s, one of which served as
the deep moat which encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the
wide castle-court; to the north of it on a lofty mound rose the great
keep; to the west the one tower which remains, the tower of St. George,
frowned over the river and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress
lay the Bailly, a space cleared by the merciless policy of the
castellan, with the church of St. Peter le Bailly which still marks its
extent.

The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the Church as on the
townsmen. Outside the town lay a meadow belonging to the Abbey of
Abingdon, which seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his
garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the Abbey; he had wiled away
one of its finest manors from its Abbot Athelm; but his seizure of the
meadow beside Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day they
threw themselves weeping before the altar of the two English saints
whose names were linked to the older glories of their house. But while
they invoked the vengeance of Dunstan and AEthelwold on their plunderer,
the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. At last Robert
dreamt that he stood in a vast court, one of a crowd of nobles gathered
round a throne whereon sate a lady passing fair. Before her knelt two
brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their mead and pointing
out the castellan as the robber. The lady bade Robert be seized, and two
youths hurried him away to the field itself, seated him on the ground,
piled burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed haybands in his face,
and set fire to his beard. The earl woke trembling at the divine
discipline; he at once took boat for Abingdon, and restored to the monks
the meadow he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by the
restitution of his plunder, and he returned to set about the restoration
of the ruined churches within and without the walls of Oxford. The tower
of St. Michael, the doorway of St. Ebbe, the chancel arch of Holywell,
the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are fragments of the
work done by Robert and his house. But the great monument of the
devotion of the D'Oillys rose beneath the walls of their castle.
Robert, a nephew of the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine
of Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the English of Leland.
"Edith used to walke out of Oxford Castelle with her gentlewomen to
solace, and that oftentymes where yn a cert