iage greatly increased in importance after the breakdown of Roman
civilisation, yet the medium by which that water carriage was utilised
was the medium of the Benedictine foundations. They it was who
established that continuous line of progressive agricultural
development and who prepared the way for the later yet more continuous
line of the full monastic effort which succeeded the Conquest.

A list of monastic institutions upon the river, if we exclude the
friars, the hospitals, and such foundations as made part of town or
university life, is as follows:--a priory at Cricklade, another at
Lechlade, the Abbey at Eynsham (sufficiently near the stream to be
regarded as riparian), the Nunnery and School of Godstow, the great
Abbeys of Osney and Rewley, the Benedictine Nunnery at Littlemore, the
great Abbey of Abingdon, the Abbey of Dorchester, Cholsey (but this
had been destroyed before the Conquest, and was never revived), the
Augustinian Nunnery at Goring, the great Cluniac Abbey at Reading, the
Cell of Westminster at Hurley, the Abbey of Medmenham, the Abbey of
Bisham just opposite Marlow, and the Nunnery of Little Marlow; the
Nunnery of Burnham, which, though nearly a mile and a half from the
stream, should count from the position of its property as a riparian
foundation, the little Nunnery of Ankerwike, the great Benedictine
Abbey of Chertsey, the Carthusians of Sheen, and the Benedictines of
Westminster, to which may be added the foundation of Bermondsey.

When the end came the total number of those in control of such wide
possessions was small.

Indeed it was perhaps no small cause of the unpopularity, such as it
was, into which the same monasteries had locally fallen, that so much
economic power was concentrated in so few hands. The greater
foundations throughout the country possessed but a little more than
3000 religious, and even when all the nuns, friars, and professed
religious of the towns are counted, we do not arrive at more than 8000
in religion in an England which must have had a population of at least
4,000,000, and quite possibly a much larger number; nor could the mobs
foresee that the class which would seize upon the abbey lands would
concentrate the means of production into still fewer hands, until at
last the mass of Englishmen should have no lot in England.

Moreover, it would be an error to consider the numbers of the
religious alone. The smaller foundations, and especially the convents
of nuns