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Title: The Historic Thames

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Release date: July 29, 2004 [eBook #13046]
                Most recently updated: December 15, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Project Manager; Keith M. Eckrich, Post-Processor; the PG Online Distributed Proofreaders Team


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Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Project Manager; Keith M. Eckrich,
Post-Processor; the PG Online Distributed Proofreaders Team






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, in
that pattern, the principal line has been the line of the Thames.

Partly because it was the main highway of Southern England, partly
because it looked eastward towards the Continent from which the
national life has been drawn, partly because it was better served by
the tide than any other channel, but mainly because it was the chief
among a great number of closely connected river basins, the Thames
Valley has in the past supported the government and the wealth of
England.

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

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

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

When we consider the river systems of the other great islands of
Europe we find that none besides our own enjoys this advantage. Sicily
and Crete, apart from the fact that they do not stand in tidal water,
have no navigable rivers. Iceland, standing in a tidal sea, too far
north indeed for successful commerce, but not too far north for the
growth of a civilisation, is at a similar disadvantage. Great Britain
and Ireland alone--Great Britain south of the Scottish Mountains, that
is--enjoy this peculiar advantage; and there are few things more
instructive when one is engaged upon the history of England than to
take a map and mark upon it the head of each navigable piece of water
and 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 be
penetrated by the influence of the sea.

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

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

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

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

The importance of the first lessens as men learn to dig wells and to
canalise springs; the two last, defence and communication, remain
attached to river settlements to a much later date, and are apparent
in all the history of the Thames.

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

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

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

What is equally interesting, when a high civilisation after its little
effort begins to decline into one of those long periods of repose into
which all such periods of energy do at last decline, the river
reassumes its importance. There is a very interesting example of this
in the history of France. Before Roman civilisation reached the north
of Gaul the Seine and its tributary streams were evidently the chief
economic factor in the life of the people: this may be seen in the
sites of their strongholds and in the relation of the tribes to one
another, as for instance, the dependence of the Parisians upon Sens.
The five centuries of active Roman civilisation saw the river replaced
by the system of Roman roads; the great artificial track from north to
south, for instance, takes on a peculiar importance; but when the end
of that period has come, and the energies of the Roman state are
beginning to drag, when the money cannot be collected to repair the
great highways, and these fall into decay--then the Seine and its
tributaries reassume their old importance. Paris, the junction of the
various waterways, becomes the capital of a new state, and the
influence of its kings leads out upon every side along the river
valleys which fall into the main valley of the Seine.

There are but two considerable modifications to the use for habitation
of slow and constant rivers: their value is lessened or interrupted by
precipitous banks or they are rendered unapproachable by marshes. The
first of these causes, for instance, has singularly cut off one from
the other the groups of population residing upon the upper and the
lower Meuse, as it has also, to quote another example, cut off even in
language 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 of
the Trent, whose banks interfere so little with the settlement of men
in 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 most
easily inhabited, and the part in which, once the river is navigable,
will be found the largest number of small settlements, is in the case
of the Thames the most marshy. From its source to beyond Cricklade the
river runs entirely over clay; thenceforward the valley is a flat mass
of alluvium, in which the stream swings from one side to the other,
and even where it touches higher soil, touches nothing better than the
continuation of this clay. In spite, therefore, of the shallowness and
narrowness of the upper river there always existed this impediment
which an insecure soil would present to the formation of any
considerable settlements. The loneliness of the stretch below
Kelmscott is due to an original difficulty of this kind, and the one
considerable settlement upon the upper river at Lechlade stands upon
the only place where firm ground approaches the bank of the river.

This formation endures well below Oxford until one reaches the gap at
Sandford, where the stream passes between two beds of gravel which
very 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 been
morass; and nowhere were these more difficult of passage than in the
last network of streams between Witham Hill and Sandford, to the west
of the gravel bank upon which Oxford is built.

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

At the crossing places (as we shall see later), notably at Long
Wittenham, at Wallingford, at Streatley, at Pangbourne, and, still
lower, at Maidenhead and at Ealing, this hard soil came right down to
the bank upon either side.

On all this lower half of the Thames marsh was rare, and was to be
found even in early times only in isolated patches, which are still
clearly defined. These are never found facing each other upon opposite
banks of the stream. Thus there was a bad bit on the left bank above
Abingdon, but the large marsh below Abingdon, where the Ock came in,
was on the right bank, with firm soil opposite it. There was a large
bay, as it were, of drowned land on the right bank, from below Reading
to a point opposite Shiplake, the last wide morass before the marshes
of the tidal portion of the river; and another at the mouth of the
Coln, above Staines, on the left bank, which was the last before one
came to the mud of the tidal estuary; and even the tidal marshes were
fairly firm above London. From Staines eastward down as far as Chelsea
the superficial soil upon either side is of gravels, and the long list
of ancient inhabited sites upon either bank show how little the
overflow of the river interfered with its usefulness to men.

The river, then, from Sandford downward has afforded upon either bank
innumerable sites upon which a settlement could be formed. Above
Sandford these sites are not to be found indifferently upon either
bank, but now on one, now on the other. There is no case on the upper
river 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 to
the establishment of settlements, a certain number of firmer stretches
could be found, and advantage was taken of them to build.

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

Of the way in which the Thames was a necessary great road in early
times, perhaps the best proof is the manner in which various parishes
manage to get their water front at the expense of a somewhat unnatural
shape to their boundaries. Thus Fawley in Buckinghamshire has a
curious and interesting arrangement of this sort thrusting down from
the hills a tongue of land which ends in a sort of wharfage on the
river just opposite Remenham church. In Berkshire there are also
several examples of this. On the upper river Dractmoor and Kingston
Bagpuise are both very narrow and long, a shape forced upon them by
the necessity of having this outlet upon the river in days when the
life of a parish was a real one and the village was a true and
self-sufficing unit. Next to them Fyfield does the same thing. Lower
down, near Wallingford, the parish of Brightwell has added on a
similar eccentric edge to the north and east so that it may share in
the bank; but perhaps the best example of all in this connection is
the curious extension below Reading. Here land which is of no use for
human habitation--water meadows continually liable to floods--runs out
from the parish northward for a good mile. These lands are separated
from the river during the whole of this extension until at last a bend
of the stream gives the parish the opportunity it has evidently sought
in thus extending its boundaries. On the Oxford bank Standlake and
Brighthampton do the same thing upon the Upper Thames and to some
extent Eynsham; for when one thinks how far back Eynsham stands from
the river it is somewhat remarkable that it should have claimed the
right to get at the stream. Below Oxford there is another most
interesting instance of the same thing in the case of Littlemore.
Littlemore stands on high and dry land up above the river somewhat set
back from it. Sandford evidently interfered with its access to the
water, and Littlemore has therefore claimed an obviously artificial
extension for all the world like a great foot added on to the bulk of
the parish. This "foot" includes Kennington Island, and runs up the
meadows to the foot of that eyot.

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

They owe their construction to the same causes as have produced the
similar long parishes of the Surrey and the Sussex Weald. The life of
the 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 behind
it upon the Chiltern Hills. The truth of this will be apparent to
anyone who notes upon the map the way in which parishes are thus
lengthened, not only on the western side of the hills, but also upon
the farther eastern side, where there was no connection with the
river.

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

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

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

There will first of all be the tidal portion which the tide usually
scours into an estuary. As a general rule, this portion is not
considerably inhabited in the early periods of history, for it is not
until a large international commerce arises that vessels have much
occasion to stop as they pass up and down the maritime part of the
stream; and even so, settlements upon its banks must come
comparatively late in the development of the history of the river,
because a landing upon such flooded banks is not easily to be
effected.

This is true of the Dutch marshes at the mouths of the Rhine, whose
civilisation (one exclusively due to the energy of man) came centuries
after the establishment of the great Roman towns of the Rhine; it is
true of the estuary of the Seine, whose principal harbour of Havre is
almost modern, and whose difficulties are still formidable for
ocean-going craft; and it is true of the Thames.

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

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

The swish of the tide continues up beyond the broad estuary, the
sand-banks, and the marshes, and there are reaches more or less long
(rather less than twenty miles perhaps originally in the case of the
Thames, rather more perhaps originally in the case of the lower Seine)
which for the purposes of habitation are inland reaches. They have the
advantage of a current moving in either direction twice a day and yet
not the disadvantage of greatly varying levels of water. Thus one may
say of the Seine in the old days that from about Caudebec to Point de
L'Arche it enjoyed such inland tidal conditions; and of the Thames
from Greenwich to Teddington that similar advantages existed.

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

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

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

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

Conversely, in some streams of peculiar breadth and constancy very
shallow upper reaches may have early been converted to the use of man.
The matter is only to be determined by the experience of what the
inhabitants of a river valley have actually been able to do under the
local circumstances, and when we examine this we shall usually be
astonished to see how far inland a river was used until the history of
internal navigation was transformed by the development of canals or
partially destroyed by the development of railways. Thus it is certain
that so small a stream as the Adur in Sussex floated barges up to the
boundaries of Shipley Parish; that the Stour was habitually used
beyond Canterbury; that so tiny a tributary as the Ant in Norfolk was
followed 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 navigable
non-tidal water of any of the shorter rivers in Europe. Until the
digging of the Thames and Severn Canal at the end of last century it
was possible, and even common, for boats to reach Cricklade, or at any
rate the mouth of the Churn. And even now, in spite of the pumping
that is necessary at Thames head and the consequent diminution of the
volume of water in the upper reaches, the Thames, were water carriage
to come again into general use, would be a busy commercial stream as
high up as Lechlade.

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

From Cricklade to the navigable waters of the Severn Valley is but a
long day's walk; and one may say that even in the earliest times there
was thus provided a great highway right across what then was by far
the 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 called
the _head-waters_ of the river: where the stream is so shallow or so
uncertain as to be no longer navigable. In the case of the Thames
these head-waters cover no more than ten to fifteen miles of country.
With the exception of rivers that run through mountain districts this
section of a river's course is nearly always small in proportion to
the rest; but the Thames, just as it has the longest proportion of
navigable water, has also by far the shortest proportion of useless
head-water of all the shorter European rivers.

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

But a river has a second topographical and historic function. It
cannot only be considered longitudinally as a highway, it can also be
considered in relation to transverse forces and regarded as an
obstacle, a defence, and a boundary.

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

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

We have already said that the establishment of the site of London
Bridge was a capital point in the history of the river and the
principal line of division in its course. What were the topographical
conditions which caused the river to be crossed at this point rather
than at another?

It is always of the greatest moment to men to find some crossing for a
great river as low down as may be towards the mouth. For the higher
the bridge the longer the detour between, at the least, _two_
provinces of the country which the river traverses. It is especially
important to find such a crossing as low down as possible when the
river is tidal and when it is flanked upon either side by great
flooded marshes, as was and is the Thames. For under such conditions
it is difficult, especially in primitive times, to cross habitually
from one side to the other in boats.

Now it is a universal rule of early topography, and one which can be
proved upon twenty of the old trackways of England, that the wild path
which the earliest men used, when it approaches a river, seeks out a
spur of higher and drier land, and if possible one directly facing
another similar spur upon the far side of the water. It is a feature
which the present writer continually observed in the exploration of
the old British trackway between Winchester and Canterbury; it is
similarly observable in the presumably British track between Chester
and Manchester; and it is the feature which determined the site of
London Bridge.

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

There is in the whole or the upper stretch of the tidal water but one
place where a bluff of high and dry land faces, not indeed land
equally dry immediately upon the farther bank, but at least a spur of
dry land which approaches fairly near to the main stream. If the
modern contour lines be taken and laid out upon a map of London this
spur will be found to project from Southwark northward directly
towards the river, and immediately opposite it is the dry hill,
surrounded upon three sides by river or by marsh, upon which grew up
the settlement of London. Here, then, the first crossing of the Thames
was certain to be made.

It is not known whether a permanent bridge existed before the Roman
Conquest. It may be urged in favour of the negative argument that
Cæsar had no knowledge of such a bridge, or at least did not march
towards it, but crossed the river with difficulty in the higher
reaches by a ford. And it may also be urged that a bridge across the
Rhine was equally unknown in that time. But, the bridge once
established, it could not fail to become the main point of convergence
for the commerce of Southern England, and indeed for much of that
which proceeded from the North upon its way to the Continent. Such an
obstacle 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 securely
stepped and could not lower from proceeding farther up stream, and
would thereupon become the boundary of the seaport of the Thames. Such
a bridge would, again, concentrate upon itself the traffic of all that
important and formerly wealthy part of the island which bulges out to
the east between the estuary of the Thames and the Wash, and which
must necessarily have desired communication both with the still
wealthier southern portion and with the Continent. But, more important
than this, London Bridge also concentrated upon itself all the
up-country traffic in men and in goods which came in by the natural
gate of the country at the Straits of Dover, except that small portion
which happened to be proceeding to the south-west of England: and this
exception to the early commerce of England was the smaller from the
comparative ease with which the Channel could be crossed between
Brittany 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 craft
coming from inland down the stream. It would form the place of
transhipment between the sea-going and the inland trade.

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

We have seen that the river when it is regarded as an avenue of access
to men for commerce or for travel is, especially in early times, and
with boats of light draught, of one piece from Lechlade to London
Bridge. There was in this section always sufficient water even in a
dry summer to float some sort of a boat. But the river, regarded as a
barrier or obstacle for human beings in their movement up and down
Britain, did not form one such united section. On the contrary, it
divided itself, as all such rivers do, into two very clearly defined
parts: there was that upper part which could be crossed at frequent
intervals by an army, that lower part in which fords are rare.

In most rivers one has nothing more to do in describing those two
sections than to show how gradually they merge into one another. In
most rivers the passage of the upper waters is perfectly easy, and as
one 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 river
are sharply divided in the vicinity of Oxford, and that for reasons
which we have already seen when we were speaking of the suitability of
its banks for habitation. The upper Thames is indeed shallow and
narrow, and there are innumerable places above Oxford where it could
be crossed, so far as the volume of its waters was concerned. It was
crossed by husbandmen wherever a village or a farm stood upon its
banks. Perhaps the highest point at which it had to be crossed at one
chosen spot is to be discovered in the word Somer_ford_ Keynes, but
the ease with which the water itself could be traversed is apparent
rather in the absence than in the presence of names of this sort upon
the upper Thames. Shifford, for instance, which used to be spelt
Siford, may just as well have been named from the crossing of the
Great Brook as from the crossing of the Thames. The only other is
Duxford.

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

Below Oxford, after the entry of the Cherwell, and from thence down to
a point not very easily determined, but which is perhaps best fixed at
Wallingford, the Thames is only passable at fixed crossings in
ordinary weather, as at Sandford, where the hard gravels approach the
bank upon either side, and at other places, each distant from the next
by long stretches of river.

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

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

The next place below Abingdon may have been at Appleford, but was more
likely between the high cliff at Clifton-Hampden and the high and dry
spit of Long Wittenham. Below this again for miles there was no easy
crossing of the river.

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

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

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 of
the Thames and of England.

Wallingford was not the lowest point at which the Thames could ever be
crossed. So far was this from being the case that the _tidal_ Thames
could be crossed in several places on the ebb, notably at the passage
between Ealing and Kew, where Kew Bridge now stands; and, as we shall
see, the Thames was passable at many other places. But the special
character of the passage at Wallingford lay in the fact that it was a
ford upon which one could always depend. Below Wallingford the
crossings 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 the
Thames was effected, and it was through Wallingford that Berkshire
communicated with the Chilterns. Wallingford is, then, the second
point of division upon the Thames when one is regarding that river as
a defence or a boundary. Below Wallingford there was perhaps a regular
crossing at Pangbourne; there was certainly a ford of great importance
between Streatley and Goring; and all the way down the river at
intervals were difficult but practicable passages--notably at Cowey
Stakes between the Surrey and the Middlesex shore, a place which is
the traditional crossing of Cæsar. The water here in normal weather
was, however, as much as five feet deep, and this ford well
illustrates the difficulties of all the lower crossings of the Thames.

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

As an example of the antiquity of the regulation of the Thames we have
the embankment round the Isle of Dogs, which is Roman or pre-Roman in
its origin, like the sea-wall of the Wash, which defends the Fenland;
and at Ealing, Staines, Abingdon, and twenty other places we have
sites probably pre-historic, and certainly at the beginnings of
history, which could never have been inhabited if the neighbouring
fields had not been drained or protected. The regularity of the stream
has therefore been somewhat artificial throughout all the centuries of
recorded history, and the banks have had ample time to acquire
consistency.

It is certain, of course, that works of planting, of draining, or of
embankment, which required continuous energy, skill, and capital,
decayed after the coming of the Saxon pirates, and were not undertaken
again with full vigour until after the Norman Conquest. Even to-day
the work is not quite complete, though every year sees its
improvement: we are still unable to prevent regularly recurrent floods
in the flats round Oxford and below the gorge of the Chilterns; but
for the purpose of this argument the chief fact to be noted is that no
serious interruption to the approach of the river seems to have
existed in historic times.

In pre-historic times many stretches of the river must have afforded
great difficulties of approach. The mouths of the Ock, the Coln, the
Kennet, the Mole, and the Wandle must each have been surrounded by a
marsh; all the plain between Oxford and the Hinkseys must have been
partially flooded, as must the upper reaches between Lechlade and
Witham (on one side or the other of the stream as it winds from the
southern to the northern rises of land), and as must also have been
the long stretch of the right bank below Reading. The highest spring
tides may have been felt as high up the stream as Staines, and both
the character of the surface and the contour lines permit one to
conjecture that the valley of the Wandle and several other inlets from
the lower river were flooded. Yet it is remarkable that in this
alluvium, more disturbed and dug than any other in Europe, little or
nothing of human relics, of boats, or of piles has been discovered,
and this absence of testimony also points to the remoteness of date
from which we should reckon the human control of the river.

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

The tendency of most modern history in this country has been to
exaggerate such changes and such contrasts. In the greater part of
modern popular history care is taken to emphasise the difference
between the Middle and Dark Ages and the last few centuries. The
forests of England are represented as impassable, or nearly so; the
numbers of the population are grossly underestimated; the towns which
have had a continuous municipal existence of 1500 years are
represented as villages.

The same spirit would tend to make of the Thames Valley in the Dark
and Middle Ages a very different landscape from that which we see
to-day. The floods were indeed more common and the passage of the
river somewhat more difficult; cultivation did not everywhere approach
the banks as it does now; and in two or three spots where there has
been 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 belt
of densely inhabited landscape in England has changed so little in its
natural features as the Thames Valley.

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

There is another method of judging the comparative smallness of the
change, and it is a method which can be applied to many other parts of
England whose desertion or wildness in the Dark and early Middle Ages
has been too confidently asserted. That method is to note where human
settlements were and are found. With the exception of the long and
probably marshy piece between Radcot and Shifford the whole of the
upper Thames was dotted with such settlements, which, though small,
were quite close to the banks. Kelmscott is right up against the river
in what one would otherwise have imagined to be land too marshy for
building until modern times. Buscot, on the other bank, is not only
close to the river, but was a royal manor of high historical
importance in the eleventh century. Eaton Hastings is similarly placed
right against the bank; so was in its day the palace of Kempsford
above Lechlade, and so is the church of Inglesham between the two. All
the 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 European
river. The invention is even said (upon doubtful authority) to be as
late as the sixteenth century, but the method of regulating the waters
of a river by weirs is immemorial.

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

There is but one place left in which one can still reconstruct for
oneself the aspect of such weirs as were till but little more than a
century ago the universal method of canalising the river. Modern weirs
are merely adjuncts to locks, and are usually found upon a branch of
the stream other than that which leads up to the lock. But in this
weir 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 of
the weir have to be lifted. It is, in a modern journey upon the upper
Thames, the one faint incident which the day affords, for if one is
going down the stream but few paddles are lifted, and the boat shoots
a small rapid, while to admit a boat going up stream the whole weir is
raised, and, even so, a great rush of water opposes the boat as it is
hauled through. Some years ago there were several of these weirs upon
the upper river. They have all been superseded by locks, and it is
probable that this last one will not long survive.

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

We have in the place names upon the Thames a further evidence of the
antiquity of its regulation, for, as will be seen in a moment, none
give proof of any important settlement later than the eleventh
century.

