How they held the fort here in those dim times before the Norman came and built his great stone castle—and before even the Saxon came—we may perhaps see in the remarkable earthworks that still form three sides of a square enclosure: the river itself forming the natural defence of the fourth side. No stranger whose eye lights upon those ancient dykes in the Kine Croft can fail to notice them, nor help speculating for what purpose they were made. No facts are, or will ever be, available; but it does not require much penetration to reconstruct the needs of that primeval community protected within these earthworks, not in themselves a sufficient protection, but easily defensible in that age when they formed—as they doubtless did—the foundation for a wooden stockade. At that time, when William the Conqueror had descended upon England and fought the battle of Hastings, there lived and ruled in Wallingford a Saxon thane, by name Wygod, who, noting the caution which forbade the Conqueror to advance directly upon London and caused him to make a circuitous march, invited him to cross the Thames here, which he accordingly did, at this place receiving the homage of the chief Saxon notables. Was Wygod, then, a traitor, or was he merely a level-headed opportunist who saw that all was lost, and sought to moderate strife by wise action? We are not in full possession of the facts, and therefore cannot tell whether to praise or blame him. But the results show that he did well: did, perhaps, better than he knew at the time of doing; for he thus—and also in giving his daughter Edith in marriage to Robert D’Oyley, one of the Conqueror’s knights—helped in the great work of bringing about the settlement of the realm and the eventual merging of the Norman and the Anglo-Saxon races. And by so much those who fell at Hastings, fighting for their country, had died in vain. It was not very long before the great castle of Wallingford was put to proof as a fortress, for it played an important part in the wars between the Empress Maud and King Stephen. The Empress, sorely beset in the castle of Oxford, escaped thence through the snow of one December night, covered with a sheet; and by favour of that covering entirely escaped observation, and came safely to Wallingford, whither she was followed after an interval by Stephen, who built a castle at Crowmarsh, on the Oxfordshire side of the river, to keep her in check. She then escaped to Gloucester, while her trusty partisan, Brian Fitzcount, held out for years: until, indeed, Stephen was wearied, with the result that the long civil war was at last concluded by the treaty of Wallingford, effecting the compromise by which Stephen was to reign for his life, and Henry, son of the Empress Maud, was to succeed him: which, in the fulness of time, he accordingly did; and reigned, and misgoverned sometimes, and at others governed well, as Henry the Second, in a truly Norman way, for thirty-five years. [Illustration: WALLINGFORD.]