In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town, lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst these various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the more intense that it was so closely cabined and confined.
It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic philosophy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the age of a great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rhône and the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival of individual, human life in the industrial masses of the feudal world that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet townships of Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no foreign Cæsar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's peace shielded them from that terrible oppression of the mediæval baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life or death. The peculiarity of municipal life in fact in England is that instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In township or manor alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice, commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to furnish in time of war. The progress of municipal freedom, like that of national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that wrested liberty from the French seigneur or the century of warfare that broke the power of the Cæsars in the plain of the Po.