Today we have a tale of two towns.

Chertsey and Staines emerged for opposite reasons. One was for going to, the other for going through. Each owed this to a singular crux: in one case a house of the Christian cross, in the other a river crossing. Those structures are long gone, yet the towns they birthed stand to this day as important crossroads on the river. Add to that that one can hardly cross their paths without being made cross at the political situation, which has seriously crossed a line, and you begin to – well, that’s enough talking across them.

Although, it really did cross a line. And don’t take my word for it. In the present constituency, Runnymede and Weybridge, it was a line too far even for some individuals on the highest balconies of the party responsible.

On the electoral map we are now well into hardcore Tory Thames, blue surrounded by blue. In the December 2019 election they changed their minion in parliament regardless. This was because up till then it happened to be former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond. It isn’t anymore.

Hammond controlled this country’s treasury during some of the cruellest years of the Tory austerity programme and must take his share of responsibility for its dire human rights abuses. Yet relatively speaking, he was a moderate: more concerned with outcomes – however poorly he assessed them – than ideological zeal, preferring to deal in arguments rather than slogans. Ultimately this found expression in a stubborn resistance to a hard Brexit which turned him into a hate figure for the Brexit-rapture demagogues who clawed their way to power under Boris Johnson. At the crunch, Hammond was one of twenty-one Tory MPs expelled from the parliamentary Conservative Party, some of its grandest veterans among them, for voting against Johnson’s Brexit deal. Like many other conservatives he has since wandered into the political wilderness, no longer at home in a party he believes has left him.

It is one of the many subplots of England’s present crisis, and one which will most trouble the hearts of old Tory heartlands like this. The death of English conservatism, a tradition devoured by its own children. It always had its grievous flaws and made terrible mistakes. It had its part in the worst atrocities of industrial exploitation and colonial racism. But somewhere in there was also a more scrupulous dogs-and-meadows-and-fireplaces conservatism that meant something better than violence against dissidents and minorities. An honest and venerable tradition existed, born from legitimate shock at the carnage of the civil wars and the French Revolution, whose instinct was to place a steadying hand of caution on the shoulder of swift and hot-headed change; that enjoyed discussing disagreements over tea and earnestly sought to learn from them; that did not beat its chest about the wonders of industry and empire, but made pragmatic use of those systems to try to do good with their own little bits of them. A conservatism, that is, with integrity in its bones – integrity which to the Brexit revolutionaries, in their contempt for truth and hatred of dissent, has been totally indigestible. Those bones, spat out with dripping conceit, are all that remain of the English conservative tradition: scattered, lost, with a body no longer, washed away on the river.

But that is what the river does. To the people who live on its floodplain, it brings possibilities and it takes them away. But it does not choose from them. Only they, the English and their predecessors and successors, can do that. Let’s look at a few they did.

Start:Chertsey Bridge (nearest station: Chertsey)

End:Staines Bridge (nearest station: Staines)

Length: 6.4km/4 miles

Location: Surrey – Borough of Runnymede, Borough of Spelthorne

Topics: Chertsey Abbey, Laleham and the Earls of Lucan, the Penton Hook, Staines

Once upon a time there was someone called Cirotis (or Ceorot, as the historian Bede calls him, or Cerotus, which sounds like a Latinised variant). Of this individual nothing is known. Their name is Britonic, not Roman or Anglo-Saxon. And yet, it made enough of an echo for the Anglo-Saxon immigrants to give this site the name of Chertsey, that is to say, ‘Cirotis’s Island’. And it could easily have been an island back then, for it stands on a gravel outcrop in an area where all the water dumped in by tributaries like the Wey give the river a marshy disposition.

Out of that process emerged the individual who put Chertsey on the map. Little is known about Erkenwald (or Earconwald – Anglo-Saxon names are not standardised in modern English) except that he came from another frontier area, Lindsey (now Lincolnshire). It is believed he was of royal descent, possibly in the Essex kingdom, which was powerful early on and underwent one of the most internally turbulent Christianisations. Bede goes further and names him as the East Saxons’ bishop. As the case may be, in 666 CE Erkenwald decided to come out into this marshy, desolate and politically unstable middle ground to found the first monastery in Surrey, Chertsey Abbey. This is not something you just get up and do and suggests access to supportive people and resources (not to mention that he founded a second abbey for his sister at Barking, which likewise grew to great importance). These ventures seem to have done him little harm, because after serving as Chertsey’s abbot for a few years he received promotion to Bishop of London.

The original monastery was built of wood and seems to have made a soaring start. It received generous land grants from the Mercian client kings who came into control of Surrey, and got to bury the bodies of high-status Anglo-Saxon saints in its cemetery (always helpful because it means pilgrimages and therefore news and money). But then it got killed.

