The Little History of Oxfordshire E-Book

Paul Sullivan

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 269

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Oxfordshire is the hive to which great artists, scientists, thinkers and warlords have swarmed for 2,000 years. You will be amazed at how many historical figures have enjoyed or suffered their defining moments in this exciting and interesting county. From flint arrowheads to RAF bases, from the Ridgeway to the M40 and from the Roman Conquest to the Cold War, this book tells the story of Oxfordshire's diverse people and their trades, triumphs and tribulations. The history of Oxfordshire is, indeed, the history of England in miniature, and Paul Sullivan shares it in all its glory in this well-researched book.

Leseprobe

For Magda, Jan and Theo;remembering our momentous years in Oxfordshire.

First published 2019

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Paul Sullivan, 2019

The right of Paul Sullivan to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9103 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed in Turkey

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

1In the beginning was …?

2Romano-Britain: 43 BC–AD 450

3The Anglo-Saxon and Danish era: 450–1066

4The Normans: 1066–1154

5The Plantagenets: 1154–1485

6The Tudors: 1485–1603

7The Stuarts: 1603–1714

8Jacobites and Georgians: 1714–1837

9The Victorian Age: 1837–1901

10The Twentieth Century

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

In acceding to the request to compile a summary of the historical material on which the Early History of Oxford was based, I did not at the moment quite realise what I had undertaken.

James Parker, 1885

The apology quoted above was written in the preface to the new edition of James Parker’s Early History of Oxford, 727–1100. He had underestimated the time it would take to dig through the historical material, and was late getting his book to the publisher. Armed as I am with the Internet’s bottomless pit and a huge database based on research from my previous Oxfordshire books, I have fewer excuses than Parker. But I know exactly how he felt.

In terms of its importance in the political, artistic, scientific and social history of Britain, Oxfordshire is equalled only by London. A lot of this is due to the magnetic pull of the university, which has tasted unfair riches of celebrity residents over the centuries. The history of Oxford is in many ways the history of England.

This is what makes it so challenging when considering the county as a whole – trying to balance the ogre of Oxford against the rest of Oxfordshire. So, my approach here has been to fight off Oxford as much as possible, knowing full well that the ogre will loom large without my help. The stories included here were chosen primarily for their entertainment value, punctuated with summaries of the background social and political upheavals that defined each era, to give the flow of history a coherence which, in reality, it most certainly never had.

Oxfordshire presents several faces to the world. It encompasses the Cotswolds, the Chilterns, the North Wessex Downs, ‘Banburyshire’ in the north, Oxford in the south, and a large section, centred on Abingdon, wrested from Berkshire in 1974. A large chunk of it was formerly a royal hunting forest, plonked like a decadent Eden between the rivers Evenlode and Windrush, smothering the land from Burford in Oxfordshire to Bernewood in Buckinghamshire. Most of it was lopped during the seventeenth-century Civil Wars, and the Enclosure Acts mopped up what was left – examples of the many and surprising ways in which history moulds the physical and moral landscape we take for granted.

A brief word about anachronism. I have used the name ‘Oxfordshire’ throughout, even when talking about pre-Anglo-Saxon history. The county didn’t exist before the tenth century AD, but I have grudgingly followed convention and applied the tag to the early bits too. The assertion that Romans, Catuvellauni, and even dinosaurs, gambolled through the thoroughfares of Oxfordshire is nonsense; but there are only so many times you can say things like ‘the part of the country currently known as Oxfordshire’ without losing patience, sanity and readers, in that order.

The timelessness of Oxford and Oxfordshire is just an illusion. They sometimes pretend to be academic and bucolic relics of a Golden Age, but in reality, the city and county have always been at the forefront of progress. For every thatched Cotswold stone cottage there is an office expanding the digital possibilities of modern life; for every former mill there is a Bicester Village designer brand outlet; and for every traditional Morris team there is The Next Big Thing playing in a pub near you (probably The Jericho Arms in Oxford).

All of which makes me think – why on earth would I ever want to live anywhere else?

