reign of Henry III., which would convey the impression that in 1262
the bridge had first needed repairing, being built, perhaps, in the
earlier years of the reign and completed, possibly, but a little after
the death of King John.

This bridge of Staines was most unfortunate. It broke down again and
again. Even an experiment in stone at the end of the last century was
a failure, because the foundations did not go deep enough into the bed
of the river. An iron absurdity succeeded the stone, and luckily broke
down also, until at last, in the thirties of the nineteenth century,
the whole thing was rebuilt, 200 yards above the old traditional site.

Staines is of interest in another way, because it marks one of those
boundaries between the maritime and the wholly inland part of a river
which is in so many of the English valleys associated with some
important crossing. The jurisdiction of the port of London over the
river extended as high as the little island just opposite the mouth of
the Colne. On this island can still be seen the square stone shaft
which is at least as old as the thirteenth century (though it stands
on more modern steps), and which marks this limit, as it does also the
shire mark between Middlesex and Buckingham.

We have, after the Dissolution it is true, and when the financial
standing of most of these places had been struck a heavy blow, a
valuable estimate for many of them in the inquiry ordered by Pole in
1555. This estimate gives Abingdon less than 1500 of population,
Reading less than 3000, Windsor about 1000; and in general one may say
that with the sixteenth century, whether the population was
diminishing (as certainly contemporary witnesses believed), or whether
it had increased beyond the maximum which England had seen before the
Black Death, at any rate the relative importance of the various
centres of population had not very greatly changed during those long
five centuries of customary rule and of firm tradition. The towns and
villages which Shakespeare would have passed in a journey up the
river, though probably shrunk somewhat from what they had been in, let
us say, the days of Edward I. or of his grandson, when the Middle Ages
were in their full vigour and before the Black Death had ruined our
countrysides, were still a string of some such large villages and
small walled boroughs as his ancestry had seen for many hundred years,
disfigured only and changed by the scaffolded ruins here a