Egelwin, Bishop of Durham, was sent to Abingdon, where within a few months he died of hunger, either voluntary or enforced; while Archbishop Stigand was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. xxiii Lanfranc. This noted ecclesiastic was a native of Pavia; he was bred up to the law, and, coming to France, established a school at Avranches, which was attended by pupils of the highest rank. On a journey to Rouen he was robbed and left bound in a wood, where some peasants found him, and brought him for shelter to the Abbey of Bec, recently founded by Herluin. Here he felt himself called to the monastic life, and became a monk at Bec, which sprang up rapidly under him into a school no less of literature than of piety, where William often retired to make spiritual retreats, and where an intimacy sprang up between them. He became successively Prior of Bec and abbot of William's new foundation of St. Stephen's at Caen. His influence with the Pope procured the papal sanction for the invasion of England; and afterwards, in 1070, the Archbishopric of Canterbury was pressed upon him by William, which he held until his death in 1089, in the eighty-fourth year of his age. In some respects he dealt harshly with the English clergy, and connived at their wholesale deprivation. We must own, in extenuation, that their lives and conduct had not been such as to do honour to God, that they were said to be the most ignorant clergy in Europe; and that the sins of the nation under their guidance were owned, even by the English, to have brought the heavy judgment of the Conquest upon them. Otherwise, Lanfranc was a protector of the oppressed, in which character he is introduced in the tale. If Englishmen can only forgive him his share in the Conquest, few Archbishops of Canterbury can be named more worthy of our respect. xxiv It must be remembered that Lanfranc was a firm believer in the right of King William, in the supposed testament of Edward the Confessor; and in the right of Rome to dispose of disputed thrones. Good man though he was, he believed in all this rubbish, as true Englishmen must ever deem it. xxv Oxford in the Olden Time. The earliest authentic record in which Oxford finds a place is of the year 912, when we read in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that King Edward took possession of the city, when he took upon himself the responsibility of defending the valley of the Thames against Danish incursions, upon the death of his sister's husband, Aethelred, Ealdorman of the Mercians, to whom the city had formerly belonged. Then, probably, was that mound thrown up which still exists opposite the old Norman tower of Robert D'Oyly; and from that period the city gradually grew into importance, until it quite superseded the more ancient city, Dorchester. which was situated at the angle formed by the tributary river Tame, fifteen miles lower down the stream, even as Oxford occupied the similar angle formed by the Cherwell.