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.