Sinodun Hill, whose aspects and history have already been remarked upon, groups grandly as one drops down river to Day’s Lock, as perhaps the illustration may serve to indicate. The original Day who, ages ago, conferred his name upon the lock is forgotten, but at any rate the proprietary style of the lock’s name and of those of one or two others reminds people who know anything about the history of the river of those times before the coming of the Thames Conservancy, when the stream and the towing-paths along it were regarded very much as the private property of the landowners whose fields ran down to their water-course. We read much of the mediæval robber-barons of the Rhine, and their fellows in this country were those riparian property-owners, who made up for the lack of ferocity which characterised their continental counterparts by a cunning assumption of legality, very much more difficult to dispose of than sheer brute force. Much of the history of the Thames is concerned with actions in courts of law to assert or to contest these rights, real or assumed. So early as 1624 an Act of Parliament providing for the better navigation of the Thames referred incidentally to the “Exactions of the Occupiers of Locks and Weirs upon the River of Thames Westward,” and set out to do away with them; but that was a long business, and for many a year afterwards Day, of Day’s Lock, and Boulter, of Boulter’s Lock, and their brethren, owned, or rented from landowners, the locks still named after them, and charged just what they pleased for traffic passing through. Beyond Day’s Lock comes Dorchester, i.e. _Dwr chester_, the fortress on the water. Plenty of water here, at any rate, to give point to the place-name, for at this spot the Thame, meandering along through oozy meadows, joins the Thames. It cannot be said, by any exactness of imagery, to “fall” into it; to use that well-worn expression beloved by the writers of geography primers. CHAPTER XI DORCHESTER—BENSON Dorchester, Oxon, has not the slightest resemblance to Dorchester, Dorset: the two have little in common save their name, which might well have been much more than duplicated, seeing how many must have been the camps and fortresses upon various waters. Fortunately, with the result of saving us from the confusion of dozens of Dorchesters, our very remote ancestors were possessed of sufficient resourcefulness to enable them to fit distinctive names to those places.