Flemild
slept, was a rough wooden box filled with straw, on the top of which
were a bed and a mattress, covered by coarse quilts and a rug of
rabbit-skin. Derette and the boys lay on sacks filled with chaff, with
woollen rugs over them.

The baby was already asleep, and Agnes laid it gently on one of the
woollen rugs, while she and Ermine, to Derette's amazement, knelt and
prayed for some time. Derette herself took scarcely five minutes to her
prayers. Why should she require more, when her notion of prayer was not
to make request for what she wanted to One who could give it to her, but
to gabble over one Creed, six Paternosters, and the doxology, with as
much rapidity as she could persuade her lips to utter the words? Then,
in another five minutes, after a few rapid motions, Derette drew the
woollen rug over her, and very quickly knew nothing more, for that night
at least.

The city of Oxford, as then inhabited, was considerably smaller than it
is now. The walls ran, roughly speaking, on the north, from the Castle
to Holywell Street, on the east a little lower than the end of Merton
Street, thence on the south to the other side of the Castle. Beyond the
walls the houses extended northwards somewhat further than to Beaumont
Street, and southwards about half-way to Friar Bacon's Tower. The
oldest church in the city is Saint Peter's in the East, which was
originally built in the reign of Alfred; the University sermons used to
be delivered in the stone pulpit of this church.

There was a royal palace in Oxford, built by Henry First, who styled it
le Beau Mont; it stood in Stockwell Street, nearly on the site of the
present workhouse. It had not been visited by royalty since 1157, when
a baby was born in it, destined to become a mighty man of valour, and to
be known to all ages as King Richard Coeur-de-Lion. In 1317 King Edward
Second bestowed it on the White Friars, and all that now remains of it
is a small portion of the wall built into the workhouse.

The really great man of the city was the Earl of Oxford, at that time
Aubrey de Vere, the first holder of the title. He had been married to a
lady who was a near relative of King Stephen, but his second and present
Countess, though of good family, came from a lower grade.

Modern ideas of a castle are often inaccurate. It was not always a
single fortified mansion, but consisted quite as frequently of an
embattled wall surrounding several houses, and usually