in 1082 by the Conqueror and William of Carilef, the then Bishop of Durham.
The Danish marauders ravaged the country, but were met at Stamford by a stout resistance from Saxons and Britons combined; but in the end they beat the Saxons and nearly destroyed Stamford in 870. A few years later, when, after the peace of Wedmore, Alfred the Great gave terms to Guthrum on condition that he kept away to the north of the Watling Street, the five towns of Stamford, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and Lincoln were left to the Danes for strongholds; of these Lincoln then, as now, was the chief.
PARLIAMENT AT STAMFORD The early importance of Stamford may be gauged by the facts that Parliament was convened there more than once in the fourteenth century, and several Councils of War and of State held there. One of these was called by Pope Boniface IX. to suppress the doctrines of Wyclif. There, too, a large number of nobles met to devise some check on King John, who was often in the neighbourhood either at Kingscliffe, in Rockingham Forest, or at Stamford itself—and from thence they marched to Runnymede.
The town was on the Great North Road, so that kings, when moving up and down their realm, naturally stopped there. A good road also went east and west, hence, just outside the town gate on the road leading west towards Geddington and Northampton, a cross (the third) was set up in memory of the halting of Queen Eleanor's funeral procession in 1293 on its way from Harby near Lincoln to Westminster.
There was a castle near the ford in the tenth century, and Danes and Saxons alternately held it until the Norman Conquest. The city, like the ancient Thebes, had a wall with seven gates besides posterns, one of which still exists in the garden of 9, Barn Hill, the house in which Alderman Wolph hid Charles I. on his last visit to Stamford in 1646. Most of the buildings which once made Stamford so very remarkable were the work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and as they comprised fifteen churches, six priories, with hospitals, schools and almshouses in corresponding numbers, the town must have presented a beautiful appearance, more especially so because the stone used in all these buildings, public and private, is of such exceptionally good character, being from the neighbouring quarries of Barnack, Ketton and Clipsham. But much of this glory of stone build-
