Excerpt from A History of Berkshire The following pages profess to be no more than a compilation. So much has been already written about Berkshire that my chief difficulty has been to select what seemed to me the most salient periods and, I trust, most generally interesting episodes in its history. I have endeavoured, I feel very imperfectly, to show how Berkshire grew to be the 'Royal County.' At first but an ill-defined portion of southern England, its earliest story is necessarily that of the country of which it formed a part, and I found it impossible therefore to disassociate its personal upgrowth from that of the districts that surround it. Though I have touched most briefly on its geological condition, I hold that to understand the history of any county, its physical structure must first be examined, as from the materials that compose its underlying strata its present superficial aspect is derived; and on this, too, its successive human occupation and its eventual political development are almost if not entirely based. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.