Godstow at once suggests the story, often told and always interesting, of fair Rosamond. The lady gives a flavour also to Woodstock, some eight miles distant. The wrongs and the rights of Mistress Rosamond will never in this world be accurately known, but that she was poisoned by jealous Queen Eleanor at Woodstock, and that she was the mistress of Queen Eleanor's husband, Henry II., are facts which no one dare deny. According to Lord Lyttleton, Henry II. met the frail daughter of Walter, Lord Clifford at Godstow, in 1149, on his return from Carlisle, the lady being at the time, in accordance with the custom of the age, placed amongst the nuns to be educated. The nunnery is still known by the ivy-clad walls which remain on its site. It was a nunnery of the Benedictines, consecrated in the presence of King Stephen and his Queen in the year 1138. The nunnery was dispossessed, and has crumbled to ruins, but the brave river passes by even as in the olden times before Henry VIII., the spoiler, gave the house to his physician, Dr. George Owen. There was another nunnery at the foot of Witham Hill, but that was an older establishment, which existed as early as 690, on the spot where the Earls of Abingdon have their seat, partly built, it is understood, by the stones of Godstow, even as the modern buildings at Stanton Harcourt are supposed to have been erected from the stones with which the original mansion was constructed. The ruins of Godstow Nunnery, such as they are, catch one's eye first from the river. It may be that the pathetic romance touching the silken thread and the bowl of poison is not, as many hold, founded upon fact; but we cannot be equally sceptical with regard to Rosamond's connection with Godstow. She retired to the nunnery to pass the remainder of her days, after the marriage of the king, in seclusion. She died, and was buried in the choir, opposite the high altar, and Henry raised a grand monument to her memory. The nuns forgot the frailty of the lady, remembering rather the manner in which she had enriched the establishment, and the tokens of favour they had received from the king on her account; and we read that her remains were treated with much honour by the sisters, who hung a pall of silk over her tomb, and set it about with lighted tapers. This chronic honour was put an end to by Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, who, going to the nunnery and requesting to know why one particular tomb should be so much honoured, was informed that it was the tomb of Rosamond, sometime leman to Henry II. In order that the nuns might not be led astray by having her example constantly set before them, and that other women might beware, poor Rosamond's bones were cast out of the church; but they were brought back again by the nuns, and wrapped in perfumed leather.