minimum of population, we are quite at sea. We may presume that the
houses numbered are only the houses paying tax, or at least we may
presume this in some cases, but already the local customs of each town
were so highly differentiated that it is quite impossible to say with
certitude what the figures may mean. It is usual to take the taxable
value of the place to the Crown and to establish a comparison on that
basis, but it is perhaps wiser, though almost as inconclusive, to
consider each case, and all the elements of it separately, and to
attempt, by a co-ordination of the different factors given to arrive
at some sort of scale.
Judged in this manner, Wallingford and Oxford are the early towns of
the Thames Valley which afford the best subjects for survey.
Wallingford in Domesday counted, closes and cottages together, just
under 500 units of habitation. It is, of course, a matter of
conjecture how much population this would stand for. A minimum is
here, as elsewhere, easily established. We may presuppose that a
close, even of the largest kind, was but a private one; we may next
average the inhabitants of each house at five, which is about the
average of modern times, and so arrive at a population of 2500. But
this minimum of 2500 for the population of Wallingford at the time of
the Conquest is too artificial and too full of modern bias to be
received. Not even the strongest prejudice in favour of underrating
the wealth and population of early England, a prejudice which has for
it objects the emphasising of our modern perfection, would admit so
ludicrous a conclusion. But while we may be perfectly certain that the
population of Wallingford was far larger than this minimum, to obtain
a maximum is not so easy. We do not know, with absolute certainty,
whether the whole of the town has been enumerated in the Survey,
though we have a better ground for supposing it in this case than in
most others. Such numerous details are given of holdings which, though
situated in the town, counted in the property of local manors that we
are fairly safe in saying that we have here a more than commonly
complete survey. The very cottages are mentioned, as, for example,
"twenty-two cottages outside the wall," and their condition is
described in terms which, though not easy for us to understand,
clearly signify that they could be taken as paying the full tax.
The real elements of uncertainty lie, first in the number of people
normally inhabiting one house at that time, and secondly, in the exact
meaning of the word "haga" or "close."
As to the first point, we may take it that one household of five would
be the least, ten would be the most, to be present under the roof of
an isolated family; but we must remember that the Middle Ages
contained in their social system a conception of community which not
only appeared (and is still remembered) in connection with monastic
institutions, but which inspired the whole of military and civil life.
To put it briefly, a man at the time of the Conquest, and for
centuries later, would rather have lived as part of a community than
as an individual householder, and conversely, those indices of
importance and social position which we now estimate in furniture and
other forms of ostentation were then to be found in the number of
dependants surrounding the head of the house. A merchant, for example,
if he flourished, was the head of a very numerous community; every
parish church in a town represented a society of priests and of their
servants, and of course a garrison (such as Wallingford pre-eminently
possessed) meant a very large community indeed. We are usually safe,
at any rate in the towns, if we multiply the known number of tenements
by ten in order to arrive at the number of souls inhabiting the
borough. To give the Wallingford of the Conquest a minimum of 5000, if
we were certain that 500 (or, to speak exactly, 491) was the number of
single units of taxation within the borough, would be to set that
minimum quite low enough.
The second difficulty is that of establishing the meaning of the word
"haga." In some cases it may represent one single large establishment.
But on the other hand we can point to six which between them covered a
whole acre, and no one with the least acquaintance of mediæval
municipal topography, no one, for instance, who knows the history of
twelfth-century Paris, would allow one-sixth of an acre to a single
average house within the walls of a town. A close would have one or
more wells, it is true; some closes certainly would have gardens, but
the labour of fortification, and the privilege of market, were each of
them causes which forbade any great extension of open spaces, save in
the case of privileged or wealthy communities or individuals.
From what we know of closes elsewhere, it is more probable that these
at Wallingford were the "cells" as it were of the borough organism. A
man would be granted in the first growth of the town a unit of land
with definitely established boundaries, which he would probably
enclose (the word "haga" refers to such an enclosure), and though at
first there might be only one house upon it, it would be to his
interest to multiply the tenements within this unit, which unit
rendered a regular, customary and unchanging due to its various
superiors, whatever the number of inhabitants it grew to contain.
If we turn to a comparison based upon taxation we have equal
difficulties, though difficulties of a different sort. We saw in the
case of Old Windsor that a community of perhaps 1000, probably of
more, but at any rate something more like a large village than a town
(and one moreover not rated as a town), paid in dues the equivalent of
thirty loads of wheat. Wallingford paid the equivalent of only twenty
or twenty-two. But on the other hand the total Farm of the Borough,
the globular price at which the taxes could be reckoned upon to yield
a profit, was equivalent to no less than 400 such loads.
