Algar in the meanwhile had gone to Oxford, found Frideswide flown, and in the midst of his fury been smitten with blindness. After living three years in close retirement in the Benton wood, Frideswide, to comfort the nuns whom she had left, came by boat to Binsey near Oxford, and there lived for some time. Soon after she came back into Oxford, and spent her days in the service of the people, working in especial many miracles of healing. The Cottonian MS. relates her first miracle as happening at "Bentonia," when St. Frideswide cured a blind girl of seven through virtue of the water wherein the saint had washed her hands. Shortly after she helped a young man (_infortunatus juvenis_) named Alward, who, while cutting wood on a Sunday (_parvi pendens diem Resurrectionis Dominicæ_), found his hand fixed to the handle of his axe, so that he could not let it go. A beautiful story is told about her entry into Oxford; that a leper met her, and begged her to kiss him, which, after making the sign of the cross, she did, and he was healed of his leprosy. [Illustration: THE EXTERIOR IN 1857.] Of her last sojourn in Oxford, William of Malmesbury says:--"In that place, therefore, this maiden, having gained the triumph of her virginity, established a convent, and when her days were over and her Spouse called her, she there died." "Some time," says Dugdale, "after the glorious death of St. Frideswide, the nuns having been taken away, Secular Canons were introduced." We cannot fix the date when the community of nuns which the saint had founded was thus removed, but the passage which follows in Dugdale makes it clear that the seculars were in possession in 1004, when Ethelred II. rebuilt the church. It seems strange that the nuns, for whom Frideswide had suffered so much and laboured so successfully, should have been thus early made to give place to a chapter of married priests; but early it must have been, for by the middle of the tenth century Dunstan was busy suppressing the seculars, and enforcing everywhere the stricter monastic rule. Nor did the nuns ever come back; for, when the Secular Canons had finally disappeared, by the time of the Norman Conquest, the priory, after being for a long time in ruins, was made over, first to the great Benedictine monastery of Abingdon, of which it became a "cell" or dependency, shortly afterwards to the warlike Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, "but only for the profits issuing from their lands, which he, after its restoration, returned again with great reluctancy"; and it was finally restored under Henry I. (IIII) as a house of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, an order holding a position midway between monks and secular canons, in whose hands it continued henceforward. Guimond was the first prior, and a curious story is told by several old writers as to the manner whereby he won the king's favour:--