dern 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 fantas