A king lies buried in Reading, and Vikings once camped there
Reading's first appearance in writing is a battle report: in January 871 Alfred the Great and his brother failed to storm a Danish camp there. Two and a half centuries later Henry I founded a vast abbey and was buried in it. The Berkshire town later grew rich on cloth, beer, biscuits and seeds.
The name goes back to the 8th century and most likely honours an Anglo-Saxon group, the Readingas, or Reada's people in Old English. The settlement grew around a crossing of the Kennet about a mile above where it joins the Thames, and there may have been a Roman trading post earlier. Someone from the town is a Redingensian.
Danes invaded Wessex late in 870 and dug in at Reading. King Ethelred and Alfred attacked on 4 January 871 without success, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account of the fight is the oldest written mention of the place. After 1066 William the Conqueror handed local land to Battle Abbey, and Domesday Book counted six mills. Henry I founded Reading Abbey in 1121, turning the town into a pilgrimage destination, though abbey and townsfolk often clashed. Henry VIII largely destroyed it in 1538, and its last abbot, Hugh Faringdon, was executed for treason outside his own church.
Cloth made the town wealthy. By 1525 it ranked tenth in England for taxable wealth, and by 1611 it had more than 5,000 people. The Civil War hit hard: a Royalist garrison moved in in 1642, Parliament's siege succeeded in April 1643, and the cloth trade did not fully recover until the 20th century. During the Glorious Revolution, the only real fighting of the campaign took place in Reading's streets.
Canals and railways brought a second boom. The Kennet Navigation reached Newbury in 1723 despite local protests, and from 1810 barges could travel all the way to the Bristol Channel. Brewing, baking and seed-growing flourished alongside the Great Western Railway. Today the county town of Berkshire had 203,795 people in its built-up area in 2021 and is known for insurance, IT, its university and the annual Reading Festival.
Source: Reading, Berkshire