These place names not only indicate a continuous and early settlement
of 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 human
habitation, though the names of the waterways are almost universally
Celtic, as is the name of Thames itself. But it is probable that in
the Saxon names which line the river there are many corruptions of
Celtic words made to sound in the Saxon fashion. We cannot prove such
origins. We can surmise with justice that the "tons" and "dons" all up
and down England are Celtic terminations; they are almost unknown in
Germany. There is a somewhat pedantic guess, drawn (it is said) from
Iceland, that we got this national name ending from Scandinavia; so
universal a habit would hardly have arisen from an admixture of
Scandinavian blood received at the very close of the Dark Ages and
affecting but small patches of North England. Moreover, as against
this theory, there is the fact that quite half the Celtic place names
mentioned in our early history and in that of Gaul had a similar
termination. London itself is the best example.

If, however, we neglect this termination, and consider the first part
of 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 very
source 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 very
marked feature of the left bank of the river at this place. Of
Bensing-ton, now Benson, we know nothing, nor do we of the origin of
the 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 not
all of those--ending in "ford." Ford may just as well be a Celtic as a
Teutonic ending, and in either case means a "passage," a "going." It
does not even in all cases indicate a shallow passage, though in the
great majority of cases on the Thames it does indicate a place where
one could cross the river on foot. Thus Wallingford was probably the
walled or embattled ford, and Oxford almost certainly the "ford of the
droves"--droves going north from Berkshire. One may say roughly that
all the "hams" were Teutonic save where one can put one's finger on a
probable Celtic derivation such as one has, for instance, in the case
of Witham, which should mean the settlement upon the "bend" or curve
of 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 with
a purely Anglo-Saxon word, that it had a German origin, but at least
Hythe is Anglo-Saxon, a wharf or stage; thus Bablock Hythe on the road
through the Roman town of Eynsham across the river to Cumnor and
Abingdon, cutting off the great bend of the river at Witham; so also
the town we now call "Maidenhead," which was perhaps the "mid-Hythe"
between Windsor and Reading. Some few certainly Celtic names do
survive: in the Sinodun Hills, for instance, above Dorchester; and the
first part of the name Dorchester itself is Celtic. At the very head
of the Thames you have Coates, reminding one of the Celtic name for
the great wood that lay along the hill; but just below, where the
water begins, to flow, Kemble and Ewen, if they are Saxon, are perhaps
drawn from the presence of a "spring." Cricklade may be all Celtic, or
may be partly Celtic and partly Saxon. London is Celtic, as we have
seen. And in the mass of places whose derivation it is impossible to
establish the primitive roots of a Celtic place name may very possibly
survive.

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

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

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

Nevertheless, it is true of the Thames, as of nearly every other
division in Europe, that it was much more of a boundary at the end of
the Roman Empire, and is more of a strict boundary to-day, than it was
during the Dark Ages, and presumably also before the Claudian
invasion. Thus we may conjecture with a fair accuracy that in the last
great ordering of boundaries within the Roman Empire, which was the
work of Diocletian, and so much of which still survives in our
European politics to-day (for instance, the boundary of Normandy), the
Thames formed the division between Southern and Midland Britain. It is
equally certain that it did _not_ form any exact division between
Wessex and Mercia.

The estuary has, of course, always formed a division, and in the
barbarian period it separated the higher civilisation of Kent from
that of the East Saxons, who were possibly of a different race, and
certainly of a different culture. But the Thames above London Bridge
was not a true boundary until the civilisation of England began to
form, towards the close of the Dark Ages. It is perpetually crossed
and recrossed by contending armies, and the first result of a success
is to cause the conqueror to annex a belt from the farther bank to his
own territories.

It is further remarkable that the one great definite boundary of the
Dark Ages in England--that which was established for a few years by
Alfred between his kingdom and the territory of the Danish
invaders--abandons the Thames above bridges altogether, and uses it as
a 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 Norman
Conquest by many years, the Thames at once becomes of the utmost
importance as a boundary.

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

It is a tribute to the great place of the river in history that there
is no other watercourse in England nor any other natural division of
which 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 its
use as a limit is more apparent in civilised than in uncivilised
times, is simply the fact that limits and boundaries themselves are
never of great exactitude save in times of comparatively high
civilisation. It is when a complex system of law and a far-reaching
power of execution are present in a country that the necessity for
precise delimitation arises. In the barbaric period of England there
was no such necessity. Doubtless the men of Berkshire and the men of
Oxfordshire felt themselves to be in general divided by the stream;
but had we documents to hand (which, of course, we have not) it might
be possible to show that exceptional tracts, such as the isolated Hill
of Witham (which is much more influenced by Oxford than by Abingdon),
was treated as the land of Oxfordshire men in early times, or was
perhaps a territory in dispute; and something of the same sort may
have existed in the connection of Caversham with Reading.

In this old age of our civilisation the exactitude of the boundary
which the Thames establishes is apparent in various survivals. Islands
now joined to the one bank and indistinguishable from the rest of the
shore are still annexed to the farther shore. Such a patch is to be
found 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 course
of the old river. One arrested in process of formation may be seen at
Pentonhook.

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 the
obstacle is surmounted--is certain to become a point of strategic and
often of commercial importance. So it is with the passes over
mountains and with the narrows of the sea, and so it is with fords and
bridges over rivers. So it is with the Thames.

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

Such passages over the Thames were of two sorts: there are first the
original fords, numerous and primeval; next the crossing places of the
great 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. Oxford
may have been an early exception; and the difficult passage at
Abingdon founded a great monastery but no military post: the rise of
each was connected, as was Reading (which had no ford), with the
junction of a tributary. Wallingford alone, in its character of the
last easy and practicable ford down the river, had for centuries an
importance certainly due to geographical causes alone. Two principal
events of English history--the crossing of the Thames by the Conqueror
and the successful challenge of Henry II. to Stephen--depend upon the
site of this crossing. Long before their time it had been of capital
importance to the Saxon kings, so early as Offa and so late as Alfred.
If the bridges built at Abingdon in the fifteenth century had not
gradually deflected the western road, Wallingford might still count
the fourteen churches and the large population which it possessed for
so many centuries.

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

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

One from the Straits of Dover in the south-east to the north-western
centres of the Welsh Marches and of Chester, the Port for Ireland, and
so 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 the
south-west to the north-east until it struck and merged into other
roads 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, and
connected them not with the Dee, but with the lower Severn. This track
ran from the open highlands of Hampshire through Newbury and the
Berkshire Hills to Gloucester, and was called (like other lesser
tracks) the _Ermine Street_.

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

All these can be traced in their general direction throughout and for
most of their length minutely. All were forced to cross the Thames
Valley, which so nearly divided the whole of South England from east
to west.

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

These old roads are of capital importance in the story of England, and
though historians have always recognised this there are a number of
features about them which have not been sufficiently noted--as, for
instance, that armies until perhaps the twelfth century perpetually
used them; for the great English roads, though their general track was
laid out in pre-historic times, were generally hardened, straightened,
and embanked by the Romans in a manner which permitted them to survive
right on into the early Middle Ages; and of these four all were so
hardened and strengthened, except the Icknield Way. Not one of them is
quite complete to-day, but the Ermine Street is perhaps the best
preserved. It is a good modern road all the way from Bayden to
Gloucester, with the exception of a very slight gap at this village of
Cricklade.

It originally crossed the river half-a-mile below Cricklade Bridge, so
that the priory which stood on the left bank lay just to the south of
the old road. How and when the old bridge at Cricklade fell we have no
record, but one of the most important records of the Thames in
Anglo-Saxon history is connected with this passage of the river.

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

But though this piece of hydrography has its importance the chief
meaning of Cricklade in history lay in the fact that it was the spot
where this Ermine Street on its way from the south country to the
Severn Valley got over the Thames, and the village connected with it
was 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 of
the Ermine Street at Cricklade, presents a problem.

Cricklade, as we have seen, is a perfectly well-established site, and
we owe our certitude upon the matter to the fact that the Romans had
hardened and straightened what was probably an old British track. But
with the crossing of the Icknield Way no such complete certitude
exists, for the Icknield Way was but a vague barbarian track, often
tortuous in outline, confused by branching ways, and presenting all
the features of a savage trail. Doubtless that trail was used during
the four hundred years of the high Roman civilisation as a country
road, just as the similar trail, known as the "Pilgrims' Way" from
Winchester to Canterbury, was used in the same epoch. There are plenty
of Roman remains to be found along the track, and there is no doubt
that all such roads, even when the State was not at the expense of
hardening or straightening them, were in continual use before, as they
were in continual use after, the presence of Roman government in this
island; but the Icknield Way does not approach the river in a clear
and unmistakable manner as would a Roman or a Romanised road. It is on
this account that the exact point of its crossing has been debated.

The problem is roughly this: the high and treeless chalk downs have
been used from the beginning of human habitation in these islands as
the principal highways, and any single traveller or tribe that desired
in early times to get from the Hampshire highlands to the east and
north of England must have begun by following the ridge of the
Berkshire Hills, and by continuing along the dry upland of the
Chiltern Hills, which continue this reach beyond the Thames. But the
spot at which the pre-historic crossing of the Thames was effected
cannot be determined by a simple survey of the place where the Thames
cuts through the chalk range. Wallingford up above this gorge has
certain claims, both because it was the lowest of the continually
practicable fords upon the river, and because its whole history points
to an immemorial antiquity. Higher still, Dorchester, on which every
historian of the Thames must dwell as perhaps the most interesting of
all the settlements upon the banks of the river, has also been
suggested. Just above Dorchester, on the Berkshire side, stands the
peculiar isolated twin height which forms so conspicuous a landmark
when one gazes over the plain from the summit of the Downs. Such
landmarks often helped to trace the old roads. And Dorchester has also
an immemorial antiquity--a pre-historic fortification upon the hills
above, and fortifications, probably historic, on the Oxford bank
below, but Dorchester has no ford.

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

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

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

Luckily, we have some indication upon the farther bank. A way can then
be traced here as a lane (and in the gaps as a right of way, as a
path, or sometimes only by its general direction) for some miles on
the Oxfordshire side as it approaches Goring and the river coming from
the 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 is
actually built upon the old road. Beyond the railway the track is
continued in the lane which leads on past the schoolhouse to the old
ferry, where there was presumably in Roman times a ford. If we accept
this track we can conjecture that the vicarage of Streatley, upon the
Berkshire bank, stands upon the continuation of the Way, and give the
place where the pre-historic road crossed the river with tolerable
certitude, though it is, I believe, impossible to recover the
half-mile or so which lies between Streatley vicarage and the point
where the Wantage Road and the Icknield Way separated upon the
hillside above.

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

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

Here, of course, there could be no question of a ford; there can only
have been a ferry. Such a ferry existed throughout the Middle Ages and
up to the building of Westminster Bridge, and produced a large revenue
for the Archbishop of Canterbury. The memory of it is preserved in the
name of the street upon the Middlesex shore. The Watling Street is
fairly fixed in all its journey from the coast to the Archbishop's
palace 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 the
neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace up on the higher ground west of the
Tybourne, parallel with or perhaps identical with Park Lane until we
find it certainly again at the Marble Arch, whence in the form of the
Edgware 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 so
below its traditional source at Thames head, but above the point where
the first water is seen. A small culvert running under that embankment
takes the flood water in winter down the hollow, but no longer covers
a regular stream.

Besides these four crossings of the old British ways above London
Bridge there is the crossing of the Roman Road at Staines, which may
or may not represent a passage older than the Roman occupation. We
have no proof of its being older. The river is deep, and, unless the
broken causeway on the Surrey shore is regarded as the remains of
British work, there is no trace of a pre-Roman track in the
neighbourhood.

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

But apart from these there are two unsolved problems in connection
with the roads across the Thames Valley in Roman times. The first
concerns the passage of the upper Thames south of Eynsham; the second
concerns the road which runs south from Bicester and Alchester.

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

It is a question which will probably never be answered. There is no
trace remaining of Roman bridges; perhaps nothing was built save of
wood.

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

As to the second question, the road from Bicester southward runs
straight to Dorchester. At Dorchester, as we have seen, there was no
ford, though just below it a Roman ferry has been guessed at.

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

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

All the great rivers of Europe prove this. They are studded with lines
of strongholds standing either right upon their banks or close by; and
various as is the character of the different great rivers in their
physical conformation, few or none have been unable to furnish sites
for fortification. For instance, the slow rivers of Northern France,
running for the most part through a flat country, were able to afford
fortresses for the Gaulish clans in their numerous islands; the origin
of Melun and Paris, for instance, was of this kind. The sharp rocks
along 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 exception
even in the list of English rivers, most of which can show a certain
number of fortifications along their banks.

In the whole course of the great river above London there are but
three examples of fortification, or at any rate of fortification
directly dependent upon the river. Of these the first, at Lechlade, is
conjectural; the second, at Windsor, came quite late in history, and
the only one which seems to have been a primeval fortified site was
Dorchester.

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

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

It is useless to pursue an archæological discussion as to the origin
of the place, and still more useless to try and determine why, though
certainly the most easily defended, it should originally have been the
_only_ heavily fortified spot in the whole of the valley. We know that
it was Roman: we know that it was a place of pre-historic
fortification before the Romans came: we know that a Roman road ran
northward towards Bicester from it, and we also know, or at least we
can make a very probable guess, that though it was continuously
important, and that the interest of early history is continually
returning to it, it can never have been large.

Perhaps the best conjecture upon the origin of Dorchester is that the
stronghold grew up as an out-lier to the great fort over the river at
the top of Sinodun Hill. The exact and regular peninsula between the
bend in the Thames and the mouth of the Thames is obviously suited for
fortification: the tributary flows just to the east of this peninsula,
exactly parallel with the main river beyond, and covers the peninsula
not only with a stream on its east flank, but with a marsh at the
mouth. One can imagine that the conspicuous heights of the Sinodun
Hills were held, from the very beginning of human habitation in this
district, as a permanent fortress, into which the neighbouring tribes
could retire during war, and one can imagine that when the river was
low in summer, and perhaps fordable, the spit of land before it, which
formed an exception to the marshes round about, needed to be protected
as a sort of bastion beyond the stream. This theory will at least
account for the two great ridges of earthwork going from one water to
the other and completely cutting off the peninsula, since it is agreed
these works are earlier than the Roman invasion. Whatever its origin,
the part which Dorchester plays in the early history of England is
most remarkable.

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

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

The early hold of civilisation upon Kent is explicable. But when the
influence of Rome begins to spread again over England you have
distances covered which are astounding; there occur sporadic incidents
of the highest importance in spots where they would be the least
expected. Among the very first of these is the first baptism of a
West-Saxon King.

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

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

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

It is imagined by some authorities that the fulness of the story and
its apparent accuracy depend upon access to some early ecclesiastical
record 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 ecclesiastical
centre and one to which, even when this baptism takes place, the King
of Northumbria was at the pains of travelling southward to, to be
present as sponsor for the new Christian.

The story has a special historical interest, because it shows how very
vague were the boundaries and the occupancies of the little wandering
chieftains of this period. It need hardly be pointed out that no
regular division into shires can have existed so early, and, as we
have already insisted, the Thames itself was not a permanent boundary
between any two definable societies, yet those who regard the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as historical would show one Penda had appeared
a few years before as the chief of a group of men with a new name, the
Mercians--probably a loose agglomeration of tribes occupying the
middle strip of England; a group whose dialect and measures of land
are, perhaps, the ancestors of the modern Midland dialect and most of
our measures. Cynegil's baptism could not have taken place in
territory controlled by Penda, for he was the champion of all the
Anti-Christian forces of the time, and though he had just defeated the
West Saxons, and (according to a later legend) pushed back their
boundary to the line of the Thames, his action, like that of all the
little kings of the barbaric age in Britain, can have been no more
than 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 many
valuable instances which help to prove the unreliability of that part
of the early Chronicle which does not deal with ecclesiastical
affairs.

The priest who received Cynegil into the Church was one Birinus, an
Italian, and perhaps a Milanese; he appears, from his first presence
in Dorchester, to have fixed the seat of a bishopric in that village.
His reasons for choosing the spot are as impossible to discover as are
the 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 frontier
see--a sort of ecclesiastical fortress, pushed out to the very limits
of the occupation of the enemy.

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

The artificial chain of fortifications up the Thames Valley, which had
their origin under William the Conqueror, will call our attention to
many other spots besides Oxford as these pages proceed, but it is
interesting at this moment to consider Oxford in its early military
aspect, when it succeeded Dorchester, and came forward as the chief
stronghold of the upper Thames Valley above Wallingford.

The gravel bank north of the ford, by which what is presumed to have
been the drovers' road from south to north crossed the river, had
supported a very considerable population, and had attained a very
considerable civil importance, long before the Conquest. It is
difficult to believe that any new, especially that any extensive,
centres of population grew up in Anglo-Saxon Britain, upon sites
chosen by the barbarians. The Romans had colonised and densely
populated every suitable spot. The ships' crews of open pirate vessels
had no qualities suitable to the founding of a town; and when there is
no direct evidence it is always safer of the two conjectures in
English topography to believe that any spot which we find inhabited
and flourishing in the Anglo-Saxon period, even at its close, was not
a town developed during the Dark Ages but one which the pirates, when
they first entered the island, had found already inhabited and
flourishing, though sometimes perhaps more British than Roman. But
though this is always the more historical way of looking at the
probable origin of an English town it must be admitted that there is
no direct evidence of any town upon the site of Oxford before the
Danish invasions, and the first mention of the place by name is as
late as eleven years after Alfred's death, when it is recorded that
Edward, his son, "took possession of London and of Oxford and of all
lands in obedience thereunto."

This first mention, slight as it is, characterises Oxford as being the
town 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 a
considerable monastery had existed upon the spot for a century and a
half before this first mention in the Chronicle.

There still exists in the modern town, to the west of it, a large
artificial mound, one of those which have been discovered here and
there up and down England, and which are characteristic of a late
Saxon method of fortification. Before the advent of the Normans these
mounds were defended by palisades only, and were used as but
occasional strongholds. It may be conjectured that this Saxon work at
Oxford dates from somewhat the same period as does the first mention
of the town in the Chronicle. Twelve years later Alfred's grandson is
mentioned as dying at Oxford. It may be presumed that his death would
indicate the presence of a royal palace. We hear nothing more of this
town during the remainder of the tenth century, but we have a long
account in what is probably an accurate record of the rising of the
townsmen against the Danes in the beginning of the eleventh. The
Scandinavians made their last stand in the church of the monastery,
and the townsmen burnt it. Five years later a new host of Danes took
and burnt the town; and four years later again, Sweyn, in his terrible
conquering march, captured it, after very little resistance, in the
same year in which he took the crown of England. The brief episode of
Edmund Ironside again brings the town into history: he slept here upon
his 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 a
second advent of European civilisation and the success of its armies
at Hastings.

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

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

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

In all this record it is clear that Oxford held a continually growing
place in the life of England, and especially as a stronghold of
whoever might be governing England. What battle was fought there, if
any, or how the Normans got it, we do not know, but it is presumed
that it suffered in the fighting because the number and value of its
houses is given in the subsequent Survey as having fallen very largely
indeed.

It is always well, whenever one comes across the Domesday Survey in
history, to remember that the whole record is very imperfectly
understood. We do not know quite what was being measured: we do not
know, for instance, in the case of a town like Oxford, whether all the
inhabited houses were counted; or whether only those who by custom
gave taxes were counted; nor can we be certain of the meaning of the
word _vastus_, save that it has some connection either with
destruction or dilapidation, or lack of occupation, or, possibly, even
remission of taxation. But the theory of a sack is not without
foundation, for we know that in the case of York (which was certainly
sacked by Tostig in 1065 and then again by William in 1068) what is
probably 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 Conqueror
is or is not due to the destruction wrought by the Conquest we must be
very careful not to estimate the population of that time upon the
basis to-day such a list would afford. The figures of Domesday stand
for a much larger population than most historians have hitherto been
inclined to grant, as may be shown by considerations to which I shall
only allude here, as I shall have to repeat them more fully upon a
later page when I speak of urban life upon the Thames. The nomadic
element in the life of the early Middle Ages; the smallness of the
space allotted for sleeping; the large amount of time spent out of
doors; the great proportion of collegiate institutions, not only
monastic but military; the life in common which spread as a habit to
so many parts of society beyond the monastic; the large families which
(from genealogy) we can trust to be as much a character of the early
Middle Ages as they, were not the character of the later Middle Ages,
the crowd of semi-servile dependants which would be discovered in any
large house--all these make us perfectly safe in multiplying by at
least ten the number of households counted in the Survey if we would
get at the population of those households, and it must be remembered
that the houses counted, even in those parts of England which were
fairly thoroughly surveyed, can only represent a _minimum_ number,
whatever was the method of counting. The lists may in some instances
include every single household in a place, though from what we know of
the diversity of local custom this is unlikely. In most places it is
far more likely that the list covered but some portion that by custom
owed 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 recorded
history in these islands, there remain to be considered the other
strongholds which held the line of the valley.