Paul Sullivan, 2019

1

IN THE BEGINNING WAS …?

A history of Oxfordshire has to start somewhere. The historian in me says it should kick off with the earliest recorded mention of Oxford, in an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry from the year 912; or perhaps with the earliest human settlers more than a thousand years earlier.

However, the imaginary Richard Dawkins perched on my right shoulder disagrees. He says it should all start with the first mammals, or the dinosaurs. But then Stephen Hawking on my left shoulder insists that it should go back much further and begin with Big Bangs and meteorites. The Launton meteorite, specifically.

This lump of interstellar rock, born in our embryonic solar system at some point between the Big Bang and the formation of the earth, crashed to the ground in a garden at Launton, near Bicester, at 7.30 p.m. on 15 February 1830. According to a report in the Magazine of Natural History of 1831:

Its descent was accompanied with a most brilliant light, which was visible for many miles around, and attended with a triple explosion … A man named Thomas Marriot was passing near the garden at the moment, and states that it came rapidly towards him from the north-east, not perpendicularly but obliquely, appearing about the size of a cricket-ball; and that expecting it would strike him, he instinctively lowered his head to avoid it.

So, having satisfied the Hawking in me, I must now appease my inner Dawkins and make honourable mention of the region’s early habitats and wildlife.

Oxfordshire is rich in fossils, and was an important source of material for early scientists trying to determine the true nature of petrified shells and bones. In the north-west of the county Jurassic limestone, shale and sandstone forms the Cotswold hills, the origin of the famously golden-yellow Cotswold Stone that decorates many a town and village in these parts. Locally tagged seams include Banbury Marble, Stonesfield Slate and Forest Marble (named after Wychwood Forest), which has yielded a rich fossil harvest.

These relics caused headaches for seventeenth-century Robert Plot, first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Fossilised seashells found inland posed the obvious question: how did they come to be here in the rocks of Oxfordshire, so far from the sea?

Plot refused to believe that England could experience earthquakes sufficient to raise cockle beds to hill-top level. He also ruled out another popular theory of the time – that the Biblical Deluge, of Noah’s Ark fame, was responsible. If the Flood had been a gentle accumulation of water, Plot reasoned, it would not have evicted the shellfish from their sea beds and left them stranded on hills and mountains; and, if violent, it would have scattered the animals rather than leaving them in the neat, ordered beds he had observed. Crowded shellfish beds suggested that these were established colonies that would have needed far longer than the Flood’s forty days to become rooted.

Robert Plot had a couple of alternative theories. He suggested that urinous salts – i.e. fossilised puddles of urine – may have been involved in some deposits. But his chief theory was that fossils were formed at the beginning of Creation, when God was ‘dispersing the Seminal Virtue of Animals through the Universe’. When this divine outpouring hit water, it resulted in living shellfish; but if the creative juices hit ‘an improper Matrix’ such as earth, they produced shellfish-shaped inanimate stones.

OF DINOSAURS AND OTHER GIANTS

The grand matriarch of Oxfordshire wildlife is the Megalosaurus, a carnivore from the Middle Jurassic. Robert Plot, the man with the fossil theories mentioned above, had the first crack at identification. He examined a thigh bone, discovered at Cornwell near Oxford, and went against received opinion by rejecting the theory that it belonged to a Roman-era elephant. He suggested instead that it was evidence of an ancient race of humanoid giants.

The truth, finally nailed in the early 1800s, would have been as outrageous to Robert Plot as his giants theory seems to us. The bone belonged to a previously unsuspected group of enormous reptiles. When Oxford University canon William Buckland discovered further remains of the creature at Stonesfield, he named the animal Megalosaurus bucklandii. In 1842, Richard Owen, professor of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, placed Megalosaurus in a new class of animals – the dinosaurs.

