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Dorchester-on-Thames is a village and civil parish on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, about northwest of Wallingford and southeast of Oxford. Despite its name, Dorchester is not directly on the River Thames, but a few hundred yards from the Thame's confluence with it. Historically the Thames was only so named downstream of the village; upstream it is named the Isis, and Ordnance Survey maps continue to label the river as "River Thames or Isis" above Dorchester. In practice, however, this distinction is rarely made outside the city of Oxford. ==History== The area has been inhabited since at least the Neolithic. In the north of the parish there was a Neolithic sacred site, now largely destroyed by gravel pits. On one of the Sinodun Hills on the opposite side of the Thames, a ramparted settlement was inhabited during the Bronze Age and Iron Age. Two of the Sinodun Hills bear distinctive landmarks of mature trees called Wittenham Clumps. Adjacent to the village is Dyke Hills which is the remains of an Iron Age hill fort. Dorchester's position close to the navigable Thames and bounded on three sides by water made it strategic for both communications and defence. The Romans built a ''vicus''〔"No definite public or administrative buildings have yet been excavated" note Barry C. Burnham and J. S. Wacher, ''The Small Towns of Roman Britain'' 1990: "Dorchester on Thames" p. 337〕 here, with a road linking the settlement to a military camp at Alchester, 16 miles (25 km) to the north. The settlement's Roman name is unclear; back-formations from Bede's ''Dorcic'' are unsupported.〔Barry C. Burnham and J. S. Wacher, ''The Small Towns of Roman Britain'' "Dorchester on Thames"〕 In 634 Pope Honorius I sent a bishop called Birinus to convert the Saxons of the Thames Valley to Christianity. King Cynegils of Wessex gave Dorchester to Birinus as the seat of a new Diocese of Dorchester under a Bishop of Dorchester; the diocese was extremely large, and covered most of Wessex and Mercia. The settled nature of the bishopric made Dorchester in a sense the ''de facto'' capital of Wessex, which was later to become the dominant kingdom in England; eventually Winchester displaced it, with the bishopric being transferred there in 660. Briefly in the late 670s Dorchester was once more a bishop's seat under Mercian control.〔Kirby ''Earliest English Kings'' p. 48-49〕 Dorchester again became the seat of a bishop in around 875, when the Mercian Bishop of Leicester transferred his seat there. The diocese merged with that of Lindsey in 971; the bishop's seat was moved to Lincoln in 1072. In the 12th century the church was enlarged to serve a community of Augustinian canons. King Henry VIII dissolved the Abbey in 1536, leaving a small village with a huge parish church. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dorchester on Thames」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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