It would be easy to multiply these if one were to consider all
fortifications whatsoever connected with the general strategic line
formed by the Thames, but such a catalogue would exceed the boundaries
set to this book. It is proposed to consider only those which were
strictly connected with the passage of the stream, and of such there
are but three besides Dorchester and Oxford, for that at Cricklade is
doubtful, and in any case determines a passage which could be always
outflanked upon either side, while the great fortress of the Tower,
lying as it does upon the estuarial Thames below bridges, does
directly protect a highway.

These three strongholds directly connected with the inland river are
Wallingford, Reading and Windsor, and of the three Wallingford and
Windsor were more directly military: the last, Reading, appears to
have been but an adjunct to a large and civil population; the fourfold
quality of Reading in the history of the Thames, as a civil
settlement, as a religious centre, as a stronghold, and as one of the
very few examples of modern industrial development in the valley, will
be considered later. We will take each of the three strongholds in
their order down stream.

What determined the importance of Wallingford is not easy to fix
nowadays. The explanation more usually given to the great part which
this crossing of the Thames played in the early history of Britain is
the double one that it was the lowest continuously practicable ford
over the river, and that it held the passage of the great road going
from London to the west.

Now it is true that any traveller making from London to Bath, or the
Mendip Hills, and the lower Severn would, on the whole, find his most
direct road to be along the Vale of the White Horse, but the
convenience of this line through Wallingford may easily be
exaggerated, especially its convenience for men in early times before
the valleys were properly drained. Though the ford at Abingdon was
more difficult than the ford at Wallingford, yet the line through
Abingdon westward along the Farringdon road was certainly shorter than
the line through Wantage. Whether the old habit, inherited from
pre-historic times, of following the chalk ridge had produced a
parallel road just at the foot of that ridge and so had made
Wallingford, Wantage, and all the southern edge of the Vale of the
White Horse the natural road to the west, or whether it was that the
great run of travel ran, when once the Thames had been crossed at
Wallingford, slightly south-west towards Bath, it is certain that the
Wallingford and Wantage line is the line of travel in early history.

There is no record, and but very little basis for conjecture, as to
the origin of the fortifications at Wallingford. Not much is left of
them, and though there is some Roman work in the place it is work
which has evidently been handled over and over again. It is certainly
somewhat late in English history that this "Walled Ford" is heard
of--with the tenth century. Its first castle is, of course, Norman,
and contemporary with that of Oxford--or rather a year later than that
at Oxford, and from the Conquest onward it remains royal. From that
time, also, it is perpetually appearing in English history. It was the
place of confinement of Edward I. when, as Prince Edward, he was the
prisoner of Leicester. It was the attempt to succour that prisoner
which led to his removal to Kenilworth, and finally to that escape
which permitted him to fight the battle of Evesham. Wallingford passed
to Gaveston in Edward the Second's reign, and, remaining continually
within the gift of the crown, to the Despenser in the succeeding
generation, and finally to Isabella, who declared her policy from
within the walls of Wallingford when she returned to the country. It
was next held by her favourite, Mortimer, and we afterwards find it,
throughout the fourteenth century, a sort of appanage of the
heir-apparent, and especially of the Duchy of Cornwall, to which it
was attached until the Reformation. It was for a moment under the
custody of Chaucer's son: it nursed the childhood of Henry VI., but
with the beginning of the next century it had already lost its
importance. After half that century had passed the castle was already
falling into disrepair; much of the masonry of the town and of the
fortress, lying squared and convenient to the river, had been moved
down stream for the new buildings at Windsor, and when, nearly a
century later again, the Civil War broke out, it was not until after
some considerable repair that the place could pretend to stand a
siege. It fell to the Parliament, and, before the Restoration, was
carefully destroyed, as were throughout England so many foundations of
her past by the orders of Oliver Cromwell.

It has often been remarked with surprise that cities and strongholds
once densely inhabited and heavily built can disappear and leave no
material trace to posterity. That they do so disappear should give
pause to those historians who are perpetually using the negative
argument, and pretending that the lack of material evidence is
sufficient to disturb a strong and early tradition. Those who have
watched the process by which abandoned buildings become a quarry will
easily 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, by
purchase or theft, of abandoned material.

The whole of Wallingford has suffered this fate--the mound, presumably
artificial, upon which the first keep stood, and which was, probably,
a palisade mound of Anglo-Saxon times, remains, but there is upon it
no remaining masonry.

Next down stream of the points with a strategic importance in English
history comes Reading. But the strategic importance of Reading was not
produced by the town's possessing a site of national moment: it was
produced only by local topography. Reading was never (to use a modern
term) a "nodal point" in the communications of England.

It may be generally laid down that mere strength of position is noted
and greedily seized in barbaric times alone. For mere strength of
position is a mere refuge. A strong position (I do not speak, of
course, of tactical and temporary, but of permanent, positions),
chosen only because it is strong, will save you during a critical
short period from the attack of a fierce, unthoughtful, and easily
wearied enemy--such as are all barbarians; but it cannot _of itself_
fall into a general scheme of defence, nor, _simply because it is
strong_, intercept the advance of an adversary or support a line of
opposition and resistance. Position is always of _advantage_ to a
fortress, and, in all but highly civilised times, a _necessity_--as we
shall see when we come to discuss Windsor--but it is not sufficient. A
fortress, when society is organised, and when the feud of one small
tribe or family against another is not to be feared, derives its
principal value from a command of established communications, and
established aggregations of power--especially of economic power. Towns
alone can feed and house armies; by roads and railways alone can
armies proceed.

There are, indeed, examples of a chain of positions so striking that,
from their strength alone, a strategic line imposes itself; but these
are very rare. Another, and much commoner, exception to the rule I
have 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 and
other opportunities for armies can be provided. Such places often
preserve a continuity of strategic importance, from civilised, through
barbaric, to civilised times again. Laon is an excellent instance of
this, and so is Constantine another, and so is Luxembourg a
third--indeed they are numerous.

But, in spite of--or, rather, as is proved by--these exceptions the
fortresses of an organised people are found at the conjunction of
their communications, or at places (such as straits or passes) which
have the monopoly of communication, or they are identical with great
aggregations of population and opportunity, or at least they are
situated 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 the
main highway of Southern England, occupied no such vantage until the
nineteenth century. To-day, with its large population, its provision
of steam and electrical power, and above all, its command of the main
junction between the southern and middle railways, Reading would again
prove of primary strategic importance if we still considered warfare
with 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 Thames
Valley that it will be treated later in these pages.

The long and narrow peninsula between the Kennet and the Thames was an
ideal place for defence. It needed but a trench from the one marsh to
the other to secure the stronghold. But though this was evident to
every fighter, though it is as such a stronghold that Reading is
mentioned first in history, yet the advantage was never permanently
held. Armies hold Reading, fall back on the town, fight near it, and
raid it: but it is never a great fortress in the intervals of wars,
because, while Oxford commanded the Drovers' Road, Wallingford the
western 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 as
Windsor, as easy as Dorchester, its parallel, easier than Oxford, and
far easier than Wallingford, which had, indeed, no natural defences
whatsoever.

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

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

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

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

Reading we have discussed. The chalk spurs in the gorge by Goring and
Pangbourne are not isolated (as is that of Chateau Gaillard, for
instance), and are dominated by the neighbouring heights. The
escarpment opposite Henley offered a good site for an eleventh-century
castle--but the steep cliff of Windsor had this advantage beyond all
the 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 from
Wallingford to Bray a great belt of chalk in which the trench of the
Thames is carved. Alluvials and gravels naturally flank the stream,
but chalk is the ground rock of the whole. To the west and to the east
of this belt he will notice two curious isolated patches, detached
from the main body of the chalk. That to the west forms the twin
height of the Sinodun Hills, rising abruptly out of the green sand;
that to the east is the knoll of Windsor, rising abruptly out of the
thick and damp clay. It is a singular and unique patch, almost exactly
round, and as a result of some process at which geology can hardly
guess the circle is bisected by the river. If ever the chalk of the
north bank rose high it has, in some manner, been worn down. That on
the south bank remains in a steep cliff with which everyone who uses
the river is familiar. It was the summit of this chalk hill piercing
through the clays that the Conqueror noted for his purpose, and he
was, to repeat, determined (we must presume) by the distance from
London.

The command of a great town, especially a metropolis, is but partially
effected by a fortress situated within its limits. In case of a
popular revolt, and still more in case the resources of the town are
held by an enemy, such a fortress will be penned in and find itself
suffering a siege far more rigorous than any that could be laid in an
open country-side. On this account the urban fortresses of the Middle
Ages are to be found (at least in large cities) lying upon an extreme
edge of the walls and reposing, as far as possible, upon uninhabited
land or upon water, or both. The two classic examples of this rule
are, 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 two
reasons. First, the growth of the town makes any possible garrison of
the fortress too small for the force with which it might have to cope;
and, secondly, this same growth physically overlaps the exterior
fortress; suburbs grow up beyond the wall, and the castle finds itself
at last embedded in the town. Thus within a hundred and fifty years of
its completion the Louvre was but a residence, wholly surrounded, save
upon the water front, by the packed houses within the new wall of
Marcel.

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

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

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

But there is more than this in favour of Staines. I have already said
that a fortress commanding a civilian population--an ancient fortress,
at least--can do so with the best effect at the distance of an easy
march. Now Staines is not seventeen miles from Tyburn, and a good road
all the way: Windsor is over twenty, and for the last miles there was
no good, hard road in the time of its foundation.

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

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

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

He began his work quickly. Within four years of Hastings, and long
before the conquest of the Saxon aristocracy was complete, he held his
Court at Windsor and summoned a synod there, and, though we do not
know when the keep was completed, we can conjecture, from the rapidity
with which all Norman work was done, that the walls were defensible
even at that time. Of his building perhaps nothing remains. The forest
to the south, with its opportunities for hunting, and the increasing
importance of London (which was rapidly becoming the capital of
England) made Windsor of greater value than ever in the eyes of his
son. Henry I. rebuilt or greatly enlarged the castle, lived in it, was
married in it, and accomplished in it the chief act of his life, when
he caused fealty to be sworn to his daughter, Matilda, and prepared
the advent of the Angevin. When the civil wars were over, and the
treaty between Henry II. and Stephen was signed, Windsor ("Mota de
Windsor"), though it does not seem to have stood a siege, was counted
the second fortress of the realm.

Of the exact place of Windsor in mediæval strategy, of its relations
to London and to Staines, and all we have just mentioned, as also of
the great importance of cavalry in the Middle Ages, no better example
can be quoted than the connected episode of April-June 1215, which may
be called--to give it a grandiose name--the Campaign of Magna Charta.
It further illustrates points which should never be forgotten in the
reading of early English history, though they are too particular for
the general purpose of this book--to wit, the way in which London
increased in military value throughout the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries; the strategic importance of the few old national roads as
late as the reign of John, and that power of the defensive, even in
the 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 will
confirm with regard to the aristocratic revolt against the vice and
the genius of the third Plantagenet. The strategy of the quarrel alone
concerns us.

When John's admirable diplomacy had failed (as diplomacy will under
the test of arms), and when his Continental allies had been crushed at
Bouvines in the summer of 1214, the rebels in England found their
opportunity. The great lords, especially those of the north, took oath
in the autumn to combine. The accounts of this conspiracy are
imperfect, but its general truth may be accepted. John, who from this
moment lay perpetually behind walls, held a conference in the Temple
during the January of 1215--to be accurate, upon the Epiphany of that
year--and he struck a compact with the conspirators that there should
be a truce between their forces and those of the Crown until Low
Sunday--which fell that year upon the 26th of April. The great nobles,
mistrusting his faith with some justice (especially as he had taken
the Cross), gathered their army some ten days before the expiry of the
interval, but, as befitted men who claimed in especial to defend the
Catholic Church and its principles, they were scrupulous not to engage
in actual fighting before the appointed day. The size of this army we
cannot tell, but as it contained from 2000 to 3000 armed and mounted
gentlemen it must have counted at least double that tale of cavalry,
and perhaps five-, perhaps ten-fold the number of foot soldiers. A
force of 15,000 to 30,000 men in an England of some 5,000,000 (I more
than double the conventional figures) was prepared to enforce feudal
independence against the central government, even at the expense of
ceding vast territories to Scotland or of submitting to the nominal
rule of a foreign king. Against this army the King had a number of
mercenaries, mainly drawn from his Continental possessions, probably
excellent soldiers, but scattered among the numerous garrisons which
it was his titular office to defend.

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

What followed could only have been accomplished: by cavalry, by
cavalry in high training, by a force under excellent generalship, and
by one whose leaders appreciated the all-importance of London in the
coming struggle. The rebels left Bedford immediately, marched all that
day, all the succeeding night, and early on the Sunday morning, 24th
May, entered London, and by the northern gate. Their entry was not
even challenged.

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

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

From London, as though the name of the city had a sort of national
authority, the Barons, who now felt themselves to be hardly rebels but
almost co-equals in a civil war, issued letters of mandate to others
of their class and to their inferiors. These letters were obeyed, not
perhaps without some hesitation, but at any rate with a final
obedience which turned the scale against the King. John was now in a
very distinct inferiority, and even of his personal attendants a
considerable number left the Court on learning of the defection of
London. In all this long struggle nothing but the occupation of the
capital had proved enough to make John feign a compromise. As
excellent an intriguer as he was a fighter he asked nothing better
than to hear once more the terms of the Barons.

He proceeded to _Windsor_, asked for a parley, issued a safeguard to
the emissaries of the Barons, and despatched this document upon the
8th June, giving it a validity of three days. His enemies waited
somewhat longer, perhaps in order to collect the more distant
contingents, and named Runnymede--a pasture upon the right bank of the
Thames just above _Staines_--as the place of meeting.

There are those who see in the derivation of the name "Runnymede" an
ancient 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, a
large, dry field, in which a considerable force could encamp. The
Barons marched along the old Roman military road, which is still the
high-road to Staines from London, crossed the river, and encamped on
Runnymede. Here the Charta was presented, and probably, though not
certainly, signed and sealed. The local tradition ascribes the site of
the actual signature to "Magna Charta" island--an eyot just up-stream
from the field, now called Runnymede, but neither in tradition nor in
recorded history can this detail be fixed with any exactitude. The
Charta is given as from Runnymede upon the 15th June, and for the
purpose of these pages what we have to note is that these two months
of marching and fighting had ended upon the strategic point of
Staines, and had clearly shown its relation to Windsor and to London.

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

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

These waste lands of Western Europe, which it was impossible or
unprofitable 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. The
Cantons of Switzerland, the Communes and the National Governments of
France, Italy, and Spain remain in possession of the waste. It is only
with us that wealthy private owners have been permitted to rob the
Commonwealth of so obvious an inheritance, a piece of theft which they
have accomplished with complete cynicism, and by specific acts whose
particular dates can be quoted, though historians are very naturally
careful to leave the process but vaguely analysed. Indeed, the last
and most valuable of these waste spaces, the New Forest itself, might
have entirely disappeared had not Charles I. (the last king in England
to attempt a repression of the landed class) so forcibly urged the
local engrosser to disgorge as to compel him, with Hampden and the
rest, to a burning zeal for political liberty.

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

To develop a thought which has already been touched on in these pages,
mediæval fortification was dual in character: it had either a purely
strategical object, in which case the site was chosen with an eye to
its military value, whether inhabited or not, or the stronghold or
fortification was made to develop an already existing town or site of
importance. Of the second sort was Wallingford, but of the first sort,
as we have seen, was Windsor. Indeed the distinction is normal to all
fortification and exists upon the Continent to-day. For instance, the
first-class fortress Paris is an example of the second sort, the
first-class fortress Toul of the first. Again, all German fortresses,
without exception, are of the second sort, while all Swiss
fortification, 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 to
the means of communication of the time. A stronghold may be said to
repose upon that side through which communications are most difficult.

It is true that this space lying to the south of Windsor was of no
very great dimensions, but such as it was, uninhabited and therefore
unprovided with stores of any kind, it prevented surprise from the
south.

The next point of strategic importance on the Thames, and the last, is
the 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 of
England 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 from
Windsor--a march along the old Roman road from Staines. This land
passage more than halved the distance by river, it cut off not only
the numerous large turns which the Thames begins to take between
Middlesex and Surrey, but also the general sweep southward of the
river, and it avoided, what another road might have necessitated, the
further crossing of the stream.

Long as the march is, there was no fortification of importance between
one point and the other, and mediæval history is crammed with
instances 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 the
same geographical causes as had built up so many of the urban
strongholds of Europe. It was situated upon the very bank of the river
which fed the capital, it was down stream from the town, and it was
just outside the walls. In a word, it was the parallel of the Louvre.

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

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

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

On the other hand there has been no modern investigation of those
foundations of the White Tower where, if anywhere, Roman work might be
expected. This exhausts the direct evidence. In sciences such as
geology or the criticism of Sacred Books evidence to this extent would
be ample to overset the firmest traditions or the most self-evident
conclusion of common human experience. But history is bound to a
greater caution, and it must be reluctantly admitted that the two
coins, the ingot and the bit of stone are insufficient to prove the
existence of a Roman fortress.

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

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, and
was attached to the differentiation between the civic and military
aspects 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 Tower
was not dug till the end of the twelfth century. Finally, there is
this strong argument against the theory of a Roman origin to the Tower
that had such a Roman fortress existed an extension of the town would
almost certainly have gathered round it.

One of the features of the break-up of Roman society was the enormous
expansion of the towns. We have evidence of it on every side and
nowhere more than in Northern Africa. This expansion took place
everywhere, but especially and invariably in the presence of a
garrison, and indeed the military conditions of the fourth century,
with its cosmopolitan and partially hereditary army, fixed in
permanent garrisons and forming as it were a local caste, presupposed
a large dependent civilian population at the very gates of the camp or
stronghold. Thus you have the Palatine suburb to the south of Lutetia
right up against the camp, and Verecunda just outside Lamboesis. Now
there is nothing of the sort in the neighbourhood of the Tower. It
seems certain that from the earliest times London ended here cleanly
at the wall, and that except along the Great Eastern Road the
neighbourhood of the Tower was agricultural land.

How then could a tradition have arisen with regard to Roman
occupation? It is but a conjecture, though a plausible one, that when
the pirate raids grew in severity this knoll down stream was
fortified, while still the ruling class was Latin speaking and while
still the title of Cæsar was familiar, whether before or after the
withdrawal of the Legions. If this were the case, then, on the analogy
of other similar sites, one may imagine something like the following:
that in the Dark Ages the masonry was used as a quarry for other
constructions, that the barbarians would occasionally stockade the
site, though not permanently, and only for the purposes of their
ephemeral but constant quarrels; and one may suggest that when the
barbaric period was ended, by the landing of William's army, the place
was still, by a tradition now six hundred years old, a public area
under the control of the Crown and one such as would lend itself to
the design of a permanent fortification. William, finding it in this
condition, erected upon it the great keep which was to be the last of
his fortifications along the line of the river, and the pivot for the
control of London.

This keep is of course the White Tower, which still impresses even our
generation with the squat and square shoulders of Norman strength. It
and Ely are the best remaining expressions of the hardy little men,
and it fills one, as does everything Norman, from the Tyne to the
Euphrates, with something of awe. This building, the White Tower, is
the Tower itself; the rest is but an accretion, partly designed for
defence, 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. The
presumption that it is the original name is founded upon a much
earlier record--namely, that of 1241, in which not only is it ordered
that the tower be repainted white, but in which mention is also made
that its original colour had been "worn by the weather and by the long
process of time." Such a complaint would take one back to the twelfth
century, and quite probably to the first building of the Keep. The
object of whitening the walls of the Tower is again explicable by the
very reasonable conjecture that it would so serve as a landmark over
the long, flat stretches of the lower river. It was the last
conspicuous building against the mass of the great town, and there are
many examples of similar landmarks used at the head of estuaries or
sea passages. When these are not spires they are almost invariably
white, especially where they are so situated as to catch the southern
or the eastern sun.

