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 The Thames

the last few centuries. The forests of England are represented as impassable, or nearly so ; the numbers of the population are grossly underestimated ; the towns which have had a continuous municipal existence of 1500 years are represented as villages.

The same spirit would tend to make of the Thames Valley in the Dark and Middle Ages a very different land- scape from that which we see to-day. The floods were indeed more common and the passage of the river somewhat more difficult ; cultivation did not everywhere approach the banks as it does now ; and in two or three spots where there has been a great development of modern building, notably at Reading, and, of course, in London, the banks have been artificially strengthened. But with these exceptions it may be confidently asserted that no belt of densely inhabited land- scape in England has changed so little in its natural features as the Thames Valley.

There are dozens of reaches upon the upper Thames where little is in sight save the willows, the meadows, and a village church tower, which present exactly the same aspect to-day as they did when that church was first built. You might put a man of the fifteenth century on to the water below St John's Lock, and, until he came to Buscot Lock, he would hardly know that he had passed into a time other than his own. The same steeple of Lechlade would stand as a permanent landmark beyond the fields, and, a long

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