Through the
water they carried a kind of causeway, and the name of the place for
centuries indicated that it was situated on the _ford_ of the
Cam. But what the Roman did not choose to do, that the people that
came after him found it needful to do. In the Saxon Chronicle we find
that the old fortress which the Romans had held and strengthened, and
then perforce abandoned, had got to be called Granta-brygge; and this
name, or something very like it, it retained when the great survey
was made as the Norman Conqueror's reign was drawing to its close. By
this time the town had moved across to the right bank of the river,
and had become a town surrounded by a ditch and defended by walls and
gates. Already it contained at least four hundred houses, and on the
site of the old mound the Norman raised a new castle, and in doing
that he laid some twenty-nine houses low.
The early history of Oxford is more or less connected with that of
the obscure and insignificant monastery of St. Frideswide, though
even at Oxford it is observable that the town and the University grew
up in almost entire independence of any influence exercised by any of
the older religious houses. At Cambridge this was much more the case.
There were no _monks_ at Cambridge at any time; there never were
any nearer than at the Abbey of Ely, in the old times a long day's
journey off, and accessible in the winter, if accessible at all, only
by water.
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