The exact date at which the plan was undertaken we do not know, but it
is obviously one with the scheme of building Windsor, and must date
from much the same period. The order to build was given by the
Conqueror to the Bishop of Rochester, Gundulph. Now Gundulph was not
promoted to the See of Rochester till 1077. Exactly twenty years
later, in 1097, the son of the Conqueror built the outer wall. The
Keep was then presumed to be completed, and at some time during those
twenty years it must have been begun, probably about 1080. That which
we have seen increasing, the military importance of Windsor,
diminished the military importance of the Tower, until, with the close
of the Middle Ages, it had become no more than a prison. It was not
indeed swamped by the growth of the town, as was its parallel the
Louvre, but the increase of wealth (and therefore of the means of
war), coupled with the correspondingly increased population, made both
urban fortresses increasingly difficult to hold as mediæval
civilisation developed.

The whole history of the Tower is the history of military misfortune,
which grows as London expands in numbers and prosperity. It probably
held out under Mandeville when the Londoners (who were always the
allies of the aristocracy against the national government) besieged it
under the civil wars of Stephen; but even so there was bad luck
attached to it, for when Mandeville was taken prisoner he was
compelled to sign its surrender. Within a generation Longchamp again
surrendered it to the young Prince John; he was for the moment leading
the aristocracy, which, when it was his turn to reign, betrayed him.
It was surrendered to the baronial party by the King as a trust or
pledge for the execution of Magna Charta, and though it was put into
the hands of the Archbishop, who was technically neutral, it was from
that moment the symbol of a successful rebellion, as it had already
proved 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 the
next reign almost every misfortune of Henry III. is connected with the
Tower. He was perpetually taking refuge in it, holding his Court in
it: losing it again, as the rebels succeeded, and regaining it as they
failed. This long and unfortunate tenure of his is illumined only by
one or two delightful phrases which one cannot but retain as one
reads. Thus there is the little written order, which still remains to
us for the putting of painted windows into the Chapel of St John, the
northern one of which was to have for its design "some little Mary or
other, holding her Child"--"quandam Mariolam tenenten puerum suum."
There is also a very pleasing legend in the same year, 1241, when the
fall of certain new buildings was ascribed to the action of St.
Thomas, who was seen by a priest in a dream upsetting them with his
crozier and saying that he did this "as a good citizen of London,
because these new buildings were not put up for the defence of the
realm but to overawe the town," and he added this charming remark: "If
I had not undertaken the duty myself St. Edward or another would have
done it."

Even when Henry's misfortunes were at an end, and when the Battle of
Evesham was won, the Tower was perpetually unfortunate. A body of
rebels surrounded it, and in the defence were present a great number
of Jews, who had fled from the fighting in the city only to find
themselves pressed for service in defence of the fortress. From that
moment they make no further appearance in English military history
till the South African War, unless indeed their appearance in chains
thirteen years later in this same Tower as prisoners for financial
trickery can be counted a military event.

Upon this occasion the siege was raised by the promptitude and energy
of Prince Edward--the man who as King was to march to Cærnarvon and to
the Grampians had already in his boyhood shown the energy and the
military aptitude of his grandfather King John. He was but twenty
years old, yet he had already done all the fighting at Lewes, he had
already won Evesham, and now, at the end of spring, he made one march
from Windsor to the Tower and relieved it. It was almost the last time
that the Tower stood for the success of authority. From this time
onwards it is, as it had been before, the unfortunate symbol of
successful rebellion. Edward II. had to leave it in his fatal year of
1326, the Londoners poured in and incidentally massacred the Bishop of
Exeter, into whose hands it had been entrusted.

In 1460 it surrendered to the House of York, and from that time
onwards becomes more and more of a prison and less and less of a
fortress.

The preponderatingly military aspect of the Thames Valley in English
history dwindles with the dwindling of military energy in our
civilisation, and passes with the passing of a governing class that
was military rather than commercial.

Sites which owed their importance to strategical position, and which
had hence grown into considerable towns, ceased to show any but a
civilian character, and even in the only episode of consequence
wherein fighting occurred in England since the Middle Ages--the
episode of the Civil Wars--the banks of the Thames, though perpetually
infested by either army, saw very little serious fighting, and that
although the line of the Thames was the critical line of action during
the first stage of the war.

For the Civil Wars as a whole were but an affair upon the flank of the
general struggle in Europe: the losses were never heavy, and in the
first 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 fighting
ceased, but with that exception, and especially upon the line of the
Thames itself, the losses were extraordinarily small.

One may say that Oxford and London were the two objective points of
the opposing forces from the close of 1642 to the spring of 1644. The
King's Government at Oxford, the Parliament in London, were the civil
bases, at least, upon which the opposing forces pivoted, and the two
intermediate points were Abingdon and Reading. To read the
contemporary, and even the modern, history of the time, one would
imagine from the terms used that these places were the theatre of
considerable military operations. We hear, with every technicality
which the Continental struggle had rendered familiar to Englishmen, of
sieges, assaults, headquarters, and even hornworks. But when one looks
at dates and figures it is not easy to treat the matter seriously.
Here, for instance, is Abingdon, within a short walk of Oxford, and
the 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 more
serious than "molesting" the university town. And it was so held that
Rupert tried to recapture it, of all things in the world, with
cavalry! He was "overwhelmed" by the vastly superior forces of the
enemy, and his attempt failed. When one has thoroughly grasped this
considerable military event one next learns that the overwhelming
forces were a trifle over a thousand in number!

Next an individual gentleman with a few followers conceives the
elementary idea of blocking the western road at Culham Bridge, and
isolating Abingdon upon this side. He begins building a "fort." A
certain proportion of the handful in Abingdon go out and kill him and
the fort is not proceeded with: and so forth. A military temper of
this sort very easily explains the cold-blooded massacre of prisoners
which 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 the
same. 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. Indeed
they doubted whether it could be captured by an assault of less than
5000 men, a number which appeared at this stage of the campaign so
appalling that it is mentioned as a sort of standard of comparison
with the impossible. The garrison surrendered just as relief was
approaching it, and after a strain which it had endured for no less
than ten days; but the capture of Reading was not effected entirely
without bloodshed; certainly fifty men were killed (counting both
sides), possibly a few more; and the whole episode is a grotesque
little foot-note to the comic opera upon which rose the curtain of the
Civil Wars. It was not till the appearance of Cromwell, with his
highly paid and disciplined force, that the tragedy began.

Even after Cromwell had come forward as the chief leader, in fact if
not in name, the apparent losses are largely increased by the random
massacres to which his soldiers were unfortunately addicted. Thus
after Naseby a hundred women were killed for no particular reason
except that killing was in the air, and similarly after Philiphaugh
the conscience of the Puritans forbade them to keep their word to the
prisoners they had taken, who were put to the sword in cold blood: the
women, however, on this occasion, were drowned.

After the Civil Wars all the military meaning of the Thames
disappears. Nor is it likely to revive short of a national disaster;
but that disaster would at once teach us the strategical meaning of
this great highway running through the south of England with its
attendant railways, it would re-create the strategical value of the
point where the Thames turns northward and where its main railways
bifurcate; it would provide in several conceivable cases, as it
provided to Charles I. and to William III., the line of approach on
London.

       *       *       *       *       *

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

In the next part of these notes I propose to consider the economic or
civil development of the Thames above London, and to show how the
foundations of its permanent prosperity was laid. That economic
phenomenon has at its roots the action of the Benedictine Order. It
was the great monasteries which bridged the transition between Rome
and the Dark Ages throughout North-Western Europe; it was they that
recovered land wasted by the barbarian invasions, and that developed
heaths and fens which the Empire even in its maturity had never
attempted to exploit.

The effect of the barbarian invasions was different in different
provinces of the Roman Empire, though roughly speaking it increased in
intensity with the distance from Rome. It is probable that the actual
numbers of the barbarian invaders was small even in Britain, as it
certainly was in Northern Gaul, but we must not judge of the effect
produced upon civilisation by this catastrophe, as though it were a
mere question of numbers. So large a proportion of the population was
servile, and so fixed had the imagination of everyone become in the
idea that the social order was eternal; so entirely had the army
become a professional thing, and probably a thing of routine divorced
from the civilian life round it, that at the close of the fourth
century a little shock from without was enough to produce a very
considerable result. In Eastern Britain, small as the number of the
invaders must necessarily have been, religion itself was almost, if
not entirely, destroyed, and the whole fabric of Roman civilisation
appears to have dissolved--with the exception, of course, of such
irremovable things as the agricultural system, the elements of
municipal life, and the simpler arts. Even the language very probably
changed in the eastern part of the island, and passed from what we may
conceive to have been Low Latin in the towns and Celtic dialects in
the country-sides, with possibly Teutonic settlements here and there
along the eastern shore, to a generally confused mass of Teutonic
dialects scattered throughout the eastern and northern half of the
island and enclosing but isolated fragments of Celtic speech.

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

St Augustine landed, and after the struggle of the seventh century
between those petty chieftains who sympathised with, and those who
opposed, the order of cultivated European life, the battle was won in
favour of that civilisation which we still enjoy. It would have been
impossible to re-create a sound agriculture and to refound the arts
and learning; especially would it have been impossible to refound the
study of letters, upon which all material civilisation depends, had it
not been for the monastic institution. This institution did more work
in Britain than in any other province of the Empire. And it had far
more to do. It found a district utterly wrecked, perhaps half
depopulated, and having lost all but a vague memory of the old Roman
order; it had to remake, if it could, of all this part of a Europe. No
other instrument was fitted for the purpose.

The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilisation
when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude, whether
external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of capital. The
next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in the midst of
continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that general
continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved experience, to
which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline of a civilisation,
is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of all these
difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited to a high degree.
Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of communities whose
whole temptation was to gather, and who had no opportunity for
spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in which they grew up
forbade their spoliation, at least in the internal wars of a Christian
people, and each of the great foundations provided a community of
learning 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 disciplinary
rule enforcing regular, continuous, and assiduous labour, and they
provided these in a society from which exact application of such a
kind had all but disappeared.

The monastic institution, so far as Western Europe was concerned, was
comparatively young when the work in Britain was begun. The fifth
century had seen its inception; it was still embryonic in the sixth;
the seventh, which was the date of its great conquest of the English
country-sides, was for it a period of youth and of vigour as fresh as
was, let us say, the thirteenth century for the renaissance of civil
learning. We must not think of these early foundations as we think of
the complicated, wealthy, somewhat restricted and privileged bodies of
the later Middle Ages. They were all more or less of one type, and
that type a simple one. They all sprang from the same Benedictine
stem. It was the quality of all to be somewhat independent in
management, and especially to work in large units, and out of the very
many which sprang, up all over the island three particularly concern
the Thames Valley. Each of them dates from the very beginnings of
Anglo-Saxon history, each of them has its roots in legend, and each of
them continued for close upon a thousand years to be a capital
economic centre of English life. These three great Benedictine
foundations 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 their
place, as also to the string of dependent houses and small foundations
which line the river almost from its source right down to London:
indeed the only type of religious foundation which historic notes such
as these can afford to neglect is the monastery or nunnery built in a
town, and for the purposes of a town, after the civic life of a town
had 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 not
causes but effects of the development of civilisation in the Thames
Valley.

Abingdon, Westminster, and Chertsey are all ascribed by tradition, and
each by a very vital and well-documented tradition, to the seventh
century: Abingdon and Chertsey to its close; Westminster, with less
assurance, to its beginning. All three, we may take it, did arise in
that period which was for the eastern part of this island a time when
all the work of Europe had to be begun again. Though we know nothing
of the progress of the Saxon pirates in the province of Britain, and
though history is silent for the hundred and fifty years covered by
the disaster, yet on the analogy of other and later raids from the
North Sea we may imagine that no inland part of the country suffered
more than the valley of the Thames. All that was left of the Roman
order, wealth and right living, must have appeared at the close of
that sixth century, when the Papal Mission landed, something as
appears the wrecked and desolate land upon the retirement of a flood.
To cope with such conditions, to reintroduce into the ravaged and
desecrated province, which had lost its language in the storm, all its
culture, and even its religion, a new beginning of energy and of
production, came, with the peculiar advantages we have seen it to
possess for such a work, the monastic institution. For two centuries
the great houses were founded all over England: their attachment to
Continental learning, their exactitude, their corporate power of
action, were all in violent contrast to, and most powerfully
educational for, the barbarians in the midst of whom they grew. It may
be truly said that if we regard the life of England as beginning anew
with the Saxon invasion, if that disaster of the pirate raids be
considered as so great that it offers a breach of continuity in the
history of Britain, then the new country which sprang up, speaking
Teutonic 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 that
Westminster must have been begun. There are several versions of the
story: the most detailed statement we have ascribes it to the
particular year 604, but varied as are the forms in which the history,
or rather the legend, is preserved, the truth common to all is the
foundation quite early in the seventh century. It was very probably
supported by what barbaric Government there was in London at the time
and initiated, moreover, according to one form of the legend, and that
not the least plausible, by the first bishop of the see. The site was
at the moment typical of all those which the great monasteries of the
West were to turn from desert places to gardens: it was a waste tract
of ground called "Thorney," lying low, triangular in shape, bounded by
the two reedy streams that descended through the depression which now
runs across the Green Park and Mayfair, and emptied themselves into
the Thames, the one just above, the other 100 or 200 yards below, the
site of the Houses of Parliament.

The moment the foundation was established a stream of wealth tended
towards it: it was at the very gate of the largest commercial city in
the kingdom and it was increasingly associated, as the Anglo-Saxon
monarchy developed, with the power of the Central Government. This
process culminated in the great donation and rebuilding of Edward the
Confessor.

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

Chertsey, next up the river, took on the work. Like
Westminster--though, by tradition, a few years later than
Westminster--its foundation goes back to the birth of England. Its
history is known in some detail, and is full of incident, so that it
may be called the pivot upon which, presumably, turned the development
of the Thames Valley above London for two hundred years. Its site is
worth noting. The rich, but at first probably swampy, pasturage upon
the Surrey side was just such a position as one foundation after
another up and down England settled on. To reclaim land of this kind
was one of the special functions of the great abbeys, and Chertsey may
be compared in this particular to Hyde, for instance, or to the Vale
of the Cross, to Fountains, to Ripon, to Melrose, and to many others.
It was in the new order of monastic development what Staines, its
neighbour, had been in the old Roman order--the mark of the first
stage up-river from London.

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

The third of the great early foundations is Abingdon, and in a way it
is the greatest, for, without direct connection with the Crown, by the
mere vitality of its tradition, it became something more even than
Chertsey was, wielding an immense revenue, more than half that of
Westminster itself, and situated, as it was, in a small up-valley
town, ruling with almost monarchical power. There could be even less
doubt in the case of Abingdon than there was in the case of Chertsey
that it was the creator of its own district of the Thames. It stood
right in the marshy and waste spaces of the middle upper river,
commanding a difficult but an important ford, and holding the gate of
what was to be one of the most fruitful and famous of English vales.
It can only have been from Abingdon that the culture and energy
proceeded which was to build up Northern Berkshire and Oxfordshire
between the Saxon and the Danish invasions. There only was established
a sufficient concentration of capital for the work and of knowledge
for the application of that wealth.

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

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

Even in its purely civic character, it acquired a position which no
one of the greater northern monasteries could pretend to, through the
building of its bridge in the early fifteenth century. The twin fords
crossing this bend of the river were, though direct and important,
difficult; when they were once bridged and the bridges joined by the
long causeway which still runs across Andersey Island between the old
and the new branches of the Thames, travel was easily diverted from
the bridge of Wallingford to that at Abingdon, and the great western
road running through Farringdon towards the Cotswolds and the valley
of the Severn had Abingdon for its sort of midway market town.

These three great Benedictine monasteries form, as it were, the three
nurseries or seed plots from which civilisation spread out along the
Thames Valley after the destruction wrought by the first and worst
barbarian invasions. All three, as we have seen, go back to the very
beginning of the Christian phase of English history; the origins of
all three merge in those legends which make a twilight between the
fantastic stories of the earlier paganism and the clear records of the
Christian epoch after the re-Latinisation of England. An outpost
beyond these three is the institution of St Frideswides at Oxford.
Beyond that point the upper river, gradually narrowing, losing its
importance for commerce and as a highway, supported no great
monastery, and felt but tardily the economic change wrought by the
foundations lower down the stream.

Chertsey and Westminster certainly, and Abingdon very probably, were
destroyed, or at least sacked, in the Danish invasions, but their
roots lay too deep to allow them to disappear: they re-arose, and a
generation before the Conquest were again by far the principal centres
of production and government in the Thames Valley. Indeed, with the
exception of the string of royal estates upon the banks of the river,
and of the town of Oxford, Chertsey, Westminster and Abingdon were the
only 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 of
the numbers, but especially of the organisation and power, of the
monastic system would appear: that gaps left uninfluenced by it in the
line of the Thames would be filled up, and all the old foundations
themselves would be reconstructed and become new things.

The Conquest is in its way almost as sharp a division in the history
of England as is the landing of St Augustine. In some externals it
made an even greater difference to this island than did the advent of
the Roman Missionaries, though of course, in the fundamental things
upon which the national life is built, the re-entry of England into
European civilisation in the seventh century must count as a far
greater and more decisive event than its first experience of united
and regular government under the Normans in the eleventh. Moreover
although the Conquest largely changed the language of the island,
introduced a conception of law in civil affairs with which the
Anglo-Saxon aristocracy were quite unfamiliar, and began to flood
England with a Gallic admixture which flowed .uninterruptedly for
three hundred years, yet it did not change the intimate philosophy of
the people, and it is only the change of the intimate philosophy of a
people which can have a revolutionary consequence. The Conquest found
England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in rather an isolated
way, thoroughly European. The Normans organised that feudality,
extirpated whatever was unorthodox, or slack in the machinery of the
religious system, and let in the full light of European civilisation
through a wide-open door, which had hitherto been half-closed.

The effect, therefore, of the Conquest was exercised upon the visible
and mutable things of the country rather than upon the nourishing
inward things: but it was very great, and in nothing was it greater
than in its inception of new buildings and the use everywhere of
stone. Under the Normans very nearly all the great religious
foundations of England re-arose, and that within a generation. New
houses also arose, and the mark of that time (which was a second
spring throughout Europe: full of the spirit of the Crusades, and a
complete regeneration of social life) was the rigour of new religious
orders, and especially the transformation of the old Benedictine
monotony.

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

Cluny did not rise by design. It was one of those spontaneous growths
which are characteristic of vigorous and creative times. Those who are
acquainted with the Burgundian blood will not think it fantastic to
imagine the vast reputation of Cluny to have been based upon rhetoric.
It was perhaps the sonorous Burgundian facility for expression and the
inheritance of oratory which belonged to Burgundian soil till
Bossuet's birth, and which still belongs to it, that gave Cluny a sort
of spell over the mind of Western Europe, and which made Cluny a
master in the century which preceded the great change of the Crusades.
From Cluny as a mother house proceeded communities instinct with the
discipline and new life of the reformed order, and though it has been
remarked that these communities were not numerous, in comparison to
the vigour of the movement, yet it should also be noted that they were
nearly always very large and wealthy, that they were in a particular
and close relation to the civil government of the district in which
each was planted, and that their absolute dependence upon the mother
house, and their close observance of one rule, lent the whole order
something of the force of an army.

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

It was in 1121 that the son of the Conqueror brought the Cluniac order
to the little town. From the moment of the foundation of the abbey it
attracted, in part by its geographical position, in part by the fact
that it was the first great new foundation upon the Thames, and in
part by the accident which lent a special devotion or power to one
particular house and which was in this case largely due to the
discipline and character of the Cluniac order, Reading took on a very
high position in England. It had about it, if one may so express
oneself, something more modern, something more direct and political
than was to be found in the old Benedictine houses that had preceded
it. The work it had to do was less material: the fields were already
drained, the life and wealth of the new civilisation had begun, and
throughout the four hundred years of its existence the function of
Reading was rather to entertain the Court, to assist at parliaments,
and to be, throughout, the support of the monarchy. It sprang at once
into this position, and its architecture symbolised to some extent the
rapid command which it acquired, for it preserved to the end the
characteristics of the early century in which it was erected: the
Norman arch, the dog-tooth ornaments, the thick walls, the barbaric
capitals of the early twelfth century.