Judged by the number of hagæ we should have a Wallingford about five
times the size of Old Windsor. Judged by the taxable capacity we
should have an Old Wallingford of more than ten times the size of Old
Windsor.
Here again a further element of complexity enters. It was quite out of
the spirit of the Middle Ages to estimate dues, whether to a feudal
superior or to the National Government, or even minor payments made to
a true proprietorial owner at the full capacity of the economic unit
concerned. All such payment was customary. Even where, in the later
Middle Ages, a man indubitably owned (in our modern sense of the word
"owned") a piece of freehold land, and let it (in our modern sense of
the word "let"), it would not have occurred to him or his tenant that
the very highest price obtainable for the productive capacity of the
land should be paid. The philosophy permeating the whole of society
compelled the owner and the tenant, even in this extreme case, to a
customary arrangement; for it was an arrangement intended to be
permanent, to allow for wide fluctuations of value, and therefore to
be necessarily a minimum. If this was the case in the later Middle
Ages where undoubted proprietary right was concerned, still more was
it the case in the early Middle Ages with the customary feudal dues;
these varied infinitely from place to place, rising in scale from
those of privileged communities wholly exempt to those of places such
as we believe Old Windsor to have been, which paid (and these were the
exceptions), not indeed every penny that they could pay (as they would
now have to pay a modern landlord), but half, or perhaps more than
half, such a rent.
Where Wallingford stood in this scale it is quite impossible to say,
and we can only conclude with the very general statement that the
Wallingford of the Conquest consisted of certainly more than 5000
souls, more probably of 10,000, and quite possibly of more than
10,000.
Having 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 England--that is,
of the two Englands which were most fully in touch with the general
life of Europe--as small a thing as might be.
In the light of this prejudice, which is the more bitter because it is
closely connected with religion and with the bitter theological
passions of our universities, we are always safe in taking the larger
as against the smaller modern estimates of wealth, of population and
of influence, where either of these civilisations is concerned, and,
conversely, we are always safe in taking at the lowest modern estimate
the numbers and effect of the barbaric element in our history.
To return to the ground we have already briefly covered, and to
establish a comparison with Wallingford, the word "haga," which we saw
to be of such doubtful value in the case of Wallingford, is replaced
in Oxford by the word "mansio." The taxable units so enumerated are
just over 600, but of these much more than half are set down as
untaxable or imperfectly taxable under the epithets "Uasta," "Uastæ."
What that epithet means we do not know. It may mean anything between
"out of repair," "excused from taxation because they do not come up to
our new standard of the way in which a house in a borough should be
kept up, and because we want to give them time to put themselves in
order," down to the popular acceptation of the word as meaning
"ruined," or even "destroyed."
We know that at the close of the eleventh century, or indeed at any
time before the thirteenth, the small man who lived under his own roof
would live in a very low house, and that, space for space of ground
area, the cubical contents of these poor dwellings would be less than
those of modern slums. On the other hand, we know that the population
would live much more in the open air, slept much more huddled, and
also that a very considerable proportion--what proportion we cannot
say, but probably quite half of a Norman borough--was connected with
the huge communal institutions--military, ecclesiastical, and for that
matter mercantile, as well--which marked the period. We know that the
occupied space stood for very much what is now enclosed by the line of
the old walls, and we know that under modern conditions this space, in
spite of our great empty public buildings, our sparsely inhabited
wealthy houses, and our college gardens, can comfortably hold some
5000 people. We can say, therefore, at a guess, but only at a guess,
that the Oxford of the Conquest must have had some 3000 people in it
at the very least, and can hardly have had 10,000 at the most. These
are wide limits, but anyone who shall pretend to make them narrower is
imposing upon his readers with an appearance of positive knowledge
which is the charlatanism of the colleges, and pretends to exact
knowledge where he possesses nothing but the vague basis of
antiquarian conjecture.
It is sufficiently clear (and the reading of any of our most positive
modern authorities upon Domesday will make it clearer) that no sort of
statistical exactitude can be arrived at for the population of the
boroughs in the early Middle Ages. But when we consider that Reading
is certainly underestimated, and when we consider the detail in which
we are informed of Old Windsor, Wallingford, and Oxford, with the
neglect of Abingdon, Lechlade, Cricklade, and Dorchester, one can
roughly say that the Thames above London possessed in Staines,
Windsor, Cookham, probably Henley, perhaps Bensington, Dorchester,
Eynsham, and possibly Buscot, large villages varying from some
hundreds in population to a little over 1000, not defended, not
reckoned as towns, and agricultural in character. To these we may add
Chertsey, Ealing, and a few others whose proximity to London makes it
difficult for us to judge except in the vaguest way their true
importance.
