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Thus we leave the pre-Academic Oxford a flourishing town, with merchants and moneylenders. As for the religious, the brethren of St. Whoever goes into Christ Church new buildings from the river-side, will see, in the old edifice facing him, a certain bulging in the wall. That is the mark of the pulpit, whence a brother used to read aloud to the brethren in the refectory of St. Frideswyde.
Frideswyde, where a solemn Mass would be performed, to which the penitents would be admitted. Then, with a solemn benediction, they would be dismissed to their own homes, and admitted to communion upon Easter Day. Freda sat very still at the window, hearing little beside the heavy beating of her own heart and the monotonous tolling of the bells.
To be sure, he did not find all the funds for it out of his private purse. He swept away the small priory of St. Frideswyde, finding homes for the prior and few monks, and confiscating the revenues to his scheme; and other small religious communities were treated in like manner, in order to contribute to the expenses of the great undertaking.
Frideswyde built a home for religious maidens; when she fled from King Algar and hid among the swine, and after a whole fairy tale of adventures died in great sanctity, we cannot even guess. This legend of St. Frideswyde, and of her foundation, the germ of the Cathedral and of Christ Church, is not, indeed, without its value and significance for those who care for Oxford.
Just as the old Irish kings were forbidden by their customs to do this or that, to cross a certain moor on May morning, or to listen to the winnowing of the night-fowl's wings in the dusk above the lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned to enter Oxford, and to come within the walls of Frideswyde the maiden. Harold died there, as we have seen, but there he was not buried.
His body was laid at Westminster, where it could not rest, for his enemies dug it up, and cast it forth upon the fens, or threw it into the river. Many years later, when Henry III. entered Oxford, not without fear, the curse of Frideswyde lighted also upon him.
Frideswyde to carry out the plans for his college; but though the collegiate buildings were called by his name, the chapel generally retained its older and more familiar title. The daily services were better performed there than in any other college chapel; and many men, like Dalaber himself, possessed of good voices, sang in the choir as often as their other duties permitted them.
So says William of Malmesbury, who, so many years later, read the story, as he says, in the records of the Church of St. Frideswyde. Aethelred is made to say, in a deed of grant of lands to St. Brice. On that day Aethelred, "by the advice of his satraps, determined to destroy the tares among the wheat, the Danes in England."
At Oxford, too, met the peaceful gathering of 1035, when Danish and English claims were in some sort reconciled, and at Oxford Harold Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040. The place indeed was fatal to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger against King Algar, left her curse on it.
Frideswyde had already begun before the two friends reached the chapel, so they did not go in, but stood at the choir door, from whence they could see the dean and canons in their robes, and hear the singing, in which Dalaber had so often joined; but there was little of song in his heart just now only a sense of coming woe and peril. They had scarce been there a few minutes before they beheld Dr.
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