Before the thirteenth it was in wealth equal to, and in public repute
the superior of, any foundation upon the banks of the Thames with the
exception of Westminster itself, and it forms, with the three
Benedictine foundations, and with the later foundation of Osney, the
last link in the chain of abbeys which ran unbroken from stage to
stage throughout the whole length of the river. And with it ends the
story of those first foundations which completed the recivilisation of
the Valley.

Reading was not the only Cluniac establishment upon the Thames.
Another, and earlier one, was to be found at Bermondsey; but its
proximity to London and its distance down river forbid it having any
place in these pages. It was founded immediately after the Conquest;
Lanfranc colonised it with French monks; it became an abbacy at the
very end of the fourteenth century, and was remarkable for its
continual accretion of wealth, an accretion in some part due to the
growing importance of London throughout its existence. At the end of
the thirteenth century it stands worth £280. At the time of its
dissolution, on the first of January 1538, in spite of the much higher
value of money in the sixteenth century as compared with the
thirteenth, 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 almost
contemporary with Reading.

It stood just outside the walls of Oxford Castle to the west, and upon
the bank of the main stream of the Thames, and owed its foundation to
the Conqueror's local governing family of Oilei. Though at the moment
of its suppression it hardly counted a fifth of the revenues of
Westminster (which must be our standard throughout all this
examination), yet its magnificence profoundly affected contemporaries,
and has left a great tradition. It must always be remembered that
these great monasteries were not only receivers of revenue as are our
modern rich, but were also producers or, rather, could be producers
when they chose, and that therefore the actual economic power of any
one foundation might always be higher, and often was very considerably
higher, than the nominal revenue, the dead income, which passed to the
spoliators of the sixteenth century. When a town is sacked the army
gets a considerable loot, but nothing like what the value was of the
city 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 large
surplus for ornament and extension, it was for 400 years the principal
building upon the upper river, catching the eye from miles away up by
Eynsham meadows and forming a noble gate to the University town for
those who approached it from the west by the packway, of which traces
still remain, and over the bridges which the Conqueror had built. So
deep was the impress of Osney upon the locality, and even upon the
national Government, that Henry proposed, as in the case of
Westminster, to make of the building one of his new cathedrals, and to
establish there his new See of Oxford. The determination, however,
lasted but for a very short time. In a few years the financial
pressure was too much for him; he transferred the see to the old
Church of St Frideswides, where it still remains, and gave up Osney to
loot. It was looted very thoroughly.

The smaller monasteries need hardly a mention. At the head of them
comes Eynsham, worth more than half as much as Osney, and a very
considerable place. Founded as a colony or adjunct to Stow, in
Lincolnshire, it outlived the importance of the parent house, and was
at the height of its prosperity immediately before the Dissolution.

Eynsham affords a very good instance of the way in which the fabric in
these superb temples disappeared. As late as the early eighteenth
century there was still standing the whole of the west front; the two
high towers, the splendid west window, and the sculptured doorways
were complete, though they remained but as a fragment of a ruined
building. A century and a half passed and the whole had disappeared,
carted away to build walls and stables for the local squires, or sold
by the local squires for rubble.

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

With Dorchester, which had existed from the twelfth century, and which
was worth almost half as much as Eynsham, and with the considerable
Cell of Hurley which attached to Westminster, the list is complete. It
is interesting to know that the church at Dorchester was saved by the
local patriotism of one man, who left half his fortune for the
purchase of it, and that not in order to ruin it and to sell the
stones 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 the
later Middle Ages. It was in the Dark Ages that the great Benedictine
work was done, the pastures drained, the woods planted, the
settlements established. It was in the early Middle Ages, in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in the first half of the
fourteenth--in a word, before the Black Death--that the work of the
new and vigorous foundations, and the revived energy of the older
ones, spread Gothic architecture, scholastic learning, and the whole
reinvigorated social system of the time, from Oxford to Westminster;
and the historian who notes the social and economic effects of
monasticism in Western Europe, however enthusiastic he may be in
defence of that force, cannot with truth lend it between the Black
Death and the Reformation a vigour which it did not possess. It had
tended to become, in the fifteenth century, a fixed social institution
like any other, one might almost say a bundle of proprietary rights
like any other. And though it is easy now to perceive what ruin was
caused by the sudden destruction, the contemporaries of the last age
of Great Houses were perpetually considering their privilege and their
immovable tradition rather than the remaining functions which the
monasteries fulfilled in the State.

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

Sheen was a Charterhouse, and it merits observation not only from the
peculiar characteristics of the Carthusian Order, but also from its
considerable position so near to Westminster and not yet overshadowed
by the greatness either of that abbey or of Chertsey. It received,
from its land in England alone, a revenue of close upon two-thirds of
that which Westminster enjoyed. Recent in its origin (it had existed
for only just over 100 years when Henry VIII. attacked it), not
without that foreign flavour which, rightly or wrongly, was ascribed
in this island to the Carthusian Order, rigid in doctrine, and of a
magnificent temper in the defence of religion, these Carthusians, like
their brethren in London, formed a very natural target for the King's
attack. I include them only because notes upon the mediæval
foundations, would be quite imperfect were there no mention of Sheen,
late as the origin of the community was, and little as it had to do
with the historic development of the valley.

This completes the list of the greater foundations; with the lesser
ones it would only be possible to deal in pages devoted to the
Monastic 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, the
communities, early and late, of Medmenham and Cholsey, the priories of
Lechlade and of Cricklade (which might have occupied a larger space
than was available), must be passed over. Even Godstow, famous as it
is from the early legend of Rosamond, and considerable as was its
function both of education and of retreat, cannot be included in the
list of those principal foundations which alone take rank as
originators of the prosperity of the valley.

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

Westminster, Chertsey, Sheen, Reading, Abingdon, and Osney
disappeared.

One writes the list straight off without considering, taking it for
granted that everything which could have roused the cupidity of that
generation necessarily disappeared: and as one writes it one remembers
that, after all, Westminster survived. Its survival was an accident,
which will be further considered. But that survival, so far from
redeeming, emphasises and throws into relief the destruction of the
rest.

Of these enduring monuments of human energy and, what is more
important still in the control of energy, human certitude, what
besides Westminster survived? Of Chertsey there is perhaps a gateway
and part of a wall; of Sheen nothing; of Reading a few flints built
into modern work; of Abingdon a gateway, and a buttress or two that
long served to support a brewhouse; of Osney nothing, contrariwise,
electric works and the slums of a modern town. All these were
Westminsters. In all of these was to be discovered that patient
process of production which argues the continuity, and therefore the
dignity, of human civilisation. Each had the glass which we can no
longer paint, the vivid, living, and happy grotesque in sculpture
which only the best of us can so much as understand; each had a
thousand and another thousand details of careful work in stone meant
to endure, if not for ever, at least into such further centuries as
might have the added faith and added knowledge to restore them in
greater plenitude. The whole thing has gone. It has gone to no
purpose. Nothing has been built upon it save a wandering host of rich
and careworn men.

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

The upper river would have been much the same, but as he came to that
part of it which was wealthy and populous, as he turned the corner of
Witham Hill, he would already have seen far off, larger and a little
nearer than the many spires of Oxford, a building such as to-day we
never see save in our rare and half-deserted cathedral country towns.
It was the Abbey of Osney. It would have been his landmark, as
Hereford is the landmark for a man to-day rowing up to Wye, or the new
spire of Chichester for a man that makes harbour out of the channel
past Bisham upon a rising tide. And as he passed beneath it (for, of
the many branches here, the main stream took him that way) he would
have seen a great and populous place with nothing ruinous in it, all
well ordered, busy with men and splendid; here again that which we now
look upon as a relic and a circumstance of repose was once alive and
strong.

Upon his way beneath the old stone bridge which crossed the ford, and
shooting between the lifted paddles of the weirs, he would, once below
Oxford, have seen much the same pastures that we see to-day; but in a
few hours Abingdon, the next to Osney, would have fixed his eyes as
Osney had before.

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

Once more in the many reaches between Abingdon and Wallingford, the
sights would have been those which a man sees now. And though at
Wallingford he would have had before him a town of brilliant red tiles
and timberwork, and a town perhaps larger than that which we see
to-day, yet (could such a man come to life again) the contrast would
not strike him here, and still less in the fields below, so much as
when he came near to Reading.

That everything else of age in Reading has disappeared one need not
say, but were that traveller here to-day, the thing that he would most
seek for and most lack would be the bulk of the building at the
farther end of the town.

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

Nothing that he had seen in this journey would more have sunk into the
mind of a contemporary man, nothing that he would lack were he
resuscitated to-day would leave a want more grievous. In the
destruction of Reading the people of this country lost something which
not even their aptitude for foreign travel can replace.

Windsor, as he passed, stood up above the right of him, not very
different from what we still admire as we come down from Bray and look
up to the jutting fore-tower which is worthy of Coucy. But down below
Windsor (after whose bridge we to-day see nothing whatever of value),
just after he had passed the wooden bridge of Staines and shot the
weir 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 down
stream the great mass of Chertsey Abbey. If Reading had the solidity
and the barbaric grandeur of Durham, Chertsey had in an ecclesiastical
way the vastness of Windsor, and must have seemed like a town to
anyone approaching it thus down the river. The enclosed area of the
abbey buildings alone covered four acres.

This impression which such a traveller would have received of the
great religious houses was enhanced by something more than the
magnitude and splendour of the buildings. Divided as was opinion at
that moment upon their value to the State, and jealous as had become
landless men of the long traditions and privileges of the monks, these
still represented not only their own wealth but the general
accumulation of capital and the continued prosperity of the river
valley. It is true to say, in spite of the difficulty of appreciating
such a truth in the light of our knowledge of what was to follow, that
the destruction of such foundations would have seemed to the traveller
before the Dissolution inconceivable. Nevertheless it came.

These notes are not the place in which to discuss that most difficult
of all historical problems--I mean the causes which led the nation to
abandon in a couple of generations the whole of its traditions and to
adopt, not spontaneously but at the bidding of a comparatively small
body of wealthy men, a new scheme of society. But it is of value to
consider the economic aspect of the thing, and to show what it was
that Henry desired to seize when his policy of Dissolution was
secretly formed.

The economic function of the monastic system in the Middle Ages, and
especially in the later Middle Ages, is one to which no sufficient
attention has been given by historians.

They collected, as does no modern agency, wealth from very various
sources, scattered up and down the whole of the kingdom, and often
farther afield, throughout Europe, and exercised the whole economic
power so drawn together in one centre, and so founded a permanent
nucleus of wealth in the place where the community resided.

We are indeed to-day accustomed to a similar effect in the action of
our wealthy families. The rents of the London poor, a toll upon the
produce of Egypt, of the Argentine, or of India, all flow into some
country house in the provinces, where it revives in an effective
demand for production, or lends to the whole countryside a wealth
which, of itself, it could never have produced. The neighbourhood of
Aylesbury, the palaces of the larger territorials, are modern examples
of this truth, that the economic power of a district does not reside
in its productive capacity, but in its capacity for effective demand.
And it is undoubtedly true that if there were anything permanent in
modern society we should be witnessing in the wealthier quarters of
Paris and London, in the Riviera in the holiday part of Egypt, and in
certain centres of provincial luxury in England, in France, and in
Western Germany, the foundation of a permanent economic superiority.

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

In the Middle, and especially in the latter Middle, Ages it was
otherwise. The great religious houses not only tended to accumulate
wealth and to perpetuate it in the same hands (they could not gamble
it away nor disperse it in luxury; they could hardly waste it by
mismanagement), but they were also permanently fixed on one spot.

Such an institution as Reading, for example, or as Abingdon, went on
perpetually receiving its immense revenues for generation after
generation, and were under no temptation or rather had no capacity for
spending it elsewhere than in the situation where their actual
buildings were to be found.

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

The growth of great towns, one of the last phases of our national
development, one which finds its example in the Thames Valley as
elsewhere, and one to which we shall allude before closing these notes
upon the river, has somewhat obscured the quality of this original
accumulation of wealth along the Thames. But when we come to consider
the figures of the census at an earlier time, before modern
commercialism and the railway had drawn wealth and population into
fewer and larger centres, we shall see how considerable was the string
of towns which had grown up along the stream. And we shall especially
see how fairly divided among them was the population, and, it may be
presumed, the wealth and the rateable value, of the valley.

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

Economists speak of the economic importance of such-and-such a spot
because material of use to man-kind is there discovered. Thus, people
commonly point to the economic importance of the valleys all round the
Pennine Range in England because they contain coal and metals, and to
the economic importance of a small district in South Wales for the
same reason.

A further consideration has admitted that not only places where things
useful to mankind are discovered, but places naturally fitted for
their exchange have an economic importance peculiarly their own.
Indeed, the more history is studied from the point of view of
economics, the more does this kind of natural opportunity emerge, and
the less does the political importance of purely productive areas
appear. The mountain districts of Spain, the Cornish peninsula, were
centres 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 in
Johannesburg, are perhaps more numerous, but as a political force no
wealthier for the opportunities of their sites: the economic power
which they ultimately produce is first concentrated in the centres of
exchange 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 other
two, it has naturally been overlooked in the analysis of the
universities. This basis is the basis of residence. Given that a
conqueror, or a seat of Government established by routine, is
established in a particular place and chooses there to remain; or
given that the pleasure attached to a particular site--its natural
pleasures or the inherited grandeur of its buildings or what not--make
it an established residence for those who control the expenditure of
wealth, then that place will acquire an economic importance which has
for its foundation nothing more material than the human will. Thither
wealth, wherever produced, will flow, and there will be discovered
that ultimate motive force of all production and of all exchange, the
effective demand of those possessors who alone can set the industrial
machine in motion.

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

It is particularly true to-day. To-day not the natural centres of
exchange, still less the natural centres of production, determine what
places in the world shall be wealthy and what shall not. The surplus
of the wealth produced by the Egyptian fellaheen is carefully
collected by English officials and largely consumed in Paris; the
wealth produced by the manufacturers of North England is largely spent
in the south of England and upon the Continent; until their recent and
successful revolt, the wealth produced by the Irish peasantry was
largely spent in London and upon the Riviera.

The economic importance, then, of the Thames Valley has not
diminished, but increased since South England ceased to be the main
field of production.

The tradition of Government, the habitual residence of the wealthy and
directing classes of the community, have centred more and more in
London. The old establishment of luxury in the Thames Valley has
perpetually increased since the decline of its industrial and
agricultural importance, and undoubtedly, if it were possible to draw
a map indicating the proportion of economic _demand_ throughout the
country, the Valley of the Thames would appear, in proportion to its
population, by far the most concentrated district in England, although
it contains but one very large town, and although it is innocent of
any very important modern industry.

It is interesting, in connection with this economic aspect of the
Thames Valley, to note that, alone of the great river valleys of
Europe, it has no railway system parallel to its banks. There is no
series of productive centres which could give rise to such a railway
system. The Great Western Railway follows the river now some distance
upon one side, now some distance upon the other, as far as Oxford; but
it does not depend in any way upon the stream, and where the course of
the stream is irregular it goes on its straight course, throwing out
branch lines to the smaller towns upon the banks: for the railway
depends, so far as this section is concerned, upon the industries of
the Midlands and of the west. Were you to cut off the sources of
carriage which it draws upon from beyond the Valley of the Thames it
could 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 our
main river valley is chiefly a spending power. It produces little and,
though it exchanges more of human wealth, it is the artificial
machinery of exchange rather than the physical movement of goods that
enriches it.

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

A list of monastic institutions upon the river, if we exclude the
friars, the hospitals, and such foundations as made part of town or
university life, is as follows:--a priory at Cricklade, another at
Lechlade, the Abbey at Eynsham (sufficiently near the stream to be
regarded as riparian), the Nunnery and School of Godstow, the great
Abbeys of Osney and Rewley, the Benedictine Nunnery at Littlemore, the
great Abbey of Abingdon, the Abbey of Dorchester, Cholsey (but this
had been destroyed before the Conquest, and was never revived), the
Augustinian Nunnery at Goring, the great Cluniac Abbey at Reading, the
Cell of Westminster at Hurley, the Abbey of Medmenham, the Abbey of
Bisham just opposite Marlow, and the Nunnery of Little Marlow; the
Nunnery of Burnham, which, though nearly a mile and a half from the
stream, should count from the position of its property as a riparian
foundation, the little Nunnery of Ankerwike, the great Benedictine
Abbey of Chertsey, the Carthusians of Sheen, and the Benedictines of
Westminster, to which may be added the foundation of Bermondsey.

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

Indeed it was perhaps no small cause of the unpopularity, such as it
was, into which the same monasteries had locally fallen, that so much
economic power was concentrated in so few hands. The greater
foundations throughout the country possessed but a little more than
3000 religious, and even when all the nuns, friars, and professed
religious of the towns are counted, we do not arrive at more than 8000
in religion in an England which must have had a population of at least
4,000,000, and quite possibly a much larger number; nor could the mobs
foresee that the class which would seize upon the abbey lands would
concentrate the means of production into still fewer hands, until at
last the mass of Englishmen should have no lot in England.

Moreover, it would be an error to consider the numbers of the
religious alone. The smaller foundations, and especially the convents
of nuns, did certainly support but small numbers, and this probably
accounts for the ease with which they were suppressed, but, on the
other hand, their possessions also were small. In the case of the
great foundations, though one can count but 3000 monks and canons, the
number of them must be multiplied many times if we are to arrive at
the total of the communities concerned. Reading, Abingdon, and the
rest were little cities, with a whole population of direct dependants
living within the walls, and a still larger number of families
without, who indirectly depended upon the revenues of the abbey for
their livelihood.

Another and perhaps a better way of presenting to a modern reader the
overwhelming economic power of the mediæval monastic system,
especially its economic power in the Valley of the Thames, would be to
add to such a list of houses a map of that valley showing the manors
in ecclesiastical hands, the freeholds and leaseholds held by the
great 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 tributaries
covered with ecclesiastical influence upon every side.

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

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

In this list I concern myself only with the eight largest houses in
the whole length of the river. I do not mention parishes from which
the revenues were not important (though these were numerous, for the
abbeys held a large number of small parcels of land). I do not mention
the 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 not
themselves set upon the banks of the Thames. Whatever Thames land paid
rent 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. Scores
of holdings, such as those of Lechlade, which was dissolved in
Catholic times, Windsor, which was exchanged as we have seen at the
time of the Conquest, I omit and confine myself only to the lands held
at the time of the Dissolution.

Yet these lands--though they concern only eight monasteries, though I
mention only those actually upon the banks of the river, and though I
omit from the list all small payments--put before one a series of
names which, to those familiar with the Thames, seems almost like a
voyage along the stream and appears to cover every portion of the
landscape with which travellers upon the river are familiar. Thus we
have 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, Stanton
Harcourt; and all this crowd of names upon the upper river is arrived
at without counting such properties as attached to the great
monasteries within towns, as, for example, to the monasteries of
Oxford. It is true that not all these names represent complete
manorial ownership. In a number of cases they stand for portions of
the manor only, but even in this list ten at least, and possibly
twelve, stand for complete manorial ownership. Then one must add
Sonning, Wargreave, Tilehurst, Chertsey, Egham, Cobham, Richmond, Ham,
Mortlake, Sheen, Kew, Chiswick, Staines, etc., of which many of the
most important, such as Staines, are full manorial possessions.

It is clearly evident, from such a very imperfect and rapidly drawn
list, what was the economic power of the great houses, and one may
conclude, even from the basis of such imperfect evidence, that the
directing force of economic effort throughout the Thames Valley was to
be found, right up to the Dissolution, in the chapter houses of
Reading, of Chertsey, and of Westminster, of Abingdon and of the
lesser houses.

In a word, the business of Henry might be compared to what may be in
future the business of some democratic European Government when it
lays its hands upon the fortunes of the great financial houses, but
with this double difference, that the confiscation to which Henry bent
himself was a confiscation of capital whose product did not leave the
country, and could not be used for anti-national purposes, as also
that it was the confiscation of wealth which never acted secretly and
which had no interest, as have our chief moneylenders, in political
corruption. It was a vast undertaking and, in the truest sense of the
word, a revolutionary one, such as Europe had not seen until that
moment, and perhaps has not seen since.

