cultural centre. Whatever importance
it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by
the almost total cessation of river navigation. Its very soil is in
large measure in academical hands. As a municipality it seems to exist
only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not
long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police.
The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its
magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university
jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of
the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating
ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body
which reigned supreme within its walls.

Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is
the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already
seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its
streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection
with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial
ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary
control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by
their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous
borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it
among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its
freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of
self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation.
Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor,
Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older
authority of the Mayor.

The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the
most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left
its mark not on the town only but on the very constitution and character
of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must
first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then,
when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the
legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank
of English municipalities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is
certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the
departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The littl