The Secret History of Oxford

Preface

On my first day as a resident in Oxford, I caught a bus to the city centre and stood, lost but intrigued, at St Frideswide’s Square. Getting my bearings from a map, I decided to visit the castle, from which vantage point I would plan my raid on the college-riddled treasure trove beyond Carfax.

Before I had taken a single step I was, to my great surprise, hailed by Graham Clark, a friend from my previous hometown of Buxton. I’d no idea he was in the city, but it turned out he was staying on a friend’s narrow boat at Osney Marina. I accompanied him to the river, and during my brief visit the boat’s owner, Tom Troscianko, introduced us to several interesting things in addition to his splendid floating home – great local beer, the last remains of Osney Abbey at the ruined mill, The Kite public house on Mill Street, the priceless old fiddle in the Ashmolean Museum, and the American signal crayfish that infest the rivers in Oxford.

This red-clawed mini lobster is far from home and far from welcome. It infects the native white-clawed crayfish with ‘crayfish plague’, undermines riverbanks with its burrows, and generally messes up the grumpy ecosystem. And yet it is illegal to interfere with crayfish: they cannot be moved, caught for consumption or used as bait without a license. The law is obtuse: if one is netted by mistake, you are not allowed to throw it back and nor can you eat it. You can probably guess what Tom’s response to the dilemma was.

This was my first detour into Oxford secrets, crammed into my first hour in the city. That detour has continued ever since. I finally made it to the castle about a year after setting out in its general direction.

During the research for this book, I learned from Graham that Tom had died in his sleep in Amsterdam, on his way to a conference in Germany. I recalled that first day at Osney Marina – the first chapter of my own secret Oxford – and realised that without that first detour, I wouldn’t be writing this. So, thanks to Graham, Tom, and everyone else who’s kept me from the straight path.

Chapter One

A Brief History of Oxford

Prehistory and Mythology

Oxford’s greatest secret, and one which it still refuses to whisper to the hapless historian, concerns the foundation of the city and its university. Over the years there have been various theories, some comical, some plausible, all – appropriately enough – without foundation.

The most ambitious investigators have pinned their hopes on prehistory. Three generations after the fall of Troy in 1200 bc, Brutus, a descendent of King Priam of Troy, founded Britain. His three brothers did equally well, founding proto-versions of France, Germany and Rome. Brutus, carrying a cargo of Athenian philosophers, established a university at Greeklade (Cricklade in Wiltshire, alternatively Lechlade in Gloucestershire), later moving it to the site now occupied by Oxford. The position was so beautiful that they named it Bellositum (lovely place), root of the later name ‘Beaumont’, Oxford’s royal twelfth-century palace.

Mythology names Mempric (variously spelt Memphric, Menbriz, Membyr or Mempricius), great-grandson of King Brutus, as actual founder of the city. Having murdered his brother Malin at a banquet in order to silence the opposition, he became the terror of the island, killing all political rivals, and bringing dishonour to the royal Trojan line by forsaking his Queen in favour of young men. Founding Oxford (Caer Mempric) was his one good deed. Around 1009 BC Mempric went hunting with his courtiers; they abandoned him in a forest, where he was eaten by wolves. The grisly site was named Wolvercote, which later became an Oxford suburb.

In the reign of King Arthur the city was known as Caer Bosso, the City of Bosso. This ‘Big Boss’ was a local chieftain who attended the coronation of King Arthur at Caerleon in AD 516. He probably sprang fully formed from the Roman town name Bos Vadum (see next page): early historians felt no qualms about inventing a character to explain a place-name. Bosso is also referred to as Bosso of Rydychen, the latter element being a British word translating as ‘Oxen-ford’. It’s all a bit of a mess, but is tantalisingly in line with a strand of almost-plausible tradition that places the university’s foundation a few decades before St Augustine brought Christianity to Saxon England in AD 595.

Whether tantalising or farcical, these are the stories that rise to the surface when the Dark Ages refuse to give up their secrets.

The Romans

Some early historians, rejecting the Brutus story, nominated semi-mythical Romano-British king Arviragus as the founder of the university. The shadowy historical Arviragus, clearly a British chieftain of some importance, lived during the reign of Roman Emperor Domitian (AD 81–96), but legend places him in the reign of Emperor Claudius (AD 41–54). He is said to have married the latter’s daughter and ruled as British king under Rome’s benevolent eye. He rebuilt several war-torn cities, including Oxford, establishing its university for good measure. The city was known as Bos Vadum.

In the mid-first century AD the Roman general Aulus Plautus levelled a few British cities during the Roman conquest. Legend says that Bos Vadum was one of them; but the historical record is silent on the matter.

