Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation. Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor, Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older authority of the Mayor. The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left its mark not on the town only but on the very constitution and character of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then, when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank of English municipalities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The little monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of Ælfred. But though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a political importance under Æthelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence. But the men themselves are dim to us. Their town-meeting, their Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fashion as the Freeman's Common