customs and exemptions of its burghers are granted by Henry II., "as ever they enjoyed them in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in like manner as my citizens of London hold them." This identity of municipal privileges is of course common to many other boroughs, for the charter of London became the model for half the charters of the kingdom; what is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which in Henry II.'s time already linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest about judgment in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatever the citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right." The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were assimilated by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of one and the same custom, law, and liberty." In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town, lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various