Oxfordshire proved to be a hotspot for dinosaur finds. Remnants of all the following beasts can be viewed in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH). Cetiosaurus oxoniensis, translating as ‘Oxford whale lizard’, was a Brontosaurus-type beast, unearthed at Chipping Norton in 1825, and another at Kirtlington in 1860. Eustreptospondylus oxoniensis (‘Oxford well-turned vertebra’), belonged to the family that later produced the Tyrannosaurus rex. It was discovered in 1871 in a brick pit at Summertown in Oxford. Camptosaurus prestwichii, a member of the iguanodon family, came to light at a brick pit on Cumnor Hurst, south-west of Oxford, in 1880.

Megalosaurus at Woodstock Museum. (Photo by Magdalena Sullivan)

Ardley is the only place in Britain to have been given the status of Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on account of its dinosaur footprints. The 165-million-year-old tracks, embedded in the Jurassic limestone, were made by a Megalosaurus and a herd of Cetiosaurs. They were discovered in 1997, and the SSSI designation came in 2010, the Megalosaurus tracks having been carefully removed and reinstalled at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock in 2009. There are also casts of the Ardley tracks on the front lawn of the OUMNH.

Megalosaurus was William Buckland’s first scalp in a personal Oxfordshire prehistoric portfolio that went on to include the flying reptile Rhamphorynchus bucklandii, and the Jurassic mammal Phascolotherium bucklandii, also known as the Stonesfield Mammal, after the village quarry where it was discovered. Phascolotherium was a night-hunter, resembling the modern-day possum. It appears to be a common ancestor of all types of mammal found on earth today.

THE PREHISTORIC UNIVERSITY

That’s Hawking and Dawkins dealt with. Meanwhile, the real history of Oxfordshire begins with the first people. And yet we search in vain for a tidy human beginning, an Adam-and-Eve-type origins story.

It’s therefore tempting to fall into the comforting arms of folklore. Writing nearly 900 years before viral Fake News came along to undermine our efforts to understand the world around us, historian Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote an epic British pseudo-history in which King Brutus, grandson of King Priam of Troy, lands on the shores of a Giant-inhabited island around 1100 BC, polishes off its small population, and renames it Britain. Brutus founds a university at Lechlade, which, three generations later, is relocated to the city of Caer Memphric, aka Oxford.

This city was founded by King Mempricius. He was an out and out rotter, Oxford’s original villain, spurning his queen for a string of male lovers and killing anyone who got in his way. Thank goodness, then, that he was eaten by wolves during a badly planned hunting trip, at some point around 1010 BC.

All of which, sadly can be written off as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s attempt to give his employers at Oxford University an untouchable pedigree. He was simply telling them what they wanted to hear – that Oxford’s place at the heart of academia went further back than any other city’s.

So, folklore only offers brief, romantic respite from the pressing issue of where Oxfordshire’s human history begins. Instead, as my proper starting point, I’m turning to a far more grounded and inspiring Oxfordshire origin, one that does away with the need for meteorites, dinosaurs, fossils and folklore.

So, in the beginning there was …

THE RIDGEWAY

This was the first thoroughfare of the region, a natural highway that makes use of the chalk escarpment of the Chilterns, the M40 of its day. It was the Ridgeway that brought people to, from and through this portion of the island – an inroad into the human story.

With the final meltdown of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, the chalk ridge would have been poking up from the damp valleys, as inviting as a sturdy bridge over a muddy river. If you were heading this way, the Ridgeway was the only road in the county, being a thoroughfare, a vantage point, and a comforting certainty in a world of wilderness and unknowns. It was also the only route on which you could keep your feet dry at all times of the year.

The ancient pathway follows the chalk ridge in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It runs parallel to part of a prehistoric routeway called the Icknield Way, named after the British tribe the Iceni. This sits lower down on the north side of the chalk escarpment, part of a road that runs for over 360 miles from Lyme Regis in Dorset to Hunstanton in Norfolk. Quite why the Icknield Way avoids the ready-made path on the chalk ridge is a mystery.

Transport through the ages: view of the M40 from the Ridgeway.

