It is hard in dry constitutional details such as these to realize the quick pulse of popular life that stirred such a community as Oxford. Only a few names, of street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure records, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thirteenth century. The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four roads meet, was the centre of the city's life. The Town-mote was held in its church yard. Justice was administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the "penniless bench" of later times, without its eastern wall. Its bell summoned the burghers to counsel or to arms. Around the church lay the trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to the castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay a nest of huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue and traversed from time to time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew, whose burying-place lay far away to the eastward on the site of the present Botanic Garden. Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide. It was a rough time, and frays were common enough,—now the sack of a Jew's house, now burgher drawing knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young student lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town seemed well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to his door, the summons of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand and banners flying to enforce the king's peace. Order and freedom seemed absolutely secure, and there was no sign which threatened that century of disorder, of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which humbled the municipal freedom of Oxford to the dust.