It seems safe to say that the Romans didn’t actually found Oxford at all, but had small settlements in the immediate vicinity, north and east of the present city centre. Remains of a first-century AD wall have been unearthed at the site of the Churchill Kilns, at the Churchill Hospital. Human and dog bones were discovered in the foundations, possibly placed there as sacrificial offerings.

This same site has also yielded the earliest named human in these parts: Tamesibugus. A fragment of Churchill pottery, on display in The Museum of Oxford, bears the legend ‘TAMESIBUGUS FECIT’ translating as ‘Thames-dweller made this’. Perhaps he was executed and buried, with his dog, after being found guilty of scrawling graffiti on pottery – a theory no sillier than some of those on the previous page.

The Anglo-Saxons

We’re still in the realms of mythology when King Alfred the Great (AD 849–899) walks dejectedly through the ruins of Oxenford. Appalled at the damage to learning brought about by the previous century of Saxon versus Dane warfare, he determines to build – some say rebuild – a university in Oxford. To this end he establishes three new university halls in 886, and re-erects several academic halls.

Until the nineteenth century, Oxonians were proud to state that King Alfred founded Oxford University in the year 877. They first made the connection in 1387, when University College tried to ingratiate King Richard II by pointing out that its founder was his famous Saxon predecessor. (The college also claimed that the Venerable Bede had studied there … even though the famous monastic scholar died more than 100 years before Alfred was born.)

The essence of it is certainly believable – Alfred was a great patron of learning, and actively worked to bring teachers and books into his battered kingdom. There is, however, no direct evidence that he was active in Oxford. The city is not mentioned in any surviving document of the time, although a tantalising ‘Orsnaford’ is captured on some coins of the period – almost a typo for ‘Oxnaford’, the Saxon name for the city, and equally close to ‘Osney’ (the name of the pre-Oxford Abbey near the modern Osney Marina in the city).

Back with real history, archaeology indicates that the sites of local Roman occupation, based around the Churchill Kilns and Headington, were encompassed by a royal estate in the pre-Alfredian Saxon era. A mere 8 miles south, St Birinus was installed as Bishop of Dorchester in the 630s, the small town being one of the most important Christian bases in the island.

St Michael’s, Oxford’s oldest surviving building.

St Frideswide (AD 650–727) is said to have founded a priory on the site now occupied by Christ Church College. She is also associated with a long-gone nunnery at neighbouring Binsey. Oxford seems to have been around in all but name.

In the year 912 we get, at last, the first definite mention of Oxford: ‘This year died Æthered ealdorman of the Mercians, and King Edward took possession of London and Oxford and of all the lands which owed obedience thereto.’

Oxford was clearly an established city; otherwise Æthered would have had nothing to take possession of. This gives us a foundation in the reign of King Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder (AD 899-912), at the very latest, but probably much earlier (he said, returning to those fruitless circles).

Oxford’s oldest surviving building dates from the late Saxon period – the mid-eleventh century St Michael’s Church tower. A mix of the holy and the secular, the structure was formerly attached to the city’s Bocardo prison and has functioned as a watch tower on the North Gate of the city walls.

The Vikings

By the eleventh century, the Danes (dubbed ‘Vikings’ by the Saxons, meaning ‘pirates’) controlled the North and Midlands – the area referred to later as the Danelaw – and had large populations in several towns in the South, including Oxford.

Saxon king Ethelred the Unready (his name meaning ‘royal counsel, uncounselled’) reasserted English dominance in the south by ordering reprisals against the Danes – who, he said, had ‘sprung like weeds among the wheat’. The massacre was planned for St Brice’s Day, 13 November 1002. This was the traditional time of year for slaughtering livestock and bull baiting, and Ethelred hoped to catch the mood of bloody necessity.

In Oxford the call to arms was taken up enthusiastically and the local Danes, vastly outnumbered, sought sanctuary in the church of St Frideswide’s Priory on the site of modern Christ Church Cathedral. There they were cornered: the Saxons torched the building, with the Danes inside, mopping up with their swords and arrows any Dane who tried to flee.

In an alternative version of the story, Oxford was the venue for a treaty-signing session between Danish generals, Sigeferth and Morkere, and Saxon ealdorman Eadric. The Viking guests were butchered during supper, and it was their avenging army that was cornered and roasted in St Frideswide’s.

Whatever the details, this massacre inspired King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark, Norway and Sweden to invade and add ‘England’ to his list of dominions a few years later. His sister Gunnhild, one of the hostages handed to Ethelred to seal the temporary peace before the massacre, had been killed – and he wanted revenge. The first reprisals against Oxford came in 1009. A chronicle of the time records that, ‘after midwinter the Danes took an excursion up through Chiltern, and so to Oxford; which city they burned, and plundered on both sides of the Thames to their ships’.

