protection for their members.  Loose too as these bonds may seem, they were drawn firmly together by the older English traditions of freedom which the towns preserved.  The London burgesses gathered in their town-mote when the bell swung out from the bell-tower of St. Paul’s to deliberate freely on their own affairs under the presidency of their alderman.  Here, too, they mustered in arms if danger threatened the city, and delivered the town-banner to their captain, the Norman baron Fitz-Walter, to lead them against the enemy.

[Sidenote:  Early Oxford]

Few boroughs had as yet attained to such power as this, but the instance of Oxford shows how the freedom of London told on the general advance of English towns.  In spite of antiquarian fancies it is certain that no town had arisen on the site of Oxford for centuries after the withdrawal of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain.  Though the monastery of St. Frideswide rose in the turmoil of the eighth century on the slope which led down to a ford across the Thames, it is long before we get a glimpse of the borough that must have grown up under its walls.  The first definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English Chronicle which recalls its seizure by Eadward the Elder, but the form of this entry shows that the town was already a considerable one, and in the last wrestle of England with the Dane its position on the borders of Mercia and Wessex combined with its command of the upper valley of the Thames to give it military and political importance.  Of the life of its burgesses however we still know little or nothing.  The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the earlier town-church of St. Martin.  But the men of the little town remain dim to us.  Their town-mote, or the “Portmannimote” as it was called, which was held in the churchyard of St. Martin, still lives in a shadow of its older self as the Freeman’s Common Hall—­their town-mead is still the Port-meadow.  But it is only by later charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or judging and law-making in their hustings, their merchant-gild regulating trade, their reeve gathering his king’s dues of tax or money or marshalling his troop of burghers for the king’s wars, their boats paying toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon, as they floated down the Thames towards London.

[Sidenote:  Oxford and the Normans]