Hall; their town-mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later charters or the record of Domesday 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 busting, 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. Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the Norman within its walls. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral: the piety of the Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the city and founded within their new castle walls the church of the canons of St. George.