tic
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 p