t 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-th