The Townland
The THAMES provided the major highway between London and Westminster in the 16th and 17th centuries. The clannish guild of watermen ferried Londoners from landing to landing, and tolerated no outside interference. It is about a mile north of the village of Kemble, near Cirencester in the Cotswolds. It then flows through Lechlade, Oxford, Abingdon, Wallingford, Reading, Henley-on-Thames, Marlow, Maidenhead, Windsor, Eton, Staines and Weybridge, before entering the Greater London area. From the outskirts of Greater London, the river passes Syon House, Hampton Court, Kingston, Richmond (with the famous view of the Thames from Richmond Hill) and Kew before flowing through central London. In central London, the river forms one of the principal axes of the city, from the Palace of Westminster to the Tower of London. Once clear of central London, the river passes Greenwich and Dartford before entering the sea in a drowned estuary near Southend-on-Sea...
The Thames rises in Gloucestershire, traditionally forming the county boundary, firstly between Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, between Berkshire on the south bank and Oxfordshire on the north, between Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, between Berkshire and Surrey, between Surrey and Middlesex, and between Essex and Kent. Before the 1974 boundary changes, the current boundary between Berkshire and Surrey was between Buckinghamshire and Surrey. The Oxfordshire - Berkshire boundary was also moved at that time. About 90 km from the sea, at Teddington, the river begins to exhibit tidal activity from the North Sea. This tidal stretch of the river is known as "the Tideway".
London was reputedly made capital of Roman Britain at the spot where the tides reached in AD 43, but this spot has moved up river in the 2,000 years since then, because of the glacial rebound effect. At London, the water is slightly brackish with sea salt. Below Teddington, the principal tributaries include the rivers Brent, Wandle, Effra, Westbourne, Fleet, Ravensbourne (the final part of which is called Deptford Creek), Lea, Darent and Ingrebourne. There are 45 locks on the River Thames.
The Romans constructed the road, the Fen Causeway across the fens to join what would later become East Anglia and central England: Denver to Peterborough. They also linked Cambridge and Ely but generally, their road system avoided The Fens except for minor roads designed for extracting the products of the region. These were notably, salt and the products of cattle: meat and leather. Sheep were probably raised on the higher ground of the townlands and fen islands, then as in the early nineteenth century. In the past thousand years, the marsh has been found along the coast of The Wash, the remaining tidal waters. Moving inland, next there is a broad bank of silt deposited until the Bronze Age, on which the early post-Roman settlements were made. Inland again is the former fen proper. (Compare the sequence of salt-marsh, spit and fen formerly found at Back Bay, Boston, Mass.) From these settlements, the silt strip is known as The Townland. How far seaward the Roman settlement extended is unclear owing to the deposits laid down above them during later floods. It is clear that there was some prosperity on the Townland, particularly where rivers permitted access to the upland beyond the fen. Such places were Wisbech, Spalding and Swineshead, this last, replaced a thousand years ago by Boston.
All the Townland parishes were laid out, elongated as strips, to provide access to the products of fen, townland, marsh and sea. On the Fen-edge, parishes are similarly elongated to provide access to both upland and fen. The townships are therefore often nearer to each other than they are to the distant farms in their own parishes. For about two hundred years after the English began to settle the Townland and the upland of East Anglia and Lincolnshire, there remained in the Fens themselves, a relict Romano-British culture. The people were known as the Gyrwe, which name is likely to come from their word for "drovers" (compare Welsh gyrwyr). The cattle trade persisted well into the modern historical period as the means of livelihood in Crowland.
The earliest monastic settlements, distributed just inside The Fens appear to have arisen from the wish of English rulers to subvert the traditions of these people as a step towards controlling them. Beginning about the middle of the 7th century, the monks progressively built churches, monasteries and abbeys. They found themselves only moderately safe in the protection of the fens during the time of the Danish raids in the ninth and tenth centuries.