it was so closely cabined and confined.

It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared
within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The
twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic
philosophy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the age of a
great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rhone and
the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival
of individual, human life in the industrial masses of the feudal world
that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of
eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa
from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France
to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a
milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and
political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet townships of
Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like
the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no
foreign Caesar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a
king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's
peace shielded them from that terrible oppression of the mediaeval
baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life
or death. The peculiarity of municipal life in fact in England is that
instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life
around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with
that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within
the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went
with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his
burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his
tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural
tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In township or manor
alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice,
commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to
furnish in time of war. The progress of municipal freedom, like that of
national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of
popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few
great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that wrested liberty from
the French seigneur or the century of war