ient 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