The Viking raid on Chertsey was not random. It fell under the steamroller of the great Danish invasion of 865, which by the time it got here had swept aside the Anglo-Saxon powers of the east coast – Northumbria and East Anglia – and would soon overwhelm Mercia too. There is a great deal of debate about how much of the Viking phenomenon was as violent as traditionally portrayed or in fact more peaceful – the Christians had a tendency to exaggerate the monstrousness of people not like them – but there seems little doubt that at its sharp end it was seriously atrocious. Monasteries were glinting, undefended treasure chests of wealth and hostile religious authority and therefore frequent targets, and Chertsey’s turn to discover this the hard way came in 871 when Vikings on an expedition down the Thames slaughtered ninety monks, Beocca the abbot and Ethor the priest among them, pillaged the monastery’s riches, and laid waste to its lands. Then they came back and did it again.

The threat subsided after Alfred of Wessex defeated the Vikings and they settled their conquered lands as the Danelaw, but perhaps understandably this violence appears to have left lasting trauma. It is only a century later that evidence arises of Chertsey Abbey getting rebuilt and repopulated, and by monks sent from outside at that. They in turn were chased off by King Edgar in 964 as part the Benedictine Reforms – a programme driven by fear that monasteries’ wealth and influence were being exploited by unserious monks, and thus aiming to give the rules and norms of monastic life more rigour. From where we stand now that may look little more than some religious quibble, but two patterns it strengthened would have enormous consequence later. First, it stuck the king’s authority in the driving seat of religious affairs, which was fine if state and church got on well like Edgar with his Archbishop Dunstan, but not so much if your name is Henry. Second, it drew heavily and deliberately on continental European standards.

Re-planted with Edgar’s regularised monks, Chertsey Abbey escaped the turbulence of its youth and from there the only way was up. King after king queued up to confirm the lands it held and grant it more. It not only survived the Normans but won them over, receiving extensive rights of hunting, foresting and security from William the Conqueror in person. By the time of his Domesday survey in 1086 its land was reckoned at over 50,000 acres, which only increased as his successors handed it more and more. Then in the 1110s a new abbot undertook a massive rebuilding programme, upgrading the church into a towering stone edifice and surrounding it with a full-scale self-sufficient monastic complex of not only chapels, a cloister and domestic buildings but brewing and baking facilities, vineyards, apiaries, and a hydro-engineering project that turned a side-channel of the Thames into its own Abbey River for drinking, cleaning, milling, fishing and sewage.

Needless to say, this was no longer some ascetic retreat in the middle of nowhere (if it ever had been). In its heyday, Chertsey Abbey was one of the heftiest privilege forts of the Thames valley: the brightest star of worship, wealth and scholarship for miles around and by far the largest landowner in these parts short of the king. When anything important happened in Surrey or anywhere near it, the Abbot of Chertsey was sure to be there.

Beyond the Abbey walls, the Chertsey settlement began to thrive off its success. The village grew into a town. The monks took an mounting role in its planning. In a matter of decades it was an overflowing breadbasket of garden markets and commercial fairs backed up by tile-making and brickworks and a leading centre of trade in this region.

Obviously something changed, because today the Abbey no longer exists and Chertsey is, if far from destitute, one of the more modest beads on the Thames valley necklace of glittering affluence. Much as today, the wealthy and successful get to control how the history is written; look through the cracks however and signs can be glimpsed of accumulating trouble.

The monastery’s holdings turned its community into a bunch of rich landlords in a world of downtrodden peasants and serfs. Then as now, as the victims of the present housing crisis will attest, big landowners in the English story tend to operate towards the villainous end of the spectrum. The National Archives records petitions that indicate angry disputes between the Abbey and the tenants and communities on its land. At times their grievances moved them to refuse to work or pay rent, in which case chances were they would be violently repressed for it. This was the kind of structural injustice that fostered the English middle ages’ explosive rural upheavals, most famously the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, whose revenge was bloodily ferocious but whose underlying grievances were legitimate and would persist.

Such over-reliance on agricultural income from landholdings also exposed the Abbey to shifts in the weather and shocks to the labour supply, most especially from plagues like the Black Death. In spite of such vulnerabilities it kept up its prestige, reaching a high point during the Wars of the Roses when it was temporarily called on to bury the body of the almost certainly murdered King Henry VI of the Plantagenet house of Lancaster (who had severe mental health problems so English storytelling has not been kind to him). But by the rise of the Tudors it appears to have crept into serious debt, and from there reports by inspectors grow more scathing. Accusations appear about obsessive superstitions, dodgy relic stories, corrupt sales of land, and inevitably sexual inclinations of kinds the authorities found easy to whip into public prejudice.

It is hard to assess the fairness of these criticisms because the bulk of them came from the minions of Henry VIII, who as it turned out had it in for the monasteries and actively fuelled such grievances to lay a foundation for smashing them. But it is hard to imagine that without genuine cracks in its fabric, Chertsey Abbey, one of the top-tier behemoths of the English monastic system, would have given in as readily as it did. Many monastic communities, like Syon Abbey downriver, frustrated the king and his demolition squads for years and often paid a gruesome price for it. Chertsey surrendered without a fight in 1537. The monks’ sole condition was that they be allowed to keep practicing somewhere else, and th