could be found, and advantage was taken of them to build.

There thus arose along the whole course of the Thames from its source
to London a series of villages and towns, increasing in importance as
the stream deepened and gave greater facilities to traffic, and bound
together by the common life of the river. It was their _highway_, and
it is as a highway that it must first be regarded.

Of the way in which the Thames was a necessary great road in early
times, perhaps the best proof is the manner in which various parishes
manage to get their water front at the expense of a somewhat unnatural
shape to their boundaries. Thus Fawley in Buckinghamshire has a
curious and interesting arrangement of this sort thrusting down from
the hills a tongue of land which ends in a sort of wharfage on the
river just opposite Remenham church. In Berkshire there are also
several examples of this. On the upper river Dractmoor and Kingston
Bagpuise are both very narrow and long, a shape forced upon them by
the necessity of having this outlet upon the river in days when the
life of a parish was a real one and the village was a true and
self-sufficing unit. Next to them Fyfield does the same thing. Lower
down, near Wallingford, the parish of Brightwell has added on a
similar eccentric edge to the north and east so that it may share in
the bank; but perhaps the best example of all in this connection is
the curious extension below Reading. Here land which is of no use for
human habitation--water meadows continually liable to floods--runs out
from the parish northward for a good mile. These lands are separated
from the river during the whole of this extension until at last a bend
of the stream gives the parish the opportunity it has evidently sought
in thus extending its boundaries. On the Oxford bank Standlake and
Brighthampton do the same thing upon the Upper Thames and to some