Oxford had submitted without resistance to the Conqueror. There is no evidence that she suffered siege like Exeter or York, but many historians, Freeman among them, state that she was besieged. They have been misled by the error of a transcriber. Savile printed _Urbem Oxoniam_, for _Exoniam_, in his edition of "William of Malmesbury," and the mischief was done. A siege at this time has been supposed to explain a remarkable fact which is recorded in the Domesday Survey. "In the time of King Edward," so runs the record of Domesday Book: "Oxeneford paid for toll and gable and all other customs yearly--to the king twenty pounds, and six measures of honey, and to Earl Algar ten pounds, besides his mill within the [city]. When the king went out to war, twenty burgesses went with him in lieu of the rest, or they gave twenty pounds to the king that all might be free. Now Oxeneford pays sixty pounds at twenty-pence to the ounce. _In the town itself, as well within the wall as without, there are 243 houses that pay geld, and besides these there are 478 houses unoccupied and ruined (tam vastæ et destructæ) so that they can pay no geld._ The king has twenty wall mansions, which were Earl Algar's in the time of King Edward, paying both then and now fourteen shillings less twopence; and one mansion paying sixpence, belonging to Shipton; another paying fourpence, belonging to Bloxham; a third paying thirty pence, belonging to Risborough; and two others paying fourpence, belonging to Twyford in Buckinghamshire; one of these is unoccupied. They are called wall mansions because, if there is need and the king command it, they shall repair the wall.... All the burgesses of Oxeneford hold in common a pasture outside the wall that brings in six shillings and eightpence.... If any stranger who chooses to live in Oxeneford, and has a house, dies there without relatives, the king has all that he leaves." The extraordinary proportion of ruined and uninhabited houses enumerated in this record, however, was probably due not to any siege by the Normans and not mainly to harsh treatment at their hands, but to the ravaging and burning of that rebellious band of Northumbrians who had come upon Oxford "like a whirlwind" in 1065. Robert D'Oigli himself is recorded to have had "forty-two inhabited houses as well within as without the wall. Of these sixteen pay geld and gable, the rest pay neither, on account of poverty; and he has eight mansions unoccupied and thirty acres of meadow near the wall and a mill of ten shillings. The whole is worth three pounds and for one manor held he holds with the benefice of S. Peter...." (sentence incomplete). These houses belonged wholly to Holywell Manor,[4] and the mill referred to is no doubt that known as _Holywell Mill_, supplied with water from the Cherwell.