Durham Cathedral stands upon a noble cliff overhanging a
ravine, while Reading Abbey stood upon a small and irregular hill
which hardly showed above the flat plains of the river meadows, but in
massiveness of structure and in type of architecture Reading seems to
have resembled Durham more nearly than any other of our great
monuments, and to emphasise its parallelism to Durham is perhaps the
best way to make the modern reader understand what we have lost.

Nothing that he had seen in this journey would more have sunk into the
mind of a contemporary man, nothing that he would lack were he
resuscitated to-day would leave a want more grievous. In the
destruction of Reading the people of this country lost something which
not even their aptitude for foreign travel can replace.

Windsor, as he passed, stood up above the right of him, not very
different from what we still admire as we come down from Bray and look
up to the jutting fore-tower which is worthy of Coucy. But down below
Windsor (after whose bridge we to-day see nothing whatever of value),
just after he had passed the wooden bridge of Staines and shot the
weir of that town, the river bent southward.

The traveller would have found Pentonhook already forming or formed,
and when he had got round it he would have seen soaring above him down
stream the great mass of Chertsey Abbey. If Reading had the solidity
and the barbaric grandeur of Durham, Chertsey had in an ecclesiastical
way the vastness of Windsor, and must have seemed like a town to
anyone approaching it thus down the river. The enclosed area of the
abbey buildings alone covered four acres.

This impression which such a traveller would have received of the
great religious houses was enhanced by something more than the
magnitude and splendour of the buildings. Divided as was opinion at
that moment upon their value to the State, and jealous as had become
landless men of the long traditions and privileges of the monks, these
still represented not only their own wealth but the general
accumulation of capital and the continued prosperity of the river
valley. It is true to say, in spite of the difficulty of appreciating
such a truth in the light of our knowledge of what was to follow, that
the destruction of such foundations would have seemed to the traveller
before the Dissolution inconceivable. Nevertheless it came.

These notes are not the place in which to discuss that most difficult
of all historical probl