oughs grew up since the barbarian invasions upon waste
places. On the contrary most of our towns grew up upon Roman and
pre-Roman foundations, and are continuous with the pre-historic past.
But Henley forms a very interesting exception.

It was a hamlet which went with the manor of Bensington, and that
point alone is instructive, for it points to the insignificance of the
place. When the lords of Bensington went hunting up on Chiltern they
found on the far side of the hill, it may be presumed, a little
clearing near the river. This was all that Henley was, and it is
probable that even the church of the place was not built until quite
late in the Christian period; there is at any rate an old tradition
that Aldeburgh is the mother of Henley, and it is imagined by those
who wrote monographs upon the locality that this tradition points to
the church of Aldeburgh as the mother church of what was at first a
chapel upon the riverside.

When we first hear of Henley it is already called a town, and the date
of this is the first year of King John, 1199.

It must be remembered that the river had been developed and changed in
that first century of orderly government under the Normans. Indeed one
of the reforms which the aristocracy made much of in their revolt, and
which is granted in Magna Charta, is the destruction of the King's
weirs upon the Thames. But the weirs cannot have been permanently
destroyed; though the public rights over the river were curtailed by
Magna Charta, the system of regulation was founded and endured. It is
probably this improvement on the great highway which led to the growth
of Henley, and when Reading Minster had become the great thing it was
late in the twelfth century, Henley must have felt the effect, for it
would have afforded the nearest convenient stage down the river from
the new and wealthy settlement round the Cluniac Abbey. In the
thirteenth century--that is, in the first hundred years after the
earliest mention we have of the place--Henley became rapidly more and
more important. It seems to have afforded a convenient halting place
whenever progress was made up river, especially a royal progress from
Windsor. Edward I. stayed there constantly, and we possess a record of
three dates which are very significant of this kind of journey. In the
December of 1277 the King goes up river. On the sixteenth of the month
he slept at Windsor, on the seventeenth at Henley, the next day at
Abingdon; and in