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

The change of religion, in so far as a change was threatened (and upon
that the mass of the parish priests themselves, and still more the
mass of the laity, were very hazy), did not affect the mind of a
people famous throughout Europe for their intense and often
superstitious devotion; but in some odd way the segregation of the
great communities, their vast wealth, and perhaps an external
contradiction between their original office and their present
privilege, forbade any united or widespread enthusiasm in their
defence.

Englishmen rose upon every side when they thought that the vital
mysteries of the Faith were threatened. The risings were only put down
by the use of foreign mercenaries and by the most execrable cruelty,
nor would even these means have sufficed had the rebels formed a clear
plan, or had the purpose of Henry himself in matters of religion been
definite and capable of definite attack. But the country, though ready
to fight for Dogma, was not ready to fight for the monasteries. It
might, perhaps, have fought if the attack upon them had been direct
and universal. If Henry had laid down a programme of suppressing
religious bodies in general, he probably could not have carried it
out, but he laid down no such programme. The Dissolution of the
smaller houses was imagined by the most devout to be a statesmanlike
measure. Many of them, like Medmenham, were decayed; their wealth was
not to be used for the private luxury of the King or of nobles; it was
to swell the revenues of the greater foundations or to be applied to
pious or honourable public use. But the example once given, the attack
upon the greater houses necessarily followed; and the whole episode is
a vivid lesson in the capital principle of statesmanship that men are
governed by routine and by the example of familiar things. Render
possible to the mass of men the conception that the road, they
habitually follow is not a necessity of their lives, and you may exact
of them almost any sacrifice or hope to see them witness without
disgust almost any enormity.

Moreover, the great monasteries were each severally tricked. The one
was asked to surrender at one time, another at another; the one for
this reason, the other for that. The suppression of Chertsey, the
example perpetually recurring in these pages, was solemnly promised to
be but a transference of the community from one spot to another; then
when the transference had taken place the second community was
ruthlessly destroyed. There is ample evidence to show that each
community had its special hope of survival, and that each, until quite
the end of the process, regarded its fate, when that fate fell upon
it, as something exceptional and peculiar to itself. Some, or rather
many, purchased temporary exemption, doubtless secure in the belief
that their bribe would make that extension permanent. Their payments
were accepted, but the contracts depending upon them were never
fulfilled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No sensible man needs to be told that such a comparison is one of the
very numerous parts of historical inquiry in which a better result is
arrived at in proportion as the matter is more generally and largely
observed. It is one in which detail is more fatal to a man even than
inaccuracy, and it is one in which hardly a single observer who has
been really soaked in his subject has avoided the most ludicrous
conclusions.

Again, no man of common sense need be told that a rigid multiple is
absolutely impossible of discovery. The search for such a multiple is
like a search for an index number which shall apply to all the varying
economic habits of the modern world. One cannot say: "Multiply prices
by 10" or "Multiply prices by 20," and thus afford the modern reader a
sound basis; but one can say, after some observation: "Multiply by
such-and-such a multiple" (wherever very large and varied expenditure
is concerned) and you will certainly have a minimum; though how much
_more_ such expenditure may have represented in those very different
and 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 the
basis of wheat. One may say that wheat in normal years in the early
sixteenth century stood at about an eighth of wheat in what I may call
the normal years of the nineteenth, before the influx of Colonial
produce began to be serious, and before the depreciation of silver
combined with other causes to disturb prices.

Those who have taken wheat for their basis, recognising, as even they
must 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 it
is a ready rule, has entered into many books upon the Reformation. The
early Tudor penny is turned into the modern shilling.

But this basis of calculation is false, because the eating of wheaten
bread was not then the universal thing it is to-day. The English
proletarian of to-day is, in comparison with the large well-to-do
class of his fellow-citizens, a far poorer man than his ancestry ever
were. 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 we
find that beef will permit a higher multiple than wheat. Beef will
give you a multiple of 12, and just as wheat, giving you a multiple of
8, permits a somewhat higher general multiple, so beef, giving you a
multiple of 12, permits a higher one. So if we were to make beef our
staple instead of wheat we should get a multiple of 13 or 14 by which
to turn the money of the first third of the sixteenth century into the
money of our own time.

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

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

The consideration of but a few sets of prices such as those we have
quoted shows that the ordinary multiple might be anything between 8
and 24, with a prejudice in favour of the higher rather than the lower
figure. But there are other lines of proof which converge upon the
matter, 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 a
working man, a shilling is thought very high, and is only given in the
case of first-rate artisans; and if we consider the pre-Reformation
period, when the position of the labourer was, of course, much better
than it was under Elizabeth, or ever has been since, we find something
of 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 that
many labourers have less than a pound a year in actual wages, and that
wages over this sum, up to two pounds, for instance, form a sort of
aristocracy of labour that can afford to pay taxation. Of course some
part of the wages so counted were paid in part board and lodging,
especially in the agricultural industries, but still, the reception of
240 pence for a year's work in money gives you a multiple of far more
than 20: you will not get a man about a house and garden for less than
thirty pounds though you feed and house him, and the unhoused outside
labourer gets, first and last, over fifty pounds at the least.

When the Reformation was in full swing the currency was debased almost
out of recognition, and before the death of Edward VI. prices are
rendered so fictitious by inflation that they are useless for our
purpose. It is only with the currency of Elizabeth that they became
true measures of value once more.

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

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

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

A brief historical essay, such as is this, is no place in which to
discuss any general theory of economics; were there space to do so,
even in an elementary fashion, it would be possible to show how the
increase of wealth in a state is, on account of the increased
elasticity in circulation of the currency, almost independent of the
movement of prices. But without going into formulæ; of this
complexity, a couple of homely comparisons will suffice to show what a
much 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 modern
Europe. Prices, in the competition of modern commerce and the ease of
modern travel, are levelled up very evenly throughout the area that he
traverses. Yet such a man, should he settle in a village of Spanish
peasants, would appear of almost illimitable wealth, because he would
have at his command an almost indefinite amount of those simple
necessities which form the whole category of their consumable values.
Or again, let such a man settle in a place where the variety of
consumable values is large, but where the distribution of wealth is
fairly equal, and the small income, therefore, a normal social
phenomenon--as, for instance, among the lower middle class of
Paris-there again his £2000 a year would be of much greater effect
than in a society where wealth was unequally divided, for it would
produce that effect in a medium where the satisfaction of nearly every
individual around him was easily reached upon perhaps a tenth of such
an income.

When all this is taken into consideration we can begin to see what the
great monasteries were at the time of their dissolution. It is hardly
an exaggeration to multiply the list of mere values by 20 to bring it
into 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 short
of £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 the
luxury of our modern rich was unknown, in which the squire was usually
but three or four times richer than one of his farmers, in which great
wealth, where it existed, attached rather to an office than to a
person. In general, the multiple of 20 must be further multiplied by a
coefficient which is not arithmetically determinable, but which we see
I to be very large by a general comparison of the small, poor, and
equable 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 that
the revenues of Westminster at its dissolution in the first days of
1540 were some £80,000 a year in our modern money, we are far
underestimating the economic position of Westminster in the State.
There are to-day many private men in London who dispose of as great an
income, and who, for all their ostentation, are not remarkable; but
the income of Westminster in the early sixteenth century, when wealth
was far more equally divided than it is now, and when the accumulation
of it was far less, was a very different matter to what we mean to-day
by £80,000 a year. It produced more of the effect which we might
to-day imagine would be produced by a million. The fortune of but very
few families could so much as compare with it, and the fortunes of
individual families, especially of wealthy families, were, during the
existence 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 the
aristocracy in the Civil Wars, by far the richest legal personality in
Britain. The temptation to sack Westminster was something like the
temptation presented to our financial powers to-day to get at the
rubber of the Congo Basin or at the unexploited coal of Northern
China.

By a miracle that temptation was withstood. For the moment Henry
intended to construct a bishopric with its cathedral out of the old
corporation and abbey. He might have done so and yet have yielded
immediately after to his cupidity, as he did with the Cathedral of
Osney. It ended in the form which it at present maintains. The greater
part of its revenues were, of course, stolen, but the fabric was
spared and enough income was retained to permit the continuous life of
Westminster 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 generation
to imagine Westminster Abbey absent only from the national life; yet
Abingdon is gone, all but a gateway, Reading all but a few ruined
walls, Chertsey has utterly disappeared, so has Osney, so has
Sheen--to mention the great river houses alone: Westminster alone
survives, and the only reason it survives is that it had about it at
the time of the destruction of the monasteries a royal flavour, and
that its existence helped to bolster up the Tudors. But for that it
would have been sold like the rest, the lead would have been stripped
from its roof, the glass broken and thrown aside, and a Cecil or a
Howard would have built himself a palace with the stones. It is but a
chance 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 taken
as a symbol of all that England had been for the thirty generations
since Christianity had come to her, and then, in two generations of
men, ceased suddenly to be. There is, perhaps, not one in a thousand
of the vague Colonials who regard Westminster Abbey as a sort of
inevitable centre for Britishers and Anglo-Saxons, who has so much as
heard of Chertsey. There is perhaps but one in a hundred of historical
students who could attach a definite connection to the name, and yet
Chertsey 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 not
immediately dispersed, they were taken off to fill that strange new
foundation of Bisham, of which we shall hear later in connection with
the river, and which in its turn immediately disappeared. Not a year
had passed, the June of 1538 was not over, when the new community at
Bisham was scattered as the old one at Chertsey had been.

Of the abbey itself nothing is left but a broken piece of gateway, and
the few stones of a wall. But a relic of it remains in Black Cherry
Fair, a market granted to the abbey in the fifteenth century and
formerly 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 so
in the full expectation of continuing their monastic life at Bisham,
and if Bisham was treacherously destroyed immediately after the fault
does not lie at their door.

With Abingdon it was otherwise. The last prior was perhaps the least
steadfast of all the many bewildered or avaricious characters that
meet 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 generations
of Englishmen had left in his hands, and he had a reward in the gift
not only of a very large pension but also of the Manor of Cumnor,
which had been before the destruction of the religious orders the
sanatorium or country house of the monks. He obtained it: and from his
time on Cumnor has borne an air of desolation and of murder, nor does
any part of his own palace remain.

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

What filled the void so made? The answer to this question is, the
Oligarchy: the landed class which had been threatening for so long to
assume the Government of England stepped into the shoes of the great
houses, and by this addition to their already considerable power
achieved the destruction of the monarchy and within 100 years
proceeded to the ordering of the English people under a small group of
wealthy men, a form of Government which to this day England alone of
all Christian nations suffers or enjoys.

This general statement must not be taken to mean that the oligarchic
system, whose basis lies in the ownership of land, was immediately
created by the Dissolution of the great monasteries. The development
of the territorial system of England, of which system the banks of the
Thames afford as good a picture as any in England, can be traced
certainly 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 nearly
all of them in social constitution, descended from the owners of the
Roman Villas which had seen the petty but recurrent pirate invasions
of the fifth and sixth centuries.

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

Such a system of groups _had_ arisen in Gaul, and to that difference
ultimately 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 over
to his French kindred and dependants were scattered, and that, though
he framed a vigorous feudal rule centring in his own hands, the
ancient customs of the populace, coupled with the lack of any bond
between scattered and locally independent units, forbade that rule to
endure.

William's order was not a century old when the recrudescence of the
former manorial independence was felt in the reign of Henry II. Under
the personal unpopularity of his son, John, it blazed out into
successful revolt, and, in spite of the veil thrown over underlying
and permanent customs by such strong feudal kings as the first and the
third Edwards, the independence and power of the village landlord
remained the chief and growing character of English life. It expressed
itself in the quality of the local English Parliament, in the support
of the usurping Lancastrian dynasty--in twenty ways that converge and
mingle towards the close of the Middle Ages.

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

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

The cause of this rapid enfeeblement of the Crown lay largely in the
changed proportion of wealth. The King, until the middle of the
sixteenth century, had been far wealthier than any one of his
subjects. By a deliberate act, the breaking up of ecclesiastical
tenure, the Crown offered an opportunity to the wealthier of those
subjects so enormously to increase their revenues as to overshadow
itself; in a little more than a century after the throwing open of the
monastic lands the King is an embarrassed individual, with every issue
of expenditure ear-marked, every source of it controlled, and his very
person, as it were, mortgaged to a plutocracy. The squires had not
only added to their revenues the actual amounts produced by the sites
and estates of the old religious foundations, they had been able by
this sudden accession of wealth to shoot ahead in their competition
with their fellow-citizens. The _counterweight_ to the power of the
local landlord disappeared with the disappearance of the monastery.

To show how the religious houses had furnished a powerful
counterweight by which the Central Government and the populace could
continue to oppose the growing power of the landed oligarchy, we may
take all the southern bank of the Thames from Buscot to Windsor. We
find at the time of the Conquest twelve royal manors and fifteen
religious; only the nine remaining were under private lords. Four and
a half centuries later, at the time of the Dissolution, the royal
manors have passed for the most part into private hands, but the
manors in the hands of the religious houses have actually increased in
number.

At this point it is important to note an economic phenomenon which
appears at first sight accidental, but which, on examination, is found
to spring from calculable political causes. At the moment of the
Dissolution it was apparently in the power of the Crown to have
concentrated the revenues of all these monastic manors into its own
hands, and this typical stretch of country, the Berkshire shore, shows
how economically powerful the Central Government of England might have
become had the property surrendered to the Crown been kept in the
hands 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 he
must 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 been
able to do so the Central Government of England would have become by
far the strongest thing in Europe. It is conceivable, though in
consideration of the national character doubtful, that with so
powerful an instrument of government, England, instead of standing
aside from the rapid bureaucratic recasting of European civilisation
which was the work of the French Crown, might have led the way in that
chief of modern experiments. One can imagine the Stuarts, had they
possessed revenue, doing what the Bourbons did: one can imagine the
modern State developing under an English Crown wealthier than any
other European Government, and the re-birth of Europe happening just
to the north, instead of just to the south, of the Channel.

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

When of three forces which still form an equilibrium two are
stationary and one is pressing upon these two, then, if either of the
stationary forces be removed, that which was pressing upon both
overwhelms the stationary force that remains. The monastic system had
been marking time for over 100 years, and in certain political aspects
of its power had perhaps slightly dwindled. The monarchy, for all its
splendour, was in actual resources no more than it had been for some
generations. Pressing upon either of these two institutions was the
rising and still rising force of the squires. It is not wonderful that
under such conditions the spoil fell to the younger and advancing
power.

Consider, for example, the extraordinary anxiety of so apparently
powerful a king as Henry for the formal consent of the Commons to his
acts. It has been represented as part of the Tudor national policy and
what not, but those who write thus have not perhaps smiled, as has the
present writer, over the names of those who sat for the English shires
in the Parliament which assented to the Dissolution of the great
monastic houses. Here is a Ratcliffe from Northumberland, and a
Collingwood; here is a Dacre, a Musgrave, a Blenkinsop; the Constables
are there, and the Nevilles from Yorkshire; the Tailboys of Lincoln, a
Schaverell, 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 from
East Anglia--a Butler; from Surrey a Carew, and that FitzWilliam whose
appetite for the religious spoils proved so insatiable; here is a
Blount out of Shropshire; a Lyttleton, a Talbot (and yet _another_
Russell!), a Darrell, a Paulet, a Courtney, (to see what could be
picked 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 significant
names; and the "Constitution" had little to do then, and has little to
do now, with their domination. Wealth was and is their instrument of
power.

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

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

As to the first, it put the National Government, dependent as it still
largely was upon the customary and fixed payments, into a perpetual
embarrassment. Where it still received nothing but the customary
shilling, it had to pay out three for material and wages, whose price
had risen and was rising. In this embarrassment, in spite of every
subterfuge and shift, the Crown was in perpetual, urgent, and
increasing need. Rigid and novel taxes were imposed, loans were raised
and not repaid, but something far more was needed to save the
situation, with prices still rising as the years advanced. Ready money
from those already in possession of perhaps half the arable land of
England was an obvious source, and into their pockets flowed, as by
the force of gravitation, the funded wealth which had once supported
the old religion. Hardly ever at more than ten years' purchase,
sometimes at far less, the Crown turned its new rentals into ready
money, 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 other
than a Tudor had been upon the throne, not all at least of this
national inheritance would have been dissipated. One can imagine a
character--tenacious, pure, narrow and subtle, intent upon dignity,
and with a natural suspicion of rivals--which might have saved some
part of the estates for posterity. Charles I., for example, had he
been born 100 years earlier, might very well have done the thing.

But the Tudors, for all their violence, were fundamentally weak. There
was always some vice or passion to interrupt the continuity of their
policy--even Mary, who was not the offspring of caprice, had inherited
the mental taint of the Spanish house--and before the last of the
family had died, while still old men were living who, as children, had
seen the monasteries, nearly all this vast treasure had found its way
into the pockets of the squires. In the middle of the seventeenth
century every one of these villages is under a private landlord:
before the close of it even the theoretical link of their feudal
dependence upon the Crown is snapped: and the two centuries between
that time and our own have seen the power of the new landlords
steadily maintained and latterly vastly increased.

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

The point is of very considerable importance, though not easy to seize
for anyone unacquainted with the way in which the territorial
oligarchy has been built up or ignorant of the present conditions of
English village life.

At the close of the Middle Ages the lord of a manor in England, though
possessed of a larger proportion of the land than were his colleagues
in other countries, but rarely could claim so much as one half of the
acreage of a parish; the rest was common, in which his rights were
strictly limited and defined, to the advantage of the poor, and also
side by side with common was to be found a number of partially and
wholly independent tenures, over which the squire had little or no
control, from copyholds which did furnish him occasional sums of
money, to freeholds which were practically independent of him.

The monasteries possessed parcels of this sort everywhere. To give but
one example: Chertsey had twenty acres of freehold pasturage in the
Manor of Cobham; but it is useless to give examples of a thing which
was as common as the renting of a house to-day. Now these small
parcels formed a most valuable foundation upon which the independence
of similar lay parcels could repose. The squire might be tempted to
bully a four-acre man out of his land, but he could not bully the
Abbot of Abingdon, or of Reading. And so long as these small parcels
were sanctioned by the power of the great houses, so long they were
certain to endure in the hands even of the smallest and the humblest
of the tenants. To-day in a modern village where a gentleman possesses
such an island of land, better still where several do, there at once
arises a tendency and an opportunity for the smaller men to acquire
and to retain. The present writer could quote a Sussex village in the
centre of which were to be found, but thirty years ago, more than
half-a-dozen freeholds. They disappeared: in its prosperity "The
Estate" extinguished them. The next heir in his embarrassment has
handed over the whole lump to a Levantine for a loan. Had the Old
Squire spared the small freeholds they would have come in as
purchasers and would have increased their number during the later
years when the principal landlord, his son, was gradually falling into
poverty and drink.

When the monasteries were gone the disappearance of the small men
gradually began. It was hastened by the extinction of that old
tradition which made the Church a customary landlord exacting quit
rents always less than the economic value of the land, and, what with
the security of tenure and the low rental, creating a large tenant
right. This tenant right vested in the lucky dependants of the Church
did indeed create intense local jealousies that help to account for
much of the antagonism to the monastic houses. But the future showed
that the benefits conferred, though irregular and privileged, were
more than the landless men could hope to expect when they had
exchanged the monk for the squire.

Finally, the Dissolution of the religious houses strengthened the
squires in the mere machinery of the constitution. Before that
Dissolution the House of Lords was a clerical house. Had you entered
the Council of Henry VII. when Parliament sat at Westminster you would
have seen a crowd of mitres and of croziers, bishops and abbots of the
great 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 the
House of Lords that succeeded the Dissolution. _That_ immediately
became a committee, as it were, of the landed class; and a committee
of the landed class the House of Lords remained until quite the last
few years, when the practice of purchase has admitted to it brewers,
money-lenders, Colonial speculators, and, indeed, anyone who can
furnish the sum required by a woman or a secret party fund. A concrete
example is often of value in the illustration of a general process,
and at the expense of a digression I propose to lay before the reader
as excellent a picture as we have of the way in which the Dissolution
of the monasteries not only emphasised the position of the existing
territorial class, but began to recruit it with elements drawn from
every quarter, and, while it established the squires in power, taught
them to be careless of the origin or of the end of the families
admitted to their rank.

