Abingdon was, moreover, probably on account of its distance from London, more of a local centre, and, to repeat a word already used, more of a “monarchy” than the other great monasteries of the Thames Valley.  This is sufficiently proved by a glance at the ecclesiastic map, such as, for instance, that published in “The Victoria History of the County of Berkshire,” where one sees the manors belonging to Abingdon at the time of the Conquest all clustered together and occupying one full division of the county, that, namely, included in the great bend of the Thames which has its cusp at Witham Hill.  Abingdon was the life of Northern Berkshire, and it is not fantastic to compare its religious aspect in Saxon times over against the King’s towns of Wantage and Wallingford to the larger national aspect of Canterbury over against Winchester and London.

Even in its purely civic character, it acquired a position which no one of the greater northern monasteries could pretend to, through the building of its bridge in the early fifteenth century.  The twin fords crossing this bend of the river were, though direct and important, difficult; when they were once bridged and the bridges joined by the long causeway which still runs across Andersey Island between the old and the new branches of the Thames, travel was easily diverted from the bridge of Wallingford to that at Abingdon, and the great western road running through Farringdon towards the Cotswolds and the valley of the Severn had Abingdon for its sort of midway market town.

These three great Benedictine monasteries form, as it were, the three nurseries or seed plots from which civilisation spread out along the Thames Valley after the destruction wrought by the first and worst barbarian invasions.  All three, as we have seen, go back to the very beginning of the Christian phase of English history; the origins of all three merge in those legends which make a twilight between the fantastic stories of the earlier paganism and the clear records of the Christian epoch after the re-Latinisation of England.  An outpost beyond these three is the institution of St Frideswides at Oxford.  Beyond that point the upper river, gradually narrowing, losing its importance for commerce and as a highway, supported no great monastery, and felt but tardily the economic change wrought by the foundations lower down the stream.

Chertsey and Westminster certainly, and Abingdon very probably, were destroyed, or at least sacked, in the Danish invasions, but their roots lay too deep to allow them to disappear:  they re-arose, and a generation before the Conquest were again by far the principal centres of production and government in the Thames Valley.  Indeed, with the exception of the string of royal estates upon the banks of the river, and of the town of Oxford, Chertsey, Westminster and Abingdon were the only considerable seats of regulation and government upon the Thames, when the Conquest came to reorganise the whole of English life.