Natural historian Robert Plot wrote in 1677:

It is called by its old name at very many places, lkenildway, to this very day. Some indeed call it lcknil, some Acknil, others Hackney, and some again Hackington, but all intend the very same way, that stretches itself in this County from North-east to South-west; coming into it (out of Bucks) at the Parish of Chinnor, and going out again over the Thames (into Berks) at the Parish of Goring … it passes through no town or village in the county, but only Goring; nor does it (as I hear) scarce anywhere else, for which reason ’tis much used by stealers of cattle.

It was this road that brought people to this part of the world in the first place, a soon as the ice receded. The driving force behind early settlement was probably flint. Most of Oxfordshire is just a stone’s throw – preferably one shaped into an axe- or arrow-head – from abundant supplies; and the mother of all flint supplies lay at the northern end of the Icknield Way, at Grimes Graves in Norfolk.

Oxfordshire’s chief Palaeolithic flints – the earliest human litter in the area – have been unearthed at Rotherfield Peppard, Berinsfield, Iffley, Crowmarsh, Benson, Ewelme, Stanton Harcourt, Cassington, Goring, and Wolvercote and Osney in Oxford. See how long you can look at them in their Ashmolean and Woodstock Museum of Oxfordshire display cases before glazing over.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW STONE AGE

Neolithic (New Stone Age) settlers displaced the aboriginal peoples of the area more than 5,000 years ago. They built the first permanent settlements and followed an agricultural rather than hunter-gatherer way of life (including the earliest crops, livestock and extensive forest clearance). They also made pots in rudimentary kilns, and expanded on the tool portfolio by adding wood, bone and other rocks to the traditional all-purpose flint.

The Neolithic settlers erected monoliths and stone circles such as the Rollright Stones and The Devil’s Quoits near Stanton Harcourt, and engineered high-tech burials involving long barrows. The Neolithic long barrow checklist includes one of the finest in the island – Wayland’s Smithy near Ashbury. There are other examples in the county – although none as impressive as Wayland’s – including one at Shipton and a reconstruction at Ascott-under-Wychwood.

This all predates the earliest ‘Celtic’ settlers of the Iron Age. It’s possible that we have a fleeting glimpse of these earlier peoples in fairy stories of strong, short-statured, loyal but vengeful goblins who help around the house and farm but easily take offence, at which point they become vengeful monsters. In Oxfordshire folklore the fairy presence is limited to a few desultory sightings at Neolithic monuments such as Wayland’s Smithy and the Rollright Stones, where they were last glimpsed in the late nineteenth century. (The association is celebrated with a wooden sculpture of three dancing fairies, erected at Rollright in 2017 by sculptors David and Adam Gosling. Like the original fairies, the sculpture is temporary, but should withstand the elements long enough for visitors to get a glimpse within half a dozen years of this book’s publication date.)

In the 1960s fourteen bodies were unearthed at Wayland’s Smithy. Recently dated to the mid-fourth century BC, they appear to be the remains of war victims. Skewered by arrows, dismembered by dogs or wild animals, they were later gathered up and buried at the site. This all suggests that the Neolithic era was every bit as violent as the ages that followed.

THE STORY OF TRACING BEAKERS

At some point between 2000 and 1500 BC, settlers from the Rhineland and the north coast of Europe – the Belgic people, from modern Netherlands and Belgium – arrived. Their calling card in the archaeological record is a distinctive bell-shaped beaker, which has led to the period being dubbed the Beaker or Bell-Beaker culture. As far as we know, the Beaker Folk settled peaceably, but we can only speculate. There is no evidence of war or displacement, but these things are not always obvious in the archaeology; and the previously cited evidence of a massacre at Wayland’s Smithy hints at the possible truth.

The bell-beaker was the smartphone of its day, sweeping all before it as a cultural calling card, and probably rendering the pre-Beaker resident indistinguishable from the invader. We tend to view these things through the blood-tinted spectacles of nation and empire, but the prehistoric period was more about sparse populations of traders and distant cousins. It’s a pre-British natural history of the human species, rather than a tribal battleground. Think David Attenborough rather than Richard Starkey.