For this purpose I can find no better example than that of the family
of Williams, which by the licence of custom we have come to call
"Cromwell"; the most famous member of this family stands out in
English history as the typical squire who led the Forces of his Order
against the impoverished Monarchy, and so reduced that emblem of
Government 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 is
known. Much later they claimed relationship with certain heads of the
Welsh clans, but the derivation is fantastic. At any rate a certain
Williams was keeping a public-house in Putney in the generation which
saw the first of the Reformers. His name was Morgan, and the "Ap
William" or "Williams" which he added to that name was an affix due to
the Welsh custom of calling a man by his father's name; for surnames
had not yet become a rule in the Principality. He may have come, and
probably did, from Glamorganshire, and that is all we can say about
him; though we must admit some weight in Leland's contemporary
evidence that his son, Richard, was born in the same county, at a
place called Llanishen. Anyhow, there he is, keeping his public-house
in the first years of the sixteenth century by the riverside at
Putney.

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

The next stage in the story is not perfectly clear. Smith or Crumwell
had a son and two daughters, the son was called Thomas, and the
daughter that concerns us was called Katherine. It is highly probable,
according to modern research into the records of the manor, that
Morgan ap William married Katherine. But the matter is still in some
doubt. 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 the
other way about. It is not easy to establish the exact relationship
between two public-house keepers who lived as neighbours in a dirty
little 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 was
at last established as a merchant in the city of London. When one says
"merchant" one is talking kindly. His principal business then, as
throughout his life, was that of a usurer, and he showed throughout
his incredible adventures something of that mixture of simplicity and
greed, with a strange fixity in the oddest of personal friendships,
which amuses us to-day in our company promoters and African
adventurers. His abilities recommended him to Wolsey, and when that
great genius fell, Cromwell was, as the most familiar of historical
traditions represents him, faithful to his master.

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

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

How the witty scoundrel accomplished that business is a matter of
common history. Had he never existed the monasteries would have fallen
just the same, perhaps in the same manner, and probably with the same
despatch. But fate has chosen to associate this revolution with his
name--and to his presence in that piece of confiscation we owe the
presence in English history of the great Oliver; for Oliver, as will
be presently seen, and all his tribe were fed upon no other food than
the possessions of the Church. Cromwell, in his business of
suppressing the great houses, embezzled quite cynically--if we can
fairly call that "embezzlement" which was probably countenanced by the
King, to whom account was due. Indeed, it is plainly evident from the
whole story of that vast economic catastrophe which so completely
separates the England we know from the England of a thousand
years--the England of Alfred, of Edward I., of Chaucer, and of the
French Wars--it is evident from the whole story, that the flood of
confiscated wealth which poured into the hands of the King's agents
and 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 half
of the spoils.

We know, for instance, that the family of Howard (which was then
already of more than a century's standing) took everything they could
lay their hands on in the particular case of Bridlington--pyxes,
chalices, crucifixes, patens, reliquaries, vestments, shrines, every
saleable 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 method
of keeping accounts. But our interest lies in the fact that the
process was accompanied by that curious fidelity to all with whom he
was personally connected, which forms so interesting a feature in the
sardonic character of this adventurer. It is here that we touch again
upon the family of Morgan ap William, the public-house keeper of
Putney.

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

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

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

It is safe to say, however, that when Cromwell had got his young
relation--whatever that relationship was--into possession of the two
foundations in Huntingdon, he had set him up as a considerable local
gentleman, and whether it was the inheritance of the Cromwell blood
through his mother, or something equally unpleasant in the heredity of
his father, Morgan, young Williams ("alias Cromwell") did not stick
there.

Early in 1540 he swallowed bodily the enormous revenues of Ramsey
Abbey.

Now to appreciate what that meant we must return to the case we have
already established in the case of Westminster. Westminster almost
alone of the great foundations remains with a certain splendour
attached to it; we cannot, indeed, see all the dependencies as they
used to stand to the south of the great Abbey. We cannot see the
lively and populous community dependent upon it; still less can we
appreciate what a figure it must have cut in the days when London was
but a large country town, and when this walled monastic community
stood in its full grandeur surrounded by its gardens and farms. But
still, the object lesson afforded by the Abbey yet remains visible to
us. We can see it as it was, and we know that its income must have
represented in the England at that time infinitely more in outward
effect than do to-day the largest private incomes of our English
gentry: a Solomon Joel, for instance, or a Rothschild, does not occupy
so great a place in modern England as did Westminster, at the close of
the Middle Ages, in the very different England of its time.

Well, Ramsey was the equivalent of half Westminster, and young
Williams swallowed it whole. He was not given it outright, but the
price at which he bought it is significant of the way in which the
monastic lands were distributed, and in which incidentally the
squirearchy of England was founded. He bought it for less than three
years' purchase. Where he got the money, or indeed whether he paid
ready money at all, we do not know. If he did furnish the sum down we
may suspect that he borrowed it from his uncle, and we may hope that
that genial financier charged but a low rate of interest to one whom
he had so signally favoured.

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

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

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

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

He died in 1603, and even to his death the alias was maintained.
"Williams (alias Cromwell)" was the legal signature which guaranteed
the validity of purchases and sales, while to the outer world CROMWELL
(alias Williams) was the formula by which the family gently thrust
itself into the tradition of another and more genteel name. The whole
thing was done, like everything else this family ever did, by a
mixture of trickery and patience; he obtained no special leave from
Chancery as the law required; he simply used the "Williams" in public
less and less and the "Cromwell" more and more. When he died, his sons
after him, Robert and Oliver, had forgotten the Williams
altogether--in public--and in the case of such powerful men it was
convenient for the neighhours to forget the lineage also; so with the
end of the sixteenth century these Williams have become Cromwells,
_pur et simple_, and Cromwells they remain. But still the old caution
clings to them where the law, and especially where money, is
concerned; 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 Robert
and Oliver, sons of Henry, and grandsons of the original Richard,
Oliver, the elder, inherited, of course, the main wealth of the
family, but Robert also was portioned, and as was invariably the case
with the Williams' (alias Cromwell), the portion took the form of
monastic lands.

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

The portion of this younger brother, Robert, consisted of religious
estates in the town of Huntingdon itself, and it is highly
characteristic of the whole tribe that the very house in which the
Lord Protector was born was monastic, and had been, before the
Dissolution, a hospital dedicated to the use of the poor. For the Lord
Protector was the son of this Robert, who by a sort of atavism had
added to the ample income derived from monastic spoil the profits of a
brewery. It was  Mrs Cromwell who looked after the brewery, and some
appreciable part of the family revenues were derived from it when, in
1617, her husband died, leaving young Oliver, the future Lord
Protector, an only son of eighteen, upon her hands.

The quarrels between young Oliver and old Oliver (the absurdly wealthy
head of the family) would furnish material for several diverting
pages, but they do not concern this, which is itself but a digression
from the general subject of my book.

The object of that digression has been to trace the growth of but one
great territorial family, from the gutter to affluence in the course
of less than 100 years; to show how plain "Williams" gradually and
secretly became "Cromwell"--because the new name had about it a
flavour of nobility, however parvenu; to show how the whole of their
vast revenues depended upon, and was born from, the destruction of
monastic system, and to show by the example of one Thames-side family
how rapidly and from what sources was derived that economic power of
the squires which, when it came to the issue of arms, utterly
destroyed what was left of the national monarchy.

The new _régime_ had, however, other features about it which must not
be forgotten. For instance, in this growth of a new territorial body
upon the ruins of the monastic orders, in this sudden and portentous
increase of the wealth and power of the squires of England, the
mutability of the new system is perhaps as striking as any other of
its characteristics.

Manors or portions of manors which had been steadily fixed in the
possession and customs of these undying corporations for centuries
pass rapidly from hand to hand, and though there is sometimes a lull
in the process the uprooting reoccurs after each lull, as though
continuity and a strong tradition, which are necessarily attached for
good or for evil to a free peasantry, were as necessarily disregarded
by a landed plutocracy. There is not, perhaps, in all Europe a similar
complete carelessness for the traditions of the soil and for the
attachment of a family to an ancestral piece of land as is to be found
among these few thousand squires. The system remains, but the
individual families, the particular lineages, appear without
astonishment and are destroyed almost without regret. Aliens,
Orientals and worse, enter the ruling class, and are received without
surprise; names that recall the Elizabethans go out, and are not
mourned.

We are accustomed to-day, when we see some village estate in our own
country pass from an impoverished gentleman to some South African Jew,
to speak of the passing of an old world and of its replacement by a
new and a worse one. But an examination of the records which follow
the Dissolution of the monasteries may temper our sorrow. The wound
that was dealt in the sixteenth century to our general national
traditions affected the love of the land as profoundly as it did
religion, and the apparent antiquity which the trees, the stones, and
a certain spurious social feeling lend to these country houses is
wholly external.

Among the riparian manors of the Thames the fate of Bisham is very
characteristic of the general fate of monastic land. It was
surrendered, among other smaller monasteries, in 1536, though it
enjoyed 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 of
looking at incomes. It was thus a wealthy place, and how it came to be
included in the smaller monasteries is not quite clear. At any rate it
was restored immediately after. The monks of Chertsey were housed in
it, as we have already seen, and the revenues of several of the
smaller dissolved houses were added to it; so that it was at the
moment of its refoundation about three times as wealthy as it had been
before. The prior who had surrendered in 1536, one Barlow, was made
Bishop of St Asaphs, and in turn of St. Davids, Bath and Wells, and
Chichester; he is that famous Barlow who took the opportunity of the
Reformation to marry, and whose five daughters all in turn married the
Protestant bishops of the new Church of England. But this is by the
way. 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 great
nobles under Edward VI. confirmed it after Henry VIII.'s death, it
passed, upon her surrendering it in 1552, to a certain Sir Philip
Hoby. He had been of the Privy Council of Henry VIII. Upon his death
it passed to his nephew, Edward Hoby; Edward was a Parliamentarian
under Elizabeth, wrote on Divinity, and left an illegitimate son,
Peregrine, to whom he bequeathed Bisham upon his death in 1617. It
need hardly be said that before 100 years were over the son was
already legitimatised in the county traditions; his son, Edward, was
created Baron just after the Restoration, in 1666. The succession was
kept up for just 100 years more, when the last male heir of the family
died in 1766. He was not only a baron but a parson as well, and on his
death the estate went to relatives by the name of Mill, or, as we
might imagine, "Hoby" Mill. It did not long remain with them. They
died out in 1780 and the Van Sittarts bought it of the widow.

Consider Chertsey, from which Bisham sprang. The utter dispersion of
the whole tradition of Chertsey is more violent than that perhaps of
any other historical site in England. The Crown maintained, as we have
seen to be the case elsewhere, its nominal hold upon the foundations
of the abbey and of what was left of the buildings, though that hold
was only nominal, and it maintained such a position until 1610--that
is, for a full lifetime after the community was dispersed. But the
tradition created by FitzWilliam continued, and the Crown was ready to
sell at that date, to a certain Dr. Hammond. The perpetual mobility
which seems inseparable from spoils of this kind attaches
thenceforward to the unfortunate place. The Hammonds sell after the
Restoration to Sir Nicholas Carew, and before the end of the
seventeenth century the Carews pass it on to the Orbys, and the Orbys
pass 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 this
great national centre, it had at least remained intact. With Hinde's
son even that dignity deserted it. He found it advisable to distribute
the land in parcels as a speculation; the actual emplacement of the
building went to a certain Harwell, an East Indian, in 1753, and his
son left it by will to a private soldier called Fuller, who was
suspected of being his illegitimate brother. Fuller, as might be
expected, saw nothing but an opportunity of making money. He redivided
what was left intact of the old estate, and sold that again by lots in
1809; a stockbroker bought the remaining materials of a house whose
roots struck back to the very footings of our country, sold them for
what they were worth--and there was the end of Chertsey.

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

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

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

Cholsey, again, with its immemorial traditions of unchanging
ecclesiastical custom, receiving its priests in Saxon times from the
Mont St. Michel upon the marches of Brittany, and later holding as a
manor from the Abbot of Reading, remains with the Crown but a very few
years. In 1555 Mary handed it over to that Sir Robert Englefield who
was promptly attainted by her successor. It gets in the hands of the
Knowleses, then of the Rich's, and ends up with the family of
Edwardes-seventeenth-century Welshmen, who, by a plan of wealthy
marriages, became gentlemen, and have now for 100 years and more been
peers, under the title of Kensington.

The mention of Sir Robert Englefield leads one to what is perhaps the
best example in the whole Thames Valley of this perpetual chop and
change in the holding of English land; that example is to be
discovered at Pangbourne.

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

Davis, one would hope--in that seventeenth century which was so
essentially the century of the squires, and in that generation also
wherein the squires wiped out what was left of the Crown and left the
King a salaried dependant of the governing class--Davis might surely
have attempted to found a family and to achieve some sort of dignity
of tradition. He probably made no such an attempt, but if he did he
failed; for only half-a-century later the unfortunate place changes
hands again, and the Davises sell it to the Breedons.

The Breedons showed greater stability. They are actually associated
with Pangbourne for over a century, but even this experiment in
lineage broke down, through the extinction of the direct line. In
1776, by a sham continuity consonant to the whole recent story of
English land, it passes to yet another family on the condition of
their assuming the name of Breedon--which was not their own.

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

Anywhere along this Berkshire shore of the Thames the process may be
traced; even the poor little ruined nunnery of Ankerwike shows it. The
site 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 finally
it passes by marriage to the Harcourts.

The number of such examples that could be taken in the Valley of the
Thames alone would be far too cumbersome for these pages. One can
close 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 the
less doomed to the same mutability as the rest. In 1574 it was
exchanged with the Crown for lands in Dorset. The Crown kept it for an
unusually long time, considering the way in which land slipped on
every side from the control of the National Government at this period.
It is still royal under Charles I., but it passes in 1628 to Halstead
and Chamberlain. In little more than twenty years it is in the hands
of the family of Rich. Then there is a lull, just as there was in the
case of Pangbourne, and a continuity that lasts throughout the
eighteenth century. But just as a tradition began to form it was
broken, and in the first years of the nineteenth century Sonning is
sold to the Palmers.

Parallel to the rise of the squires and their capture of English
government has gone the development of the English town system. And
this, the last historical phase with which we shall deal in these
pages, is also very well and typically illustrated in the history of
the Thames Valley. That valley contains London, which is, of course,
not only far the largest but in its way the fullest example of what is
peculiarly English in the development of town life; and it contains,
in the modern rise of Oxford and Reading, two of the very best
instances to show how the English town in its modern aspect has sprung
from the industrial system and from the introduction of railways. For
neither has any natural facilities for production, and the growth of
each 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 a
completely new England, and it nourishes the only civilised population
in the world which is out of touch with arms, and with the physical
life and nature of the country it inhabits, and the only population in
which the vast majority are concerned with things of which they have
no actual experience, and feel most strongly upon matters dictated to
them at second or third hand by the proprietors of great journals.

What that new England will become none of us can tell; we cannot even
tell whether the considerable problem of maintaining it as an
organised civilisation will or will not be solved. All the conditions
are so completely new, our whole machinery of government so thoroughly
presupposes a little aristocratic agricultural state, and our strong
attachment to form and ritual so hampers all attempts at
reorganisation, that the way in which we shall answer, if we do
answer, the question of this sphinx, cannot as yet even be guessed at.

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

In the first place, it was not municipal in the Roman sense. The sharp
distinction 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 European
thought, method of government, and the rest, were formed on the
Mediterranean: but the civilisation of the Mediterranean was one of
city states; the modern civilisation which has returned to Roman
traditions is, therefore, necessarily municipal. A man's first country
in antiquity was his town; he died for his town; he left his wealth to
his town; the word "civilisation," like the word "citizen," and like a
hundred words connected with the superiority of mankind, are drawn
from the word for a town. To be political, to possess a police, to
recognise boundaries--all this was to be a townsman, and the various
districts of the Empire took their proper names, at least, from the
names of their chief cities, as do to-day the French and the Italian
countrysides.

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

The Roman towns were not small, indeed Roman London was very large;
they were not ill connected with highroads; they were certainly
wealthy and full of commerce; but they gave their names to no
districts, and their municipal institutions have left but very faint
traces upon posterity.

The barbarian invasions fell severely upon the Roman cities of
Britain, in some very rare cases they may have been actually
destroyed, but in the much more numerous cases where we may be
reasonably sure that municipal life continued without a break
throughout the incursions of the pirates, their decay was pitiful; and
when recorded history begins again, after a gap of two hundred years,
with the Roman missionaries of the sixth and seventh centuries, we
find thenceforward, and throughout the Saxon period, many of the towns
living the life of villages.

The proportion that were walled was much smaller than was the case
upon the Continent, and even the most enduring emblem and the most
tenacious survival of the Roman Imperial system--namely, the Bishop
seated in the chief municipality of his district--was not universal to
English life.

It is characteristic of Gregory the Great that he intended, or is
believed to have intended, Britain, when he had recivilised it, to be
set out upon a clear Latin model, with a Primate in the chief city and
suffragans in every other. But if he had such a plan (and it would
have been a typically Latin plan) he must have been thinking of a
Britain very different from that which his envoys actually found. When
the work was accomplished the little market town of Canterbury was the
seat of the Primate; the old traditions of York secured for it a
second archbishop, great London could not be passed over, but small
villages in some places, insignificant boroughs in others, were the
sites of cathedrals. Selsey, a rural manor or fishing hamlet, was the
episcopal centre of St. Wilfrid and his successors in their government
of Sussex; Dorchester, as we have seen, was the episcopal town, or
rather village, for something like half England. In the names of its
officers also and in the methods of their government the Anglo-Saxon
town was agricultural.

With the advent of the Normans, as one might expect, municipal life to
some extent re-arose. But it still maintained its distinctively
English character throughout the Middle Ages. Contrast London or
Oxford, for instance, in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,
with contemporary Paris. In London and Oxford the wall is built once
for all, and when it is completed the town may grow into suburbs as
much as it likes, no new wall is built. In Paris, throughout its
history, as the town grows, the first concern of its Government is to
mark out new limits which shall sharply define it from the surrounding
country. Philip Augustus does it, a century and a half later Etienne
Marcel did it; through the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth,
the custom is continued: through the nineteenth also, and to-day new
and 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 the
true 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 Parliament
of 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 not
depend upon the county towns; it is an organisation of rural squires;
and, most significant of all, no definite distinction can ever be
drawn between the English village and the English town neither in
spirit nor in legal definition. You have a town like Maidenhead, which
has a full local Government, and yet which has no mayor for centuries.
Conversely, a town having once had a mayor may dwindle down into a
village, and no one who respects English tradition bothers to
interfere with the anomaly. For instance, you may to-day in Orford
enjoy the hospitality, or incur the hostility, of a Mayor and
Corporation.

On all these accounts the banks of the Thames, until quite the latest
part of our historical development, presented a line of settlements in
which it was often difficult to draw the distinction between the
village and the town.

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

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

From the first records that we possess until the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the line of the Thames was a string of large
villages and small towns, differing in size and wealth far less than
their descendants do to-day. In this arrangement, of course, the
valley was similar to all the rest of England, but perhaps the
prosperity of the larger villages and the frequency of the market
towns was more marked on the line of the Thames than in any other
countryside, from the permanent influx of wealth due to the royal
castles, the great monastic foundations, and the continual stream of
travel to and from London which bound the whole together.

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

How indecisive is that standard has already been said. We do not
accurately 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 the
landed fortune of England. That, of course, is absurd. But we do have
a rough standard of comparison for rural manors, though it is a very
rough one. Though we cannot tell how much of the measurements and of
the numbers given are conventional and how much are real, though we do
not know whether the plough-lands referred to are real fields or
merely measures of capacity for production, though historians are
condemned to ceaseless guessing upon every term of the document, and
though the last orthodox guess is exploded every five or six
years--yet when we are told that one manor possessed so many ploughs
or paid upon so many hides, or had so many villein holdings while
another manor had but half or less in each category; and when we see
the dues, say three times as large in the first as in the second, then
we can say with certitude that the first was much more important than
the second; _how_ much more important we cannot say. We can, to repeat
an argument already advanced, affirm the inhabitants of any given
manor to be at the very least not less than five times the number of
holdings, and thus fix a _minimum_ everywhere. For instance, we can be
certain 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 one
industry of the time--Domesday does afford a vague statement to the
rural conditions of England at the end of the eleventh century, and,
dark as it is, no other European nation possesses such a minute record
of its economic origins.

