Many days and troubles passed over St. Frideswide’s Church, or its site. It was wholly or partially burnt in the massacre of Danes in 1002; also in 1015. It was rebuilt and made a “cell” or dependency of the great monastery of Abingdon. It became a house of Secular Canons, who were dispossessed after the Conquest; when a Norman church was constructed by restoration of the old Saxon one, whose foundations, however, exist and form part of the actual structure still. The present chapter-house, or rather its doorway, may have belonged to this period. It is justly celebrated as a fair specimen of Norman architecture, and is considered by several authorities to be more ancient, not only than the chapter-house itself (which, however, Sir Gilbert Scott places about the middle of the thirteenth century; see _Report_, p. 7), but than the old nave and transept walls, which are generally taken as twelfth century, if we must reject Dr. Ingram’s belief in them as Ethelred’s,[250] grateful as it must be to all members of the foundation. The doorway certainly bears marks of fire, which may be referred to the conflagration of 1190, when a great part of Oxford was destroyed.[251] Ten years before, the body of St. Frideswide had been translated from its resting place to the north choir aisle, to be again (but not till one hundred and ten years after, on 10th September, 1289) removed to a new and more costly shrine in the Lady Chapel, which had been added to that aisle early in the thirteenth century, or between that and the north choir aisle. Her first regular prior, Guimond, had been employed till his death in 1141, in the re-arrangements of monastic buildings which would be necessary on the change, at the Conquest, from Secular Canons to Regular Augustinians. Both he and his successor, Robert of Cricklade, seem to have been wise and well-meaning ecclesiastics; and a school was connected with the convent which really may be considered as the original germ of the historical University.