Which is as much as to say, ‘The townsfolk call for help to their neighbours, the yokels, that were more numerous than they, and better men in battle . . . so when the sun turned to the time of the loosing of oxen the Town drave in the ranks of the Gown, and won the victory.’ They were strong, the townsmen, but not merciful. ‘The crowns of some chaplains, viz. all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy,’ and ‘some poor innocents these confounded sons of Satan knocked down, beat, and most cruelly wounded.’ The result, in the long run, was that the University received from Edward III. ‘a most large charter, containing many liberties, some that they had before, and _others that he had taken away from the town_.’ Thus Edward granted to the University ‘the custody of the assize of bread, wine, and ale,’ the supervising of measures and weights, the sole power of clearing the streets of the town and suburbs. Moreover, the Mayor and the chief Burghers were condemned yearly to a sort of public penance and humiliation on St. Scholastica’s Day. Thus, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the strife of Town and Gown had ended in the complete victory of the latter. Though the University owed its success to its clerkly character, and though the Legate backed it with all the power of Rome, yet the scholars were Englishmen and Liberals first, Catholics next. Thus they had all English sympathy with them when they quarrelled with the Legate in 1238, and shot his cook (who, indeed, had thrown hot broth at them); and thus, in later days, the undergraduates were with Simon de Montfort against King Henry, and aided the barons with a useful body of archers. The University, too, constantly withstood the Friars, who had settled in Oxford on pretence of wishing to convert the Jews, and had attempted to get education into their hands. ‘The Preaching Friars, who had lately obtained from the Pope divers privileges, particularly an exemption, as they pretended, from being subject to the jurisdiction of the University, began to behave themselves very insolent against the Chancellors and Masters.’ (Wood, _Annals_, i. 399.) The conduct of the Friars caused endless appeals to Rome, and in this matter, too, Oxford was stoutly national, and resisted the Pope, as it had, on occasions, defied the King. The King’s Jews, too, the University kept in pretty good order, and when, in 1268, a certain Hebrew snatched the crucifix from the hand of the Chancellor and trod it under foot, his tribesmen were compelled to raise ‘a fair and stately cross of marble, very curiously wrought,’ on the scene of the sacrilege.