ns 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