Christ Church Cathedral, where the Danes sought sanctuary.

In 1013 Sweyn, after several false starts during the previous decade, invaded, and conquered the whole island. Although his reign was brief, his son and grandsons, Cnut, Harold I and Harthacnut, reigned for twenty-six years between them. The kings of England were Anglo-Danes for the next half century.

Edmund II (Ironside) was murdered at Oxford in 1016 after a seven-month reign. His successor Cnut, son of Sweyn, had more success, residing in Oxford where he held many councils between 1016 and 1035. His son Harold I (called Harold Harefoot on account of his great speed on the hunting field) was crowned in Oxford in 1035.

When Harold died in Oxford on 17 March 1040, the citizens praised him for his good timing. His brother Harthacnut was preparing to invade and seize the throne, but Harold’s death made the violence unnecessary. The cause of Harold’s death is unknown. The Danes said he had been ‘elf-struck’ (i.e. killed by elves – the origin of the word for the affliction known as a ‘stroke’). His brother’s death two years later, after some form of seizure, suggests that strokes may have been a genetic condition in the family.

Harold was buried at Westminster Abbey, but his sibling wanted symbolic victory. He had the corpse exhumed and beheaded, and it was dumped in a Thameside bog. Fishermen rescued it after Harthacnut’s coronation, and it was buried in the main Danish cemetery in London, and later reburied at St Clement Danes in Westminster.

The Normans

After the Conquest in 1066, vast areas of the country north of London were trashed in a show of power from the new Norman overlords. Oxford was levelled in 1067 and much of the land was described as ‘waste’ in the aftermath, with 478 houses so ruined that they could not be assessed for tax purposes. To put this in context, counting the taxable households inside and outside the city walls, only 243 were deemed habitable.

Cowed Oxfordshire was up for grabs. Most of it went to King William’s relatives Odo of Bayeaux, Robert D’Oilly and William FitzOsbern. Odo owned vast swathes in the Headington, Bampton and Wootton regions, D’Oilly received Oxford and much more besides, while FitzOsbern went on to become Earl of Hereford, Gloucester, Worcester and Oxfordshire, one of England’s richest landowners and castle builders. During William’s absences, FitzOsbern was practically in charge of the country.

The task of rebuilding Oxford fell to High Sheriff of Oxford Robert D’Oilly, one of the chief landowners of the eleventh century post-Norman Conquest. His legacy can be seen in the surviving St George’s Tower at Oxford Castle. The former church of St Peter-in-the-East (now part of the university’s St Edmund Hall) belonged to him too, although the oldest surviving sections of the current building date from 1140. D’Oilly also made the original ‘Oxen ford’ into a sturdy bridge, at the point now known as Folly Bridge on St Aldates.

D’Oilly married Ealdgyth, a Saxon heiress from Wallingford, to consolidate his territorial dominance in the region. As ruthless as any other rich landowner throughout history, Robert once confiscated some meadows just beyond the Oxford city walls, to further his estates. The land had belonged to the monastery at Abingdon, and the aggrieved monks prayed for divine intervention. A few days later Robert had a nightmare in which he was dragged before the Virgin Mary, who made him stand in his pilfered meadows while he was scourged by small boys. So shocked was D’Oilly by this vision that, under his wife’s devout guidance, he gave money and land to the monks of Abingdon, and restored all the churches he could find in and around Oxford. Churches which, as historian Andrew Lang pointed out in the 1920s, ‘he and his men had helped to ruin’.

Robert D’Oilly’s nephew, another Robert, founded Osney Abbey. Only a converted outbuilding remains of this once mighty edifice. The other city-shaping event of the Norman period was the arrival of Beaumont Palace as a royal seat in Oxford. It was built during the reign of Henry I (1100–1135).

The Anarchy

King Stephen was the nephew of outgoing King Henry I. Henry’s only legitimate son, William Adelin, had died in a shipwreck in 1120, along with one of Henry’s several illegitimate children, Richard. This left the King’s legitimate daughter, Matilda, as the direct heir. Stephen, however, seized the throne, leading to a period of brutal civil war known as the Anarchy.

Matilda was not a popular figure, spending hardly any time in England prior to Henry’s death. But Stephen was unpopular too, and in 1139 Matilda sailed to England to physically stake her claim to the island, while her husband Geoffrey of Anjou attacked Stephen’s Dukedom in Normandy.

After an abortive start to her counter-coup, the Queen gained the upper hand and was crowned Empress Matilda in London. But when the townsfolk rose up against her, she retreated, crown and all, to Oxford, holing up at the heavily fortified castle. Stephen wasted no time in besieging the city. The castle was battered and all looked lost, so Matilda donned a disguise and slipped