The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were assimilated
by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they
shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of
London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of
one and the same custom, law, and liberty."

In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate
than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of
London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general
freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the
city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But
it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed
with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a
coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London
and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to
have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of
half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the
town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students
huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or
dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly
discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power
of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to
penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was
narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The
precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded
it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little
church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The
Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern
horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the
bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to
the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town,
lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very
heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various
streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor
service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst
these various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the
more intense that