fore we get a glimpse
of the borough that must have grown up under its walls. The first
definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English
Chronicle which recalls its seizure by Eadward the Elder, but the form of
this entry shows that the town was already a considerable one, and in the
last wrestle of England with the Dane its position on the borders of
Mercia and Wessex combined with its command of the upper valley of the
Thames to give it military and political importance. Of the life of its
burgesses however we still know little or nothing. The names of its
parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, St. Edmund, show how early
church after church gathered round the earlier town-church of St. Martin.
But the men of the little town remain dim to us. Their town-mote, or the
"Portmannimote" as it was called, which was held in the churchyard of St.
Martin, still lives in a shadow of its older self as the Freeman's Common
Hall--their town-mead is still the Port-meadow. But it is only by later
charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage
to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or
judging and law-making in their hustings, their merchant-gild regulating
trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or money or
marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats paying
toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon, as they
floated down the Thames towards London.

[Sidenote: Oxford and the Normans]

The number of houses marked waste in the survey marks the terrible
suffering of Oxford in the Norman Conquest: but the ruin was soon
repaired, and the erection of its castle, the rebuilding of its churches,
the planting of a Jewry in the heart of the town, showed in what various
ways the energy of its new masters was giving an impulse to its life. It
is a proof of the superiority of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian
houses about them that each of the later town-halls of the borough had,
before their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Nearly all the larger
dwelling houses in fact which were subsequently converted into academic
halls bore traces of the same origin in names such as Moysey's Hall,
Lombard's Hall, or Jacob's Hall. The Jewish houses were abundant, for
besides the greater Jewry in the heart of it, there was a lesser Jewry
scattered over its southern quarter, and we can hardly doubt that this
abundance of