There is no distinct boundary between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age; nor, indeed, between the Bronze and Iron Ages. The Beaker Folk traded bronze goods with their neighbours in what is now Ireland. The metal was either imported from the European mainland, or recast by local bronzesmiths recycling old or broken objects. One of the oldest bronze artefacts surviving from this period is a cauldron unearthed at Shipton-on-Cherwell, on display with other artefacts from the era in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

THE ORIGINAL IRON MAN

Iron tools first appeared in Oxfordshire in the sixth century BC. Iron ore seams in the north of the region were mined for the raw materials, although most of the ironmongery was imported from elsewhere. Iron working was both an art and a science, and the smiths behind the alchemy of transmuting rock to metal weapon were viewed as no less than magicians.

This notion of smith-as-wonderworker is captured in the folklore of Wayland’s Smithy. The name is Saxon, a down-at-heel version of the Germanic and Scandinavian smith-god Weland/Völundr. Legend says that Wayland will nail horseshoes to the feet of any unshod steed tethered at the long barrow, if a payment is left.

Oxfordshire’s hillforts date from the Bronze and Iron Ages. These constructions were a mixture of cattle and sheep corrals and defensive forts in the modern sense of the word. The best surviving one is at Uffington Castle. It was occupied for hundreds of years, the earliest version having appeared in the ninth century BC. Sitting beside Dragon Hill, with its livid battle scars of chalk, and the iconic Uffington White Horse, this is a foremost pilgrimage spot for ancient history buffs.

The White Horse itself, disjointed like bones in a plundered grave, has been the object of legend, speculation and logo inspiration for as long as humans have gazed on it. The figure was carved into the hillside no earlier than 1200 BC, possibly as late as the sixth century BC, and has been renovated regularly ever since. Scouring the White Horse became a local fair-cum-festival in the sixteenth century, held every seven years, and is celebrated in Tom Brown’s Schooldays author Thomas Hughes’ rambling memoir The Scouring of the White Horse (1859). The event is also mythologised in G.K. Chesterton’s poem about Alfred the Great, The Ballad of the White Horse (1911):

And it fell in the days of Alfred,

In the days of his repose,

That as old customs in his sight

Were a straight road and a steady light,

He bade them keep the White Horse white

As the first plume of the snows.

And right to the red torchlight,

From the trouble of morning grey,

They stripped the White Horse of the grass

As they strip it to this day.

The Horse is still ‘scoured’ regularly, by teams of volunteers from the National Trust. The only time it has been hidden from view was in the Second World War, when it was covered in foliage to conceal it from Luftwaffe bombers on the lookout for geographical landmarks.

Folklore insists that the horse is actually a dragon, and not just any old dragon but the one killed by St George. The chalk ‘scars’ on neighbouring Dragon Hill were burned into the ground by the dragon’s spilled blood. But another folkloric strand maintains that the horse is indeed equine, and that it leaves the hillside at night to graze on the hillslope and valley bottom, known as The Manger.

Other hillforts survive at Madmarston, Ilbury, Idbury, Wyfold, Binditch and the Dyke Hills near Dorchester. Madmarston was occupied for at least 250 years (up to c. AD 50), with three banks and a ditch, as well-defended as any castle. This lengthy occupation suggests that the fort was a town of sorts, the HQ of a local tribe. The forts survive as sulky mounds in fields attacked by plough and sheep – still besieged after all these centuries.

We tend to call all the post-Beaker Folk inhabitants of the island Celtic. This is not a tag the people would have recognised themselves, however. The earlier settlers of Oxfordshire spoke a language related to modern Irish and Scottish; the later waves, arriving between AD 500 and 400, spoke the Brythonic language. The linguistic descendants of this tongue still flourish in modern Welsh and Cornish.

FIRST CENTURY BC: IT’S GRIM DOWN SOUTH

The first local tribe to bequeath its name to history (via the Romans) was the Catuvellauni. Originally from the Low Countries, these people had established a kingdom centred on Camulodunum (Colchester). Marching west – following the sun, as settlers always have – the incoming army would have invaded via the Ridgeway. Or perhaps they bribed, threatened and traded their way in, which is a method of invasion and cultural conquest very much at the forefront of international relations today. The evidence of their presence – or influence – is in coins and pottery.

