under Eadgar's Law, and the wise government of the King completed in the long years of his reign the task of national fusion. The conquest of William set two peoples a second time face to face upon the same soil, and it was again at Oxford that by his solemn acceptance and promulgation of the Charter of Henry I. in solemn parliament Stephen closed the period of military tyranny, and began the union of Norman and Englishman into a single people. These two great acts of national reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous assembly which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties. Followed by long trains of men in arms and sworn together by pledges of mutual fidelity, they wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which, frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of our constitutional system. On the "Provisions of Oxford" followed the regular establishment of parliamentary representation and power, of a popular and responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-government. From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, it is time to turn back to the humbler annals of the town itself. The first event that lifts it into historic prominence is its league with London. The "bargemen" of the borough seem to have already existed before the Conquest, and to have been closely united from the first with the more powerful guild, the "boatmen" or "merchants" of the capital. In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing this name represented what in later language was known as the merchant guild of the town; the original association, that is, of its principal traders for purposes of mutual protection, of commerce, and of self-government. Royal recognition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford from the time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, islands, pastures already belonged to it, and amongst them the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead" so familiar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow, and which still remains the property of the freemen of the town. The connection between the two cities and their guilds was primarily one of traffic. Prior even to the Conquest, "in the time of King Eadward and Abbot Ordric," the channel of the river running beneath the walls of the Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up "that boats could scarce pass as far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the south of his church, the two cities engaging that each barge should pay a toll of a hundred herrings on its passage during Lent. But the union soon took a constitutional form. The earliest charter of the capital which remains in detail is that of Henry I., and from the charter of his grandson we find a similar date assigned to the liberties of Oxford. The