One is glad enough to leave the remains of Robert’s place of arms—as glad as Matilda may have been when ‘they let her down at night from the tower with ropes, and she stole out, and went on foot to Wallingford.’ Robert seems at first to have made the natural use of his strength. ‘Rich he was, and spared not rich or poor, to take their livelihood away, and to lay up treasures for himself.’ He stole the lands of the monks of Abingdon, but of what service were moats, and walls, and dungeons, and instruments of torture, against the powers that side with monks? The _Chronicle of Abingdon_ has a very diverting account of Robert’s punishment and conversion. ‘He filched a certain field without the walls of Oxford that of right belonged to the monastery, and gave it over to the soldiers in the castle. For which loss the brethren were greatly grieved—the brethren of Abingdon. Therefore, they gathered in a body before the altar of St. Michael—the very altar that St. Dunstan the archbishop dedicated—and cast themselves weeping on the ground, accusing Robert D’Oily, and praying that his robbery of the monastery might be avenged, or that he might be led to make atonement.’ So, in a dream, Robert saw himself taken before Our Lady by two brethren of Abingdon, and thence carried into the very meadow he had coveted, where ‘most nasty little boys,’ _turpissimi pueri_, worked their will on him. Thereon Robert was terrified and cried out, and wakened his wife, who took advantage of his fears, and compelled him to make restitution to the brethren. After this vision, Robert gave himself up to pampering the monastery and performing other good works. He it was who built a bridge over the Isis, and he restored the many ruined parish churches in Oxford—churches which, perhaps, he and his men had helped to ruin. The tower of St. Michael’s, in ‘the Corn,’ is said to be of his building; perhaps he only ‘restored’ it, for it is in the true primitive style—gaunt, unadorned, with round-headed windows, good for shooting from with the bow. St. Michael’s was not only a church, but a watchtower of the city wall; and here the old northgate, called Bocardo, spanned the street. The rooms above the gate were used till within quite recent times, and the poor inmates used to let down a greasy old hat from the window in front of the passers-by, and cry, ‘Pity the Bocardo birds’: ‘Pigons qui sont en l’essoine, Enserrez soubz trappe volière,’