The Romans had colonised and densely populated every suitable spot.  The ships’ crews of open pirate vessels had no qualities suitable to the founding of a town; and when there is no direct evidence it is always safer of the two conjectures in English topography to believe that any spot which we find inhabited and flourishing in the Anglo-Saxon period, even at its close, was not a town developed during the Dark Ages but one which the pirates, when they first entered the island, had found already inhabited and flourishing, though sometimes perhaps more British than Roman.  But though this is always the more historical way of looking at the probable origin of an English town it must be admitted that there is no direct evidence of any town upon the site of Oxford before the Danish invasions, and the first mention of the place by name is as late as eleven years after Alfred’s death, when it is recorded that Edward, his son, “took possession of London and of Oxford and of all lands in obedience thereunto.”

This first mention, slight as it is, characterises Oxford as being the town of the upper Thames Valley at the opening of the tenth century, and we have what is usually a good basis for history—­that is, ecclesiastical tradition and a monastic charter—­to show us that a considerable monastery had existed upon the spot for a century and a half before this first mention in the Chronicle.

There still exists in the modern town, to the west of it, a large artificial mound, one of those which have been discovered here and there up and down England, and which are characteristic of a late Saxon method of fortification.  Before the advent of the Normans these mounds were defended by palisades only, and were used as but occasional strongholds.  It may be conjectured that this Saxon work at Oxford dates from somewhat the same period as does the first mention of the town in the Chronicle.  Twelve years later Alfred’s grandson is mentioned as dying at Oxford.  It may be presumed that his death would indicate the presence of a royal palace.  We hear nothing more of this town during the remainder of the tenth century, but we have a long account in what is probably an accurate record of the rising of the townsmen against the Danes in the beginning of the eleventh.  The Scandinavians made their last stand in the church of the monastery, and the townsmen burnt it.  Five years later a new host of Danes took and burnt the town; and four years later again, Sweyn, in his terrible conquering march, captured it, after very little resistance, in the same year in which he took the crown of England.  The brief episode of Edmund Ironside again brings the town into history:  he slept here upon his way to London in the late autumn of 1016, and here, very probably, he was killed.  From that moment the fortress (as it now certainly was) enters continually into that last anarchy which was only cured by a second advent of European civilisation and the success of its armies at Hastings.