frontier. If any man had stood, in the days of Eadward, on the hill
that was not yet "Shotover," and had looked along the plain to the
place where the grey spires of Oxford are clustered now, as it were
in a purple cup of the low hills, he would have seen little but "the
smoke floating up through the oakwood and the coppice,"


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The low hills were not yet cleared, nor the fens and the wolds
trimmed and enclosed. Centuries later, when the early students came,
they had to ride "through the thick forest and across the moor, to
the East Gate of the city" (Munimenta Academica, Oxon., vol. i. p.
60). In the midst of a country still wild, Oxford was already no
mean city; but the place where the hostile races of the land met to
settle their differences, to feast together and forget their wrongs
over the mead and ale, or to devise treacherous murder, and close the
banquet with fire and sword.

Again and again, after Eadward the Elder took Mercia, the Danes went
about burning and wasting England. The wooden towns were flaming
through the night, and sending up a thick smoke through the day, from
Thamesmouth to Cambridge. "And next was there no headman that force
would gather, and each fled as swift as he might, and soon was there
no shire that would help another." When the first fury of the
plundering invaders was over, when the Northmen had begun to wish to
settle and till the land and have some measure of peace, the early
meetings between them and the English rulers were held in the border-
town, in Oxford. Thus Sigeferth and Morkere, sons of Earngrim, came