The Catuvellauni seem to have made it as far west as the River Cherwell. On the opposite side of the river, the coin evidence suggests that other tribes were dominant, including the Dobunni (based in what later became Gloucestershire). The bank and ditch structure known as Grim’s Ditch, spanning the fields between the rivers Glyme and Windrush, is evidence that one faction wanted to build walls to keep out the ‘foreigners’ (sound familiar?); but it is not clear whether it was the non-Catuvellaunis trying to hold back the easterners, or the Catuvellauni themselves making a stand against the later Roman invaders.

Then again, the structure – like the other Grim’s Ditch at the southern end of the county – may have been more of an administrative boundary. The boring answer is often the correct one in history.

2

ROMANO-BRITAIN

43 BC–AD 450

Julius Caesar crossed the Thames near Wallingford en route to a battle against the Britons at Cirencester in 54 BC. That particular invasion ended in defeat for the Romans; but they made it to Oxfordshire a few years after their first successful occupation of the island in AD 43 during the reign of Emperor Claudius.

As they crossed the country from the south-east coast into the west, the Romans constructed the road Akeman Street. It enters Oxfordshire at the village of Blackthorn, and exits west of Shilton. Another road, running north–south between Silchester in Hampshire and Towcester in Northamptonshire, linked the Roman towns of Dorchester-on-Thames and Alchester, the two roads forming a crossroads at the latter town.

This north–south road, a Roman army supply line, crossed Otmoor, with foundations of brushwood to keep it from sinking in the wet ground. Elsewhere the roads were up to 25ft wide and paved. Our old friends the Ridgeway and Icknield Way were paved in places too during the Roman era.

Alchester (the site of which is in modern Wendlebury, near Bicester) was the earliest Roman town in the area, smothering an older British settlement and developing in the shadow of an earlier Roman fort at Little Chesterton. The fort was built around AD 45 to house the Second Augustan Legion, instrumental in the conquest of Britain, under the command of future Roman emperor Vespasian (AD 9–79). The site was a strategic military spot between the British Catuvellauni and the Dobunni tribes who, like all the pre-Roman Iron Age tribes of the island, were in a constant face-off. The legion moved out in AD 68, and Alchester became a comfy Romano-British town, until its abandonment in the fifth century AD.

THE FIRST LOCALS

One Alchester resident’s tombstone was unearthed in 2003, bearing the name Lucius Valerius Geminus, an Italian-born veteran of the Legio II. In translation, the stone reads:

To the souls of the departed: Lucius Valerius Geminus, the son of Lucius, of the Pollia voting tribe, from Forum Germanorum, veteran of the Second Augustan Legion, aged 50, lies here. His heir had this set up in accordance with his will.

Lucius’ links to the legion place his death in the mid to latter part of the first century AD. This makes him Oxfordshire’s earliest named resident. The stone is on display in the Museum of Oxfordshire, Woodstock.

Three quarters of a century later, a Romano-British pot maker, the second oldest known Oxfordshire native, left his mark on posterity. Dated to around AD 150, a fragment of pot formerly kept in the Museum of Oxford reads TΛ·MII·SV·BV·GVS·FII· – or Tamesubugus Fe[cit], as it is usually rendered, as those double ‘I’s represented an ‘E’, apparently. The name probably means ‘Thames Dweller’.

There have been other theories about the meaning of ‘Tamesubugus’, however. The ‘bugus’ element could mean breaker or striker, or even ‘blue’, rather than dweller. Experts all agree on the incomplete word ‘fecit’, meaning ‘made this’, based on conventions inferred from similar inscriptions. So, the fragment is declaring ‘Thames Dweller made this’ … probably.

Oxfordshire’s second big Roman town after Alchester was Dorchester-on-Thames (occupied around AD 70 on the site of a pre-Roman settlement). This settlement has bequeathed us another early resident. Third century AD tax collector Marcus Vatrius Severus erected an altar here dedicated to Jupiter and the Emperor-as-God. Unfortunately, the altar disappeared in the early twentieth century, sold for a guinea (£1.05) shortly after being unearthed.

