We may return to this interesting and instructive report, with its wealth of ancient evidence, and interrogate that much more ancient document, the face of the country. Strange to say, a great deal of that country remains as it was in, say, the reign of Henry III. The green fields and the water-courses are there, though the Abbot in 1250 could no longer look across his own land all the way from Westminster. The divided Tyburn wandered over the green expanse, untroubled with bridges. Two or three small brooks formed here a kind of delta. On the south, one of them ran through Westminster Abbey and divided Thorney Island from Tot Hill. Another ran through the district we call Whitehall. The land between was low and marshy, and even at the present day, when there has been so much levelling up, the statue of Charles I. is upon ground ten feet higher than Parliament Street. If, standing on the future site of Whitehall we looked to the westward, we saw nothing but a vast tract of low green meadow-land. If we looked to the south, we might have seen the new buildings of Westminster Abbey, unless when the Danes had been on the warpath. If we looked to the eastward, we found that the Thames washed up close to our feet. At this early period, and down to the reign of King Edward I., there were no houses in sight, except those which clustered about the Abbey, those which constituted the village of Charing, and in the far distance the grim walls, the red-tiled roofs, and the church towers of the City. London was more plainly visible than it is now, and on account of a curious bend in the course of the Thames, was nearly as visible from Westminster. By the thirteenth century a great change had come over all the district. The Thames was better confined within its proper limits; some measure of embanking had been carried out, and a great many alterations in City life, in Church arrangements, and in the King’s policy have been detailed in the histories of London. We need not go far into them here. Before 1200, all the land between the Abbot and London belonged to him. By 1222 all was changed, or about to be changed, and the Abbot owned nothing except the advowson of the far-off St. Bride’s. St. Bride’s belongs to Westminster even now. The King laid claim to certain foreshores on the banks of the Thames. Undoubtedly, they belonged by an ancient grant to the Abbot, but we must take into consideration that what had been only occasionally dry land in the eleventh century was permanently dry in the thirteenth; and the King had conferred, and was conferring, too many benefits on the Abbot and his monks and their church to permit them to dispute his royal, if illegal, pleasure. The Bishop of Exeter formed a little estate of the Outer Temple. From his precincts westward the constant embanking, and especially the formation of the roadway of the Strand, left a wide strip now permanently dry. This strip the King erected