The Secret History of Oxford E-Book

Paul Sullivan

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

Seitenzahl: 269

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The Secret History of Oxford offers the reader an off-the-beaten-track tour of the city's landmarks and streets. Filled with hundreds of facts and anecdotes, it reveals the amusing, unlikely and downright wonderful stories hidden beneath the surface. Some, such as the fact that the founder of Oxford was eaten by wolves, will be known; many others, such as the fact that Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, stole a piece of New College's unicorn horn, that one of the Fellows of Christ Church was a bear or that Oxford Castle has England's most frequently sighted ghost, are much less widely known – and some of these stories have not appeared in print for hundreds of years. With rare photographs and intriguing information on the people, eras and events that defined the city's history, this book lets the flying cats out of the bags, rattles the dragons' cages and reveals all the skeletons in the city's cupboards.

Leseprobe

For Jay, Jan and Theo

Acknowledgements

Thanks to:

Jan Sullivan for the fun we had exploring, photographing and eating all-day breakfasts

Anthea Davies for providing the perfect hideaway to sort out my notes

Magda Bezdekova for ferrying me around and looking after us all

Pavel Bezdek for invaluable research material

Heather Robbins for the May Morning pics

Jacqui Julier at New College for the unicorn information

Andrew Salmon of Paynes the silversmiths for trying to find the owner of the watch dog

The good folk of Buxton for comradeship, art and beer

Cate Ludlow and Naomi Reynolds at The History Press for editing out the bad bits

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter One:

A Brief History of Oxford

Chapter Two:

Oxford Colleges

Chapter Three:

Oxford Celebrities

Chapter Four:

Oxford Buildings

Chapter Five:

Statues and Memorials

Chapter Six:

Inns and Outs

Chapter Seven:

Highlights of the Museums

Chapter Eight:

Oxford Specialities: What’s in a Name?

Chapter Nine:

Oxford Curiosities

Bibliography

Copyright

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 out of the fortress one freezing winter’s night. Wearing white to blend in with the snowy landscape, she crossed the frozen Thames and escaped to the stronghold of Wallingford Castle.

Forces regrouped, and with her son Henry ‘Curtmantle’ (named after the short robes which he brought to the Anjou fashion scene) at her side, Matilda controlled the south-west of England, while Stephen controlled much of the south-east. There were no more decisive battles, and now the true horrors of the Anarchy descended, a period possibly matched but not exceeded by the very grimmest events in this island’s history. The nobles of the land became local tyrants, and the records known to us as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle comment that Stephen’s nineteen-year reign was a time when ‘Christ and his Saints slept’.

Stephen was eventually forced into a peace treaty that bypassed his son Eustace in favour of Matilda’s boy Henry (II). Stephen died in 1154, and Henry, often residing at Beaumont Palace in Oxford, reigned until 1189.

The Plantagenets

King Henry II (1133–89) kick-started Oxford’s growth after the darkness of the previous 300 years. He granted the city a royal charter and encouraged rudimentary economic and academic development through privileges and incentives. Religious houses flourished. The friar-scholars who settled as teachers during the twelfth century were probably carrying on an established proto-university tradition, but the historical record is vague. Chronicles mention Master Robert Puleyn as a lecturer in divinity in 1133, clearly a part of an established centre of learning. With St Frideswyde’s Priory and Osney Abbey fully functioning, this is not altogether surprising.

Parliaments were regularly held from Beaumont Palace (at a site near modern Beaumont Street, birthplace of Kings Richard I and John). The Provisions of Oxford were drawn up here in the reign of Henry III (1207–72) by Earl of Leicester Simon de Montfort and his fellow rebellious Barons. The Provisions put their rights and powers on a firm legal footing, and have been described as England’s first written constitution. The new deal introduced a powerful council of twenty-four nobles – half selected by the King, half by the Barons. This was the first elected chamber in Europe, and Parliament met thrice yearly to oversee the work of the council.

In 1239 the temporary closure of the University of Paris caused Franciscan scholar-friars to emigrate to Oxford. Their studium was established on land behind St Ebbe’s church. It was here that leading theologian, philosopher and prime mover of the early university John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) received his formative education.

The concept of students accessing university education via a college was founded by Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England. This collegiate system began with the foundation of Merton in 1265, as a community of students bound together by residence, rules, traditions, chapel, refectory and, a little later, the ‘quad’.

The university was exempt from the laws that applied to laymen: the origin of the famous ‘Town versus Gown’ divide. Students were originally clerics, with tonsures (the shaven heads associated with monks) and answered to religious courts – and, ultimately, the Papacy.

The rise of the hall and, later, college system was an attempt to maintain the clerical/secular divide. Students originally lodged with townsfolk as ‘chamberdekyns’, and soon succumbed to the secular habits (i.e. wine, women and song) of the ordinary citizen. Herded into halls, under a Master or Principal, the intention was to spare them the many temptations of the Oxford streets. The apartheid lasted into