of all to be somewhat independent in management, and especially to work in large units, and out of the very many which sprang, up all over the island three particularly concern the Thames Valley.  Each of them dates from the very beginnings of Anglo-Saxon history, each of them has its roots in legend, and each of them continued for close upon a thousand years to be a capital economic centre of English life.  These three great Benedictine foundations are WESTMINSTER, CHERTSEY, and ABINGDON.

When civilisation returned in fulness with the Norman Conquest, another great house of the first importance was founded—­at Reading; and, much later, a fourth at Sheen.  To these we shall turn in their place, as also to the string of dependent houses and small foundations which line the river almost from its source right down to London:  indeed the only type of religious foundation which historic notes such as these can afford to neglect is the monastery or nunnery built in a town, and for the purposes of a town, after the civic life of a town had developed.  These very numerous houses (most numerous, of course, in Oxford), such as the Observants of Richmond and a host of others, do not properly enter into the scheme we are considering.  They are not causes but effects of the development of civilisation in the Thames Valley.

Abingdon, Westminster, and Chertsey are all ascribed by tradition, and each by a very vital and well-documented tradition, to the seventh century:  Abingdon and Chertsey to its close; Westminster, with less assurance, to its beginning.  All three, we may take it, did arise in that period which was for the eastern part of this island a time when all the work of Europe had to be begun again.  Though we know nothing of the progress of the Saxon pirates in the province of Britain, and though history is silent for the hundred and fifty years covered by the disaster, yet on the analogy of other and later raids from the North Sea we may imagine that no inland part of the country suffered more than the valley of the Thames.  All that was left of the Roman order, wealth and right living, must have appeared at the close of that sixth century, when the Papal Mission landed, something as appears the wrecked and desolate land upon the retirement of a flood.  To cope with such conditions, to reintroduce into the ravaged and desecrated province, which had lost its language in the storm, all its culture, and even its religion, a new beginning of energy and of production, came, with the peculiar advantages we have seen it to possess for such a work, the monastic institution.  For two centuries the great houses were founded all over England:  their attachment to Continental learning, their exactitude, their corporate power of action, were all in violent contrast to, and most powerfully educational for, the barbarians in the midst of whom they grew.  It may be truly said that if we regard the life of England as beginning anew with the Saxon invasion, if that disaster of the pirate raids be considered as so great that it offers a breach of continuity in the history of Britain, then the new country which sprang up, speaking Teutonic dialects, and calling itself by its present name of England, was actually created by the Benedictine monks.