CHAPTER X

Summary

I slip, which was regarded by the family as their country home, lies on the high road between Worcester and London, seven miles from Oxford. Situated on what was formerly a great thoroughfare, it was once an active, bustling village, and is a place full of historical reminiscences. The first and most interesting of its associations with history is that it was the birthplace of Edward the Confessor, who endowed his newly founded Abbey at Westminster with his mother's birthday gift. Mr. Parker, in his “Early History of Oxford,” says:—

“Eadward ‘the Confessor,’ elected King, was probably in Normandy at the time, and the preparations were such that he was not crowned till Easter in 1043, and then at Winchester. No traces in any charter or in any of the historians occur of his visiting Oxford. Yet one might have expected it, for it is but a few miles across the meadows on the north of Oxford to the place where he was born. This fact we do not obtain from any chronicler, but from the chance mention of it in a charter respecting a grant of land to this newly founded, or rather restored, abbey in Westminster. […]