e 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 bor