In another category, possessing a different type of communal life,
already thinking of themselves as towns, we should have Cricklade,
Lechlade, Abingdon, and Kingston among the smaller, though probably
possessing a population not much larger than that of the larger
villages; while of considerable centres there were but three: Reading
the smallest, almost a town, but one upon which we have no true or
sufficient data; Wallingford the largest, with the population of a
flourishing county town in our own days, and Oxford, a place which,
though in worse repair, ran Wallingford close.
Henley affords an interesting study. At the time of the Conquest,
Bensington was no longer, Henley not yet, a borough. To trace the
growth of Henley is especially engrossing, because it is one of the
very rare examples of a process which earlier generations of
historians, and notably the popular historians like Freeman and the
Rev. Mr Green, took to be a common feature in the story of this
island. They were wrong, of course, and they have been widely and
deservedly ridiculed for imagining that the greater part of our
English boroughs 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 his son's time Henley has grown so much that it
counts as one of the three only boroughs in the whole of Oxfordshire:
Oxford and Woodstock are the two others.
It was in the thirteenth century also that a bridge was thrown across
the river at this point--that is, Henley possessed a bridge long
before Wallingford, and at a time when the river could be crossed by
road in but very few places. The granting of a number of indulgences,
and the promises of masses in the middle of the thirteenth century for
this object, give us the date; and, what is perhaps equally
interesting, this early bridge was of stone.
It is usual to think of the early bridges over the Thames as wooden
bridges. Aft older generation was accustomed to many that still
remained. This was true of the later Middle Ages, and of the torpor
and neglect in building which followed the Reformation. But it was not
true of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The bridge at Henley,
like the bridge of Wallingford and the later bridge of Abingdon, was
of stone.
It was allowed to fall into decay, and when Leland crossed the river
at this point it was upon a wooden bridge, the piers of which stood
upon the old foundation. How long that wooden bridge had existed in
1533, when Leland noticed it, we cannot tell, but it remained of wood
until 1786, when the present bridge replaced it.
In spite of the early importance of the town, it was not regularly
incorporated for a long time, but was governed by a Warden, the first
on the list being the date of 1305, within the reign of Edward I. The
charter which gave Henley a Mayor and Corporation was granted as late
as the reign of Henry VIII. and but a few years before Leland's visit.
From that moment, however, the town ceased to expand, either in
importance or in numbers; the destruction of Reading Abbey and of the
Cell of Westminster at Hurley just over the river, very possibly
affected its prosperity. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it
had a population of less than 3000, and sixty years later it had not
added another 1000 to that number.
Maidenhead follows, for centuries, a sort of parallel course to the
development of Henley.
Recently, of course, it has very largely increased in population, and
in this it is an example in a minor degree of what Reading and Oxford
are in a major degree--that is, of the changes which the railway has
made in the Thames Valley. But until the effect of the railway began
to 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
mediæval 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 of the monarchy which followed the Dissolution of the
monastic orders.
To this day traces remain of the road which joined this market to the
second crossing at Henley.
We may presume that the importance of Cookham was maintained for some
two centuries after the Conquest, until it was outflanked and the
stream of its traffic diverted by the building of the bridge at
Maidenhead.
Just as this bridge came later than the Bridge at Henley, so it was
inferior to it in structure; it was, as we have seen, of timber, but
such as it was, it was the cause of the growth of Maidenhead much more
than was the bridge at Henley the cause of the growth of Henley. The
first nucleus of municipal government grows up in connection with the
Bridge Guild; the Warden and the Bridge Masters remain the head of the
embryonic corporation throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and even when the town is incorporated (shortly before the
close of the seventeenth century), by James II., the maintenance and
guardianship of the wooden bridge remained one of the chief
occupations of the new corporation.
It was just after the granting of the Charter that the army of William
III. marched across this bridge on its way to London, an episode which
shows how completely Maidenhead held the monopoly of the Western road.
The present stone bridge was not built to replace the old wooden one
until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, parallel in this as
in everything else to the example of Henley; and this position of
inferiority to Henley, and of parallel advance to that town, is
further seen in the statistics of population. In 1801, when Henley
already boasted nearly 2000 souls, Maidenhead counted almost exactly
half that number. The later growth of the place is quite modern.
The antiquity of the crossing of the Thames at Cookham is supported by
a certain amount of pre-historic evidence, worth about as much as such
evidence ever is, and about as little. Two Neolithic flint knives have
been found there, a bronze dagger sheath and spear-head, a bronze
sword, and a whole collection or store of other bronze spear-heads.
Such as it is, it is a considerable collection for one spot.