The singular pride of Windsor Castle's position is clear to all who travel within a long sight of it by road, river, or rail. Windsor first owed its importance to its position. It stands upon a single blunt cone of chalk projecting through the clay of the surrounding low lands, which the Castle thus overlooks and commands, as from an island, like the castles of Corfe, Lincoln, Belvoir, and Montacute among others. This advantage of singular eminence above any other place upon the Thames and near London was strengthened and served both by the river, which flows on the north along a winding shore (which was perhaps the origin of the name Windsor), and by the dense, broad tracts of forest extending far to the south and west. It lay within a few miles of Staines, and so was only a long day's march from London, by the Roman road from Winchester and Silchester which crossed the Thames at that point. There is no clear evidence of its importance before the Conquest, and in the _Domesday Book_ Windsor is neither a parish nor a manor. But halfway between the chalk hill and Staines the Saxon kings had a palace at Old Windsor. It may have been close to the river, west of Old Windsor Church, where there used to be a farmstead having a river-fed moat; but not a sign of this palace remains. Edward the Confessor held his court there, we know, and the most vivid memory of it is connected with the year before the landing of the Conqueror. The king was at Old Windsor, and with him Earl Godwin's two strong sons, Harold and Tostig. Harold was drinking with Edward, when Tostig seized him by the hair and shamefully handled him, to the dismay of the household. Harold in return caught his younger brother up in his arms and dashed him to the floor. The guards then leapt forward from all sides and forcibly separated the fighters, while the mild king foretold God's anger and a fatal end to their violent ways.