Lastly, Oxford lay in the centre of
England indeed, but on the very marches of Mercia and Wessex. A
border town of natural strength and of commanding situation, she can
have been no mean or poor collection of villages in the days when she
is first spoken of, when Eadward the Elder "incorporated with his own
kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides of Watling Street"
(Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. i. p. 57), and took possession of
London and of Oxford as the two most important parts of a scientific
frontier. If any man had stood, in the days of Eadward, on the hill
that was not yet "Shotover," and had looked along the plain to the
place where the grey spires of Oxford are clustered now, as it were
in a purple cup of the low hills, he would have seen little but "the
smoke floating up through the oakwood and the coppice,"
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
The low hills were not yet cleared, nor the fens and the wolds
trimmed and enclosed. Centuries later, when the early students came,
they had to ride "through the thick forest and across the moor, to
the East Gate of the city" (Munimenta Academica, Oxon., vol. i. p.
60). In the midst of a country still wild, Oxford was already no
mean city; but the place where the hostile races of the land met to
settle their differences, to feast together and forget their wrongs
over the mead and ale, or to devise treacherous murder, and close the
banquet with fire and sword.
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