Here ready to receive them they would find a town which stood in the front rank of municipalities, commanding the river valley along which the commerce of Southern England mainly flowed. The mitred Abbey of Austin Canons, the Priory of S. Frideswide, the Castle of the D'Oiglis, and the Royal Palace without the Vallum marked the ecclesiastical and political importance of the place; the settlement of one of the wealthiest of the English Jewries in the very heart of the town indicated, as it promoted, the activity of its trade. It was still surrounded on all sides by a wild forest country. The moors of Cowley and Bullingdon fringed the course of the Thames; the great woods of Shotover and Bagley closed the horizon on south and east. But Oxford was easy of access, for there were the great roads that crossed at Carfax and there was the thoroughfare of the Thames. And facility of communication meant regularity of supplies, a matter of great importance to a floating population of poor students. Here, then, the migrating masters and scholars set up their schools, and within a very short time the reputation of the University was established throughout the length and breadth of the land. Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welshman, who had achieved fame as a lecturer at Paris, has given us an interesting account of his visit to Oxford in 1187. He came there with the purpose of reading aloud portions of his new work, as Herodotus read his history at the Panathenaic festival at Athens or at the National Games of Greece. Giraldus had written a book on Ireland--Topographia--and he chose this method of publishing and advertising it. He writes of himself in the third person, without any excessive modesty. You might almost think he was a modern author, asking his critics to dinner and writing his own "Press notices." "In course of time, when the work was finished and revised, not wishing to hide his candle under a bushel, but wishing to place it in a candlestick so that it might give light, he resolved to read it before a vast audience at Oxford, where the clergy in England chiefly flourished and excelled in clerkly lore. And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and each division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor people of the whole town; on the second all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the third the rest of the scholars with the milites of the town, and many burghers. It was a costly and noble act, for the authentic and ancient times of the poets were thus in some measure renewed; and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of such a solemnity having ever taken place in England."