Before the Conquest Oxford had been visited by parliaments and kings; it now began to be honoured by learning and art. _Olim truncus eram.... maluit esse deum._ It had often been violated or burned; in Doomsday Book it appears as a half desolate city, despite the churches; but it had already begun, though again checked by fire that flew among the wooden houses with such ghastly ease, to assume the proportions and the grace which were fostered by William of Wykeham and a hundred of the great unknown, and in the last few years by Aldrich and Wren and Jones,--crowned by the munificence of Radcliffe,--illuminated with green and white and gold and purple by the unremembered and by Reynolds, Morris, and Burne-Jones. The Saxon work at St. Frideswide’s was superseded or veiled by the Norman architects; the fine old pillars were in part altered or replaced; and the relics of the Saint herself were transferred ceremoniously and “with all the sweet odours and spices imaginable,” to a more imposing place of rest. Upon the base of the old fortifications probably now rose the bastions of the mediæval city wall, once so formidable but now defensive only against time, and unable any longer to make history, but only poetry, as they stand peacefully and muffled with herbage in New College Gardens, or at Merton or Pembroke, or by the churchyard of St. Peter’s in the East. The history of that age in Oxford is indistinct, and recorded events therein have a suddenness, for modern readers, which is vivid and fascinating, but to the historian at least, painful and false. And so the birth of the University, in the midst of darkness and noise, is to us to-day a melodious sudden cry. It is as if a voice, [Illustration: ST. PETER’S-IN-THE-EAST To the extreme right of the picture, through a huge buttress on the south side of the chancel, is pierced the doorway to the twelfth-century crypt, extending some 36 feet under the chancel of the Church. To the west of this buttress, in the angle formed by another buttress, appear the remains of a Norman arcading, broken through for the insertion of the early fifteenth-century window. The windows of the nave showing in the picture are also of this date, as is the south porch. It will be noted that this porch has a room over it--probably the lodgings of a priest. Across the graveyard and Queen’s Lane to the west are the buildings of Queen’s College; to the immediate left of the yew tree in the centre of the picture shows the east end of the Chapel; more to the north the dome of the campanile appears. To the extreme left of the graveyard shows a portion of the ivy-covered north wall of St. Edmund’s Hall (see other picture).]