has a full local Government, and yet which has no mayor for centuries.
Conversely, a town having once had a mayor may dwindle down into a
village, and no one who respects English tradition bothers to
interfere with the anomaly. For instance, you may to-day in Orford
enjoy the hospitality, or incur the hostility, of a Mayor and
Corporation.

On all these accounts the banks of the Thames, until quite the latest
part of our historical development, presented a line of settlements in
which it was often difficult to draw the distinction between the
village and the town.

Consider also this characteristic of the English thing, that the
boroughs sending Members to Parliament first sent them quite haphazard
and then by prescription.

Simon de Montfort gets just a few borough Members to his Parliament
because he knows they will be on his side; and right down to the
Tudors places are enfranchised--as, for example, certain Cornish
boroughs were--not because they are true towns but because they will
support the Government. Once returning Members, the place has a right
to return them, until the partial reform of 1832. It is a right like
the hereditary right of a peer, a quaint custom. It has no relation to
municipal feeling, for municipal feeling does not exist. Old Sarum may
lose every house, Gatton may retain but seven freeholders, yet each
solemnly returns its two Members to Parliament.

From the first records that we possess until the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the line of the Thames was a string of large
villages and small towns, differing in size and wealth far less than
their descendants do to-day. In this arrangement, of course, the
valley was similar to all the rest of England, but perhaps the
prosperity of the larger villages and the frequency of the market
towns was more marked on the line of the Thames than in any other
countryside, from the permanent influx of wealth due to the royal
castles, the great monastic foundations, and the continual stream of
travel to and from London which bound the whole together.

Cricklade, Lechlade, Oxford, Abingdon, Dorchester, Wallingford,
Reading, and Windsor--old Windsor, that is--were considerable places
from at least the period of the Danish invasions. They formed the
objective of armies, or the subject matter of treaties or important
changes. But the first standard of measure which we can apply is that
given us by the Norman Survey.

How indecisive is that standard