ng taken Wallingford with its minute and valuable record as a sort
of unit, we can roughly compare it with other centres of populations
upon the river at the same date.

Old Windsor we have already dealt with, and made it out from a fifth
to a tenth of Wallingford. Reading was apparently far smaller. Indeed
Reading is one of the puzzles of the early history of the Thames
Valley. We have already seen in discussing these strategical points
upon the river what advantages it had, and yet it appears only
sporadically in ancient history as a military post. The Danes hold it
on the first occasion on which we find the site recorded, in the
latter half of the ninth century: it has a castle during the anarchy
of the twelfth, but it is a castle which soon disappears. It
frequently plays a part in the Civil Wars of the seventeenth, but the
part it plays is only temporary.

And Reading presents a similar puzzle on the civilian side. It is
situated at the junction of two waterways, one of which leads directly
from the Thames Valley to the West of England, yet it does not seem to
have been of a considerable civil importance until the establishment
of its monastery; and even then it is not a town of first-class size
or wealth, nor does it take up its present position until quite late
in the history of the country.

At the time of the Domesday Survey it actually counts, in the number
of recorded enclosures at least, for less than a third of Old Windsor;
and we may take it, after making every allowance for possible
omissions or for some local custom which withdrew it from the taxing
power of the Crown, for little more than a village at that moment.

The size of Oxford at the same period we have already touched upon,
but since, like every other inference founded upon Domesday, the
matter has become a subject of pretty violent discussion, it will
bear, perhaps, a repeated and more detailed examination at this place.

Let us first remember that the latest prejudice from which our
historical school has suffered, and one which still clings to its more
orthodox section, was to belittle as far as possible the general
influence of European civilisation upon England; to exalt, for
example, the Celtic missionaries and their work at the expense of St
Augustine, to grope for shadowy political origins among the pirates of
the North Sea, to trace every possible etymology to a barbaric root,
and to make of Roman England and of early Medieval Engla