t), but they were also permanently fixed on one spot.

Such an institution as Reading, for example, or as Abingdon, went on
perpetually receiving its immense revenues for generation after
generation, and were under no temptation or rather had no capacity for
spending it elsewhere than in the situation where their actual
buildings were to be found.

In this way the great monastic houses founded a tradition of local
wealth which has profoundly affected the history of the Thames Valley.
And if that valley is still to-day one of the chief districts wherein
the economic power of England is concentrated, it owes that position
mainly to the centuries during which the great foundations exercised
their power upon the banks of the river.

The growth of great towns, one of the last phases of our national
development, one which finds its example in the Thames Valley as
elsewhere, and one to which we shall allude before closing these notes
upon the river, has somewhat obscured the quality of this original
accumulation of wealth along the Thames. But when we come to consider
the figures of the census at an earlier time, before modern
commercialism and the railway had drawn wealth and population into
fewer and larger centres, we shall see how considerable was the string
of towns which had grown up along the stream. And we shall especially
see how fairly divided among them was the population, and, it may be
presumed, the wealth and the rateable value, of the valley.

The point just mentioned in connection with the larger monastic
foundations, and their artificial concentration of economic power,
deserves a further elaboration, for the economic importance of a
district is one of the aspects of geography which even modern analysis
has dealt with very imperfectly.

Economists speak of the economic importance of such-and-such a spot
because material of use to man-kind is there discovered. Thus, people
commonly point to the economic importance of the valleys all round the
Pennine Range in England because they contain coal and metals, and to
the economic importance of a small district in South Wales for the
same reason.

A further consideration has admitted that not only places where things
useful to mankind are discovered, but places naturally fitted for
their exchange have an economic importance peculiarly their own.
Indeed, the more history is studied from the point of view of
economics, the more does this kind of natural opportuni