ROMANO-WHO?

There were other Roman roads in the area, laid for practical and commercial rather than military purposes, including one that stretched north-east to south-west, from Bicester to Wantage. Other major towns in this period included Frilford, a thriving centre before the Romans arrived. Remains of temples and an amphitheatre have been found here.

All of which begs the question: who exactly were the people living in Roman Oxfordshire? Roman Britain wasn’t full of people from Italy (in spite of the Italian origins of our first-named resident Lucius, mentioned previously). Ninety-nine per cent of the locals were the Brythonic Celtic people whose ancestors had been here since those tribes began occupying the island after AD 500. This is the population we now label ‘Romano-British’, although that tag should only by applied to town dwellers, who were living a life influenced, fuelled and financed by the Roman social structure and economy. Most of the locals still lived in the simple mud, straw and wood huts of their distant ancestors.

There would have been ‘foreign’ residents too, mainly army retirees and other officials; but most of these would have been from parts of the Roman Empire neighbouring Britain, not the environs of Rome itself.

The more enterprising businessmen, mainly in the north of the county near Akeman Street, grew wheat and other crops to feed the ravenous Roman forts and towns. Chieftains of the Dobunni and Catuvellauni tribes soon became rich on this gravy train, and every bit as ‘Roman’ as the retired consuls and army generals next door. In this we can see the earliest roots of the inherent racial otherness of the British aristocracy. Previously, British kings and chieftains, although probably elevated to the level of sub-gods, had been essentially local, ‘one of us’, a sturdy branch of the native land. But from now on, marital links and allegiances to a ruling caste – in this case Roman – set apart the genealogy, self-image and preferred language of ‘Romano-British’ leaders and landowners from those who were simply British.

In later centuries this trend would continue, with royalty speaking French (and later still, German) at court, the educated folk still conversing in Latin, and the peasantry conversing in whichever language – British, Old English, Emoji – the changing times had bequeathed them.

It was this increasing reliance on Roman identity, assistance and influence that would prove the downfall of the warring British tribes after the implosion of the Roman Empire in the fifth century.

INVISIBLE OXFORD

Oxfordshire was not the site of any large-scale Roman industry, but there were several utilitarian suppliers such as pot makers. These clung to the main roads, for trading purposes, with imitation Samian ware tossed off at Sandford-on-Thames, and a busy pottery at Cowley, up and running at the end of the first century AD. It remained in use for almost 200 years, with other thriving kilns in the Oxford area, at Rose Hill, Headington, and the vicinity of the Churchill Hospital, long before the foundation of the city.

That’s one of the odd things about Oxford. There were satellite settlements and cottage industries, and later there were religious communities too, but Oxford itself stubbornly refuses to emerge until that first documented mention of it in the year 912.

Most of the Roman villas of the period seem to have been built north of Akeman Street. The most tourist-friendly remains, however, are at North Leigh near Witney (kept by English Heritage). This villa grew over the years to become one of the largest in the island. The surviving highlight is a magnificent third-century mosaic floor.

The survival of this floor is something to be thankful for, given the treatment of the mosaic unearthed at a fourth-century villa in nearby Stonesfield. The pavement, featuring Bacchus riding on a panther, was uncovered in 1712, sketched in great detail, and then argued over and eventually destroyed by the disgruntled tenant on whose land it had been discovered. It was covered, and later lost altogether under the plough.

Ditchley near Charlbury had a fine villa too, built where Ditchley House stands today. A Roman hoard was discovered nearby in 1934, containing 1,176 bronze coins. They range in date over a 100-year period from AD 270 onwards, and are thought to have been buried in their ceramic pot around AD 395, at a time when the Romano-British were getting increasingly jumpy about the decline of their spiritual homeland in Rome. The hoard can be viewed in the Ashmolean in Oxford.

Smaller villas existed further south, including ones at Beckley and Harpsden near Henley, but in general Roman Oxfordshire is marked by a south–north divide.

BY JOVE!