be felt Maidenhead was the younger and parallel town to Henley.

For example, though we cannot tell exactly when Maidenhead Bridge was
built, we may suppose it to have been some few years after Henley
Bridge. It already exists and is in need of repair in 1297. Henley
Bridge is founded more than a generation earlier than that.

"Maidenhythe," as it was called, has been thought to have been before
the building of this bridge a long timber wharf upon the river, but
that is only a guess. There must have been some local accumulation of
wealth or of traffic or it would not have been chosen as a site for
the new bridge which was somewhat to divert the western road.

Originally, so far as we can judge, the main stream of gravel crossed
the Thames at Cookham, and again at Henley. Why this double crossing
should have been necessary it is useless to conjecture unless one
hazards the guess that the quality of the soil in very early times
gave so much better going upon the high southern bank of the river
that it was worth while carrying the main road along the bank, even at
the expense of a double crossing of the stream. If that was the case
it is difficult to see how a town of the importance of Marlow could
have grown up upon the farther shore; that Marlow was important we
know from the fact that it had a Borough representation in Parliament
in the first years of that experiment before the close of the
thirteenth century.

At any rate, whatever the reason was, whether from some pre-historic
conditions having brought the road across the peninsula at this point,
or, as is more likely, on account of some curious arrangement of
mediaeval privilege, it is fairly certain that, in the centuries before
the great development of the thirteenth, travel did come across the
river in front of Cookham, recross it in front of Henley, and so make
over the Chilterns to the great main bridge at Wallingford, which led
out to the Vale of the White Horse and the west country.

The importance of Cookham in this section of the road is shown in
several ways. First the great market, in Domesday bringing in
customary dues to the King of twenty shillings--and what twenty
shillings means in Domesday in mere market dues one can appreciate by
considering that all the dues from Old Windsor only amounted to ten
pounds. Then again it was a royal manor which, unlike most of the
others, was never alienated; it was not even alienated during the ruin
and breakdown