But with the towns the case is different. There, except for the
minimum of population, we are quite at sea. We may presume that the
houses numbered are only the houses paying tax, or at least we may
presume this in some cases, but already the local customs of each town
were so highly differentiated that it is quite impossible to say with
certitude what the figures may mean. It is usual to take the taxable
value of the place to the Crown and to establish a comparison on that
basis, but it is perhaps wiser, though almost as inconclusive, to
consider each case, and all the elements of it separately, and to
attempt, by a co-ordination of the different factors given to arrive
at some sort of scale.

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

Wallingford in Domesday counted, closes and cottages together, just
under 500 units of habitation. It is, of course, a matter of
conjecture how much population this would stand for. A minimum is
here, as elsewhere, easily established. We may presuppose that a
close, even of the largest kind, was but a private one; we may next
average the inhabitants of each house at five, which is about the
average of modern times, and so arrive at a population of 2500. But
this minimum of 2500 for the population of Wallingford at the time of
the Conquest is too artificial and too full of modern bias to be
received. Not even the strongest prejudice in favour of underrating
the wealth and population of early England, a prejudice which has for
it objects the emphasising of our modern perfection, would admit so
ludicrous a conclusion. But while we may be perfectly certain that the
population of Wallingford was far larger than this minimum, to obtain
a 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 in
most others. Such numerous details are given of holdings which, though
situated in the town, counted in the property of local manors that we
are fairly safe in saying that we have here a more than commonly
complete survey. The very cottages are mentioned, as, for example,
"twenty-two cottages outside the wall," and their condition is
described 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 people
normally inhabiting one house at that time, and secondly, in the exact
meaning of the word "haga" or "close."

As to the first point, we may take it that one household of five would
be the least, ten would be the most, to be present under the roof of
an isolated family; but we must remember that the Middle Ages
contained in their social system a conception of community which not
only appeared (and is still remembered) in connection with monastic
institutions, but which inspired the whole of military and civil life.
To put it briefly, a man at the time of the Conquest, and for
centuries later, would rather have lived as part of a community than
as an individual householder, and conversely, those indices of
importance and social position which we now estimate in furniture and
other forms of ostentation were then to be found in the number of
dependants surrounding the head of the house. A merchant, for example,
if he flourished, was the head of a very numerous community; every
parish church in a town represented a society of priests and of their
servants, and of course a garrison (such as Wallingford pre-eminently
possessed) meant a very large community indeed. We are usually safe,
at any rate in the towns, if we multiply the known number of tenements
by ten in order to arrive at the number of souls inhabiting the
borough. To give the Wallingford of the Conquest a minimum of 5000, if
we were certain that 500 (or, to speak exactly, 491) was the number of
single units of taxation within the borough, would be to set that
minimum 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 a
whole acre, and no one with the least acquaintance of mediæval
municipal topography, no one, for instance, who knows the history of
twelfth-century Paris, would allow one-sixth of an acre to a single
average house within the walls of a town. A close would have one or
more wells, it is true; some closes certainly would have gardens, but
the labour of fortification, and the privilege of market, were each of
them causes which forbade any great extension of open spaces, save in
the case of privileged or wealthy communities or individuals.

From what we know of closes elsewhere, it is more probable that these
at Wallingford were the "cells" as it were of the borough organism. A
man would be granted in the first growth of the town a unit of land
with definitely established boundaries, which he would probably
enclose (the word "haga" refers to such an enclosure), and though at
first there might be only one house upon it, it would be to his
interest to multiply the tenements within this unit, which unit
rendered a regular, customary and unchanging due to its various
superiors, whatever the number of inhabitants it grew to contain.

If we turn to a comparison based upon taxation we have equal
difficulties, though difficulties of a different sort. We saw in the
case of Old Windsor that a community of perhaps 1000, probably of
more, 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 of
thirty loads of wheat. Wallingford paid the equivalent of only twenty
or 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 yield
a profit, was equivalent to no less than 400 such loads.

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

Here again a further element of complexity enters. It was quite out of
the spirit of the Middle Ages to estimate dues, whether to a feudal
superior or to the National Government, or even minor payments made to
a true proprietorial owner at the full capacity of the economic unit
concerned. All such payment was customary. Even where, in the later
Middle 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 of
the word "let"), it would not have occurred to him or his tenant that
the very highest price obtainable for the productive capacity of the
land should be paid. The philosophy permeating the whole of society
compelled the owner and the tenant, even in this extreme case, to a
customary arrangement; for it was an arrangement intended to be
permanent, to allow for wide fluctuations of value, and therefore to
be necessarily a minimum. If this was the case in the later Middle
Ages where undoubted proprietary right was concerned, still more was
it the case in the early Middle Ages with the customary feudal dues;
these varied infinitely from place to place, rising in scale from
those of privileged communities wholly exempt to those of places such
as we believe Old Windsor to have been, which paid (and these were the
exceptions), not indeed every penny that they could pay (as they would
now have to pay a modern landlord), but half, or perhaps more than
half, 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 the
Wallingford of the Conquest consisted of certainly more than 5000
souls, more probably of 10,000, and quite possibly of more than
10,000.

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

Old Windsor we have already dealt with, and made it out from a fifth
to a tenth of Wallingford. Reading was apparently far smaller. Indeed
Reading is one of the puzzles of the early history of the Thames
Valley. We have already seen in discussing these strategical points
upon the river what advantages it had, and yet it appears only
sporadically in ancient history as a military post. The Danes hold it
on the first occasion on which we find the site recorded, in the
latter half of the ninth century: it has a castle during the anarchy
of the twelfth, but it is a castle which soon disappears. It
frequently plays a part in the Civil Wars of the seventeenth, but the
part it plays is only temporary.

And Reading presents a similar puzzle on the civilian side. It is
situated at the junction of two waterways, one of which leads directly
from the Thames Valley to the West of England, yet it does not seem to
have been of a considerable civil importance until the establishment
of its monastery; and even then it is not a town of first-class size
or wealth, nor does it take up its present position until quite late
in the history of the country.

At the time of the Domesday Survey it actually counts, in the number
of recorded enclosures at least, for less than a third of Old Windsor;
and we may take it, after making every allowance for possible
omissions or for some local custom which withdrew it from the taxing
power 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, the
matter has become a subject of pretty violent discussion, it will
bear, perhaps, a repeated and more detailed examination at this place.

Let us first remember that the latest prejudice from which our
historical school has suffered, and one which still clings to its more
orthodox section, was to belittle as far as possible the general
influence of European civilisation upon England; to exalt, for
example, the Celtic missionaries and their work at the expense of St
Augustine, to grope for shadowy political origins among the pirates of
the 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 general
life of Europe--as small a thing as might be.

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

To return to the ground we have already briefly covered, and to
establish a comparison with Wallingford, the word "haga," which we saw
to be of such doubtful value in the case of Wallingford, is replaced
in Oxford by the word "mansio." The taxable units so enumerated are
just over 600, but of these much more than half are set down as
untaxable 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 to
our new standard of the way in which a house in a borough should be
kept up, and because we want to give them time to put themselves in
order," 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 any
time before the thirteenth, the small man who lived under his own roof
would live in a very low house, and that, space for space of ground
area, the cubical contents of these poor dwellings would be less than
those of modern slums. On the other hand, we know that the population
would live much more in the open air, slept much more huddled, and
also that a very considerable proportion--what proportion we cannot
say, but probably quite half of a Norman borough--was connected with
the huge communal institutions--military, ecclesiastical, and for that
matter mercantile, as well--which marked the period. We know that the
occupied space stood for very much what is now enclosed by the line of
the old walls, and we know that under modern conditions this space, in
spite of our great empty public buildings, our sparsely inhabited
wealthy houses, and our college gardens, can comfortably hold some
5000 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 it
at the very least, and can hardly have had 10,000 at the most. These
are wide limits, but anyone who shall pretend to make them narrower is
imposing upon his readers with an appearance of positive knowledge
which is the charlatanism of the colleges, and pretends to exact
knowledge where he possesses nothing but the vague basis of
antiquarian conjecture.

It is sufficiently clear (and the reading of any of our most positive
modern authorities upon Domesday will make it clearer) that no sort of
statistical exactitude can be arrived at for the population of the
boroughs in the early Middle Ages. But when we consider that Reading
is certainly underestimated, and when we consider the detail in which
we are informed of Old Windsor, Wallingford, and Oxford, with the
neglect of Abingdon, Lechlade, Cricklade, and Dorchester, one can
roughly say that the Thames above London possessed in Staines,
Windsor, Cookham, probably Henley, perhaps Bensington, Dorchester,
Eynsham, and possibly Buscot, large villages varying from some
hundreds in population to a little over 1000, not defended, not
reckoned as towns, and agricultural in character. To these we may add
Chertsey, Ealing, and a few others whose proximity to London makes it
difficult for us to judge except in the vaguest way their true
importance.

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 probably
possessing a population not much larger than that of the larger
villages; while of considerable centres there were but three: Reading
the smallest, almost a town, but one upon which we have no true or
sufficient data; Wallingford the largest, with the population of a
flourishing 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 the
growth of Henley is especially engrossing, because it is one of the
very rare examples of a process which earlier generations of
historians, and notably the popular historians like Freeman and the
Rev. Mr Green, took to be a common feature in the story of this
island. They were wrong, of course, and they have been widely and
deservedly ridiculed for imagining that the greater part of our
English boroughs grew up since the barbarian invasions upon waste
places. On the contrary most of our towns grew up upon Roman and
pre-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 that
point alone is instructive, for it points to the insignificance of the
place. When the lords of Bensington went hunting up on Chiltern they
found on the far side of the hill, it may be presumed, a little
clearing near the river. This was all that Henley was, and it is
probable that even the church of the place was not built until quite
late in the Christian period; there is at any rate an old tradition
that Aldeburgh is the mother of Henley, and it is imagined by those
who wrote monographs upon the locality that this tradition points to
the church of Aldeburgh as the mother church of what was at first a
chapel upon the riverside.

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

It must be remembered that the river had been developed and changed in
that first century of orderly government under the Normans. Indeed one
of the reforms which the aristocracy made much of in their revolt, and
which is granted in Magna Charta, is the destruction of the King's
weirs upon the Thames. But the weirs cannot have been permanently
destroyed; though the public rights over the river were curtailed by
Magna Charta, the system of regulation was founded and endured. It is
probably this improvement on the great highway which led to the growth
of Henley, and when Reading Minster had become the great thing it was
late in the twelfth century, Henley must have felt the effect, for it
would have afforded the nearest convenient stage down the river from
the new and wealthy settlement round the Cluniac Abbey. In the
thirteenth century--that is, in the first hundred years after the
earliest mention we have of the place--Henley became rapidly more and
more important. It seems to have afforded a convenient halting place
whenever progress was made up river, especially a royal progress from
Windsor. Edward I. stayed there constantly, and we possess a record of
three dates which are very significant of this kind of journey. In the
December of 1277 the King goes up river. On the sixteenth of the month
he slept at Windsor, on the seventeenth at Henley, the next day at
Abingdon; and in his son's time Henley has grown so much that it
counts 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 across
the river at this point--that is, Henley possessed a bridge long
before Wallingford, and at a time when the river could be crossed by
road in but very few places. The granting of a number of indulgences,
and the promises of masses in the middle of the thirteenth century for
this object, give us the date; and, what is perhaps equally
interesting, this early bridge was of stone.

It is usual to think of the early bridges over the Thames as wooden
bridges. Aft older generation was accustomed to many that still
remained. This was true of the later Middle Ages, and of the torpor
and neglect in building which followed the Reformation. But it was not
true of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The bridge at Henley,
like the bridge of Wallingford and the later bridge of Abingdon, was
of stone.

It was allowed to fall into decay, and when Leland crossed the river
at this point it was upon a wooden bridge, the piers of which stood
upon the old foundation. How long that wooden bridge had existed in
1533, when Leland noticed it, we cannot tell, but it remained of wood
until 1786, when the present bridge replaced it.

In spite of the early importance of the town, it was not regularly
incorporated for a long time, but was governed by a Warden, the first
on the list being the date of 1305, within the reign of Edward I. The
charter which gave Henley a Mayor and Corporation was granted as late
as the reign of Henry VIII. and but a few years before Leland's visit.
From that moment, however, the town ceased to expand, either in
importance or in numbers; the destruction of Reading Abbey and of the
Cell of Westminster at Hurley just over the river, very possibly
affected its prosperity. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it
had a population of less than 3000, and sixty years later it had not
added another 1000 to that number.

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

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

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

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

Originally, so far as we can judge, the main stream of gravel crossed
the Thames at Cookham, and again at Henley. Why this double crossing
should have been necessary it is useless to conjecture unless one
hazards the guess that the quality of the soil in very early times
gave so much better going upon the high southern bank of the river
that it was worth while carrying the main road along the bank, even at
the expense of a double crossing of the stream. If that was the case
it is difficult to see how a town of the importance of Marlow could
have grown up upon the farther shore; that Marlow was important we
know from the fact that it had a Borough representation in Parliament
in the first years of that experiment before the close of the
thirteenth century.

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

The importance of Cookham in this section of the road is shown in
several ways. First the great market, in Domesday bringing in
customary dues to the King of twenty shillings--and what twenty
shillings means in Domesday in mere market dues one can appreciate by
considering that all the dues from Old Windsor only amounted to ten
pounds. Then again it was a royal manor which, unlike most of the
others, was never alienated; it was not even alienated during the ruin
and breakdown of the monarchy which followed the Dissolution of the
monastic orders.

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

We may presume that the importance of Cookham was maintained for some
two centuries after the Conquest, until it was outflanked and the
stream of its traffic diverted by the building of the bridge at
Maidenhead.

Just as this bridge came later than the Bridge at Henley, so it was
inferior to it in structure; it was, as we have seen, of timber, but
such as it was, it was the cause of the growth of Maidenhead much more
than was the bridge at Henley the cause of the growth of Henley. The
first nucleus of municipal government grows up in connection with the
Bridge Guild; the Warden and the Bridge Masters remain the head of the
embryonic corporation throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and even when the town is incorporated (shortly before the
close of the seventeenth century), by James II., the maintenance and
guardianship of the wooden bridge remained one of the chief
occupations of the new corporation.

It was just after the granting of the Charter that the army of William
III. marched across this bridge on its way to London, an episode which
shows how completely Maidenhead held the monopoly of the Western road.
The present stone bridge was not built to replace the old wooden one
until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, parallel in this as
in everything else to the example of Henley; and this position of
inferiority to Henley, and of parallel advance to that town, is
further seen in the statistics of population. In 1801, when Henley
already boasted nearly 2000 souls, Maidenhead counted almost exactly
half that number. The later growth of the place is quite modern.

The antiquity of the crossing of the Thames at Cookham is supported by
a certain amount of pre-historic evidence, worth about as much as such
evidence ever is, and about as little. Two Neolithic flint knives have
been found there, a bronze dagger sheath and spear-head, a bronze
sword, 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 fragments
of British pottery found in the relics of pile dwellings near the
river, and two Roman vases from the bed of the stream; it has further
furnished Anglo-Saxon remains, and, indeed, there are very few points
upon the river where so regular a continuity of the historic and the
pre-historic is to be discovered as in the neighbourhood of this old
ford.

In was in the course of the Middle Ages, and after the Conquest, that
new Windsor rose to importance. It is not recognised as a borough
before the close of the thirteenth century; it is incorporated in the
fifteenth.

Reading certainly increased considerably with the continual stream of
wealth that poured from the abbey; it possessed in practice a working
corporation before the Dissolution, was famous for its cloth long
before, and had become, in the process of years, an important town
that rivalled the great monastery which had developed it; indeed it is
probable that only the privileges, the conservatism, of the abbey
forbade it to be recognised and chartered before the Reformation.

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

Staines cannot take its place with these, for in spite of its high
strategical value, of its old Roman tradition, of its proximity to
London and the rest, Staines was throughout the Middle Ages, and till
long after, rather a village than a town. Though a wealthy place it is
purely agricultural in the Domesday Survey, and the comparative
insignificance of the spot is perhaps explained by the absence of a
bridge. That absence is by no means certain. Staines after all was on
the great military highway leading from London westward, and it must
have been necessary for considerable forces to cross the river here
throughout the Dark Ages and the early Middle Ages, as did for
instance, at the very close of that period, the barons on their way to
Runnymede; and far earlier the army that marched hurriedly from London
to intercept the Danes in 1009, when the pagans were coming up the
river, and whether by the help of the tide or what not, managed to get
ahead of the intercepting force. But if a bridge existed so early as
the Conquest, we have no mention of it. The first allusion to a bridge
is in the granting of three oaks from Windsor for the repairing of it
in 1262. It may have existed long before that date, but it is
significant that in the Escheats of Edward III., and as late as the
twenty-fourth year of his reign--that is, after the middle of the
fourteenth century--it is mentioned that the bridge existed since the
reign of Henry III., which would convey the impression that in 1262
the bridge had first needed repairing, being built, perhaps, in the
earlier years of the reign and completed, possibly, but a little after
the death of King John.

This bridge of Staines was most unfortunate. It broke down again and
again. Even an experiment in stone at the end of the last century was
a failure, because the foundations did not go deep enough into the bed
of the river. An iron absurdity succeeded the stone, and luckily broke
down 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 those
boundaries between the maritime and the wholly inland part of a river
which is in so many of the English valleys associated with some
important crossing. The jurisdiction of the port of London over the
river extended as high as the little island just opposite the mouth of
the Colne. On this island can still be seen the square stone shaft
which is at least as old as the thirteenth century (though it stands
on more modern steps), and which marks this limit, as it does also the
shire mark between Middlesex and Buckingham.

We have, after the Dissolution it is true, and when the financial
standing of most of these places had been struck a heavy blow, a
valuable estimate for many of them in the inquiry ordered by Pole in
1555. This estimate gives Abingdon less than 1500 of population,
Reading less than 3000, Windsor about 1000; and in general one may say
that with the sixteenth century, whether the population was
diminishing (as certainly contemporary witnesses believed), or whether
it had increased beyond the maximum which England had seen before the
Black Death, at any rate the relative importance of the various
centres of population had not very greatly changed during those long
five centuries of customary rule and of firm tradition. The towns and
villages which Shakespeare would have passed in a journey up the
river, though probably shrunk somewhat from what they had been in, let
us say, the days of Edward I. or of his grandson, when the Middle Ages
were in their full vigour and before the Black Death had ruined our
countrysides, were still a string of some such large villages and
small walled boroughs as his ancestry had seen for many hundred years,
disfigured only and changed by the scaffolded ruins here and there of
the great religious foundations. Windsor, Wallingford, Reading,
Abingdon, and even Oxford, were towns appearing to him much as
Lechlade to-day remains or Abingdon still. As for the riverside
villages their agricultural and native population was certainly larger
than that which they now possess; and in general the effect produced
upon such a journey was of a sort of even distribution of population
gradually increasing from the loneliness of the upper river to the
growing sites between Windsor and London, but in no part exaggerated;
larger everywhere in proportion to the importance of the stream, or of
agricultural or of strategical position, and forming together one
united countryside, bound together even in its architecture by the
common commerce of the river.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did little to disturb this
equilibrium or to destroy this even tradition. The opening up of the
waterways and the great improvement of the highroads, and the building
of bridges, and the expansion of wealth at the end of the eighteenth
century had indeed some considerable effect in increasing the
population of England as a whole, but the smaller country towns, in
the south at least, and in the Thames Valley, seem to have benefited
fairly equally from the general change. The new canals, entering at
Oxford and at Reading, gave a certain lead to both those centres, and
even the Severn Canal, entering at Lechlade, did a little for that
up-river town. The new fashion of the public schools (which had now
long been captured by the wealthier classes) also increased the
importance of Eton, and towards the close of the period the now
rapidly expanding capital had overfed the villages within reach of
London with a considerable accession of population. But it is
remarkable how evenly spread was even this industrial development.

The twin towns of Abingdon and Reading, for instance, twin
monasteries, twin corporations, had for all these centuries preserved
their ratio of the up-country town and the larger centre that was the
neighbour of London and Windsor. In the beginning of the nineteenth
century, in spite of the general increase of population, that ratio
was still well preserved: it is about three to one. But the Railway
found one and left the other.

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

It is through the Railway, and even then long after its first effect
might have been expected, that the Valley of the Thames, later than
any other wealthy district in England, loses, as all at last are
doomed to lose, its historic tradition, and suffers the social
revolution which has made modern England the unique and perilous thing
it 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.









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