e
monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century
only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the
borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite
evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English
Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of AElfred. But
though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already
considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle
of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the
Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a
political importance under AEthelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to
that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its
burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or
nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred,
and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the
earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming
the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the
ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence.
But the men themselves are dim to us. Their town-meeting, their
Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fashion as the Freeman's Common
Hall; their town-mead is still 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 busting, their merchant guild regulating
trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or honey or
marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats
floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred
herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way.

Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though
the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to
a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better
illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new
masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion
of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The
architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the
Norman within its walls. To the west of the town rose one of the
stateliest of English castles, and in the