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 to see Eadric in Oxford, and there were slain at a banquet, while their followers perished in the attempt to avenge them. ‘Into the tower of St. Frideswyde they were driven, and as men could not drive them thence, the tower was fired, and they perished in the burning.’ So says William of Malmesbury, who, so many years later, read the story, as he says, in the records of the Church of St. Frideswyde. There is another version of the story in the _Codex Diplomaticus_ (DCCIX.). Aethelred is made to say, in a deed of grant of lands to St. Frideswyde’s Church (‘mine own minster’), that the Danes were slain in the massacre of St. Brice. On that day Aethelred, ‘by the advice of his satraps, determined to destroy the tares among the wheat, the Danes in England.’ Certain of these fled into the minster, as into a fortress, and therefore it was burned and the books and monuments destroyed. For this cause Aethelred gives lands to the minster, ‘fro Charwell brigge andlong the streame, fro Merewell to Rugslawe, fro the lawe to the foule putte,’ and so forth. It is pleasant to see how old are the familiar names ‘Cherwell,’ ‘Hedington,’ ‘Couelee’ or Cowley, where the college cricket-grounds are. Three years passed, and the headmen of the English and of the Danes met at Oxford again, and more peacefully, and agreed to live together, obedient to the laws of Eadgar; to the law, that is, as it was administered in older days, that seem happier and better ruled to men looking back on them from an age of confusion and bloodshed. At Oxford, too, met the peaceful gathering of 1035, when Danish and English claims were in some sort reconciled, and at Oxford Harold Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040. The place