"saluted him, saying, 'Hail, thou art sole king.' When he had laid bare the deed done, the King answered, 'I will make thee on account of thy great deserts higher than all the tall men of England.' And he ordered him to be beheaded and his head to be fixed on a pole on the highest tower of London. Thus perished Edmund, a brave king." And Cnut, the Dane, reigned in his stead. Beneath the shadow of the Mound, built to repel the Danish incursions, the Danish King now held an assembly of the people. At this gemot "Danes and Angles were unanimous, at Oxford, for Eadgar's law." The old laws of the country were, then, to be retained, and his new subjects were reconciled to the Danish King. But these subjects, the townsmen of those days, are but dim and shadowy beings to us. It is only by later records that we see them going on pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or judging and law-making in their husting, their merchant-guild regulating trade, their reeve gathering his King's dues of tax or honey, or marshalling his troop of burghers for the King's wars, their boats floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way. For the river was the highway, and toll was levied on it. In Edward the Confessor's time, in return for the right of making a passage through the mead belonging to Abingdon, it was agreed that all barges that passed through carrying herrings during Lent should give to the cook of that monastery a hundred of them, and that when the servant of each barge brought them into the kitchen the cook should give him for his pains five of them, a loaf of bread and a measure of ale. In the seventeenth century the river had become so choked that no traffic was possible above Maidenhead till an Act was passed for the re-opening of it. It was at Oxford that a great assembly of all the Witan was held to elect Cnut's successor Harold, and at Oxford, so pernicious a place for kings, that Harold died. At Oxford again when the Northumbrian rebels, slaying and burning, had reached it (1065), the gemot was held which, in renouncing Tostig, came to the decision, the direct result of which was to leave England open to the easy conquest of William of Normandy when he landed in the following year. Five years later we find Robert D'Oigli in peaceful possession of Oxford, busy building one of those Norman castles, by which William made good his hold upon England, strongholds for his Norman friends, prisons for rebellious Englishmen. The river he held by such fortresses as this at Oxford, and the Castles of Wallingford and Windsor.