That she was daughter of Walter, Baron Clifford, of Hay, in Wales, is historically certain; but much else relating to her is merely picturesque legend. She appears to have been born about 1150, and was educated in this then newly-built nunnery. Here, in some unexplained way, she attracted the attention of the King, Henry the Second, and became his mistress, greatly to the jealous rage of his Queen, Eleanor of Poitou, the divorced consort of the King of France, who by many was held to be no better. This association of the King and of Rosamond seems to have lasted about four years. Legends tell variously how Queen Eleanor burst in upon a secret bower in which the King had hidden her at Woodstock, and gave her the choice of death by dagger or poison, and how she chose the bowl rather than the steel, drank of it and so died; but these are unhistorical. All that seems fairly certain is that a break in her relations with Henry occurred, and that she retired to Godstow and died there, some four years later, about 1176. A great mass of legend has accumulated around these bare outlines of her story, and poets have freely employed their imagination upon her. With remarkable unanimity, they assume Rosamond to have been a blonde: “Her locks of curlèd hair Outshone the golden ore; Her skin with whiteness may compare With the fine lily-flower; Her breasts are lovely to behold, Like to the driven snow.” That she had two children seems to be established, but that they were, as often stated, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, and Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, has been disputed. Rosamond, we are told, was for sake of her wit and beauty received back by the nuns of Godstow with alacrity. Doubtless she told them many strange tales of the wicked world, for who better qualified to know? Her body was buried before the high altar. King John, according to Lambarde, raised a gorgeous monument to her, inscribed, _Hic jacet in tumba, Rosa Mundi, non Rosa Munda,_ _Non redolet, sed olet, quae redolere solet._ Speed paraphrased this as follows: “This tomb doth here enclose the world’s most beauteous Rose, Rose, passing sweet erewhile, now nought but odour vile.” A few years later, Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, paying a round of pastoral visits in his diocese, in which Oxford was then included, coming to Godstow, saw this gorgeous monument and asked what great and good person it was, then, who lay here. It was, said the nuns, the tomb of Rosamond, sometime mistress of Henry the Second, who for love of her had done much good to that church. Thereupon the saintly and scandalised Bishop declared that the “hearse of a harlot was not a fit spectacle for a quire of virgins to contemplate, nor was the front of God’s altar a proper station for it”; and he directed that she should be removed and buried outside, “lest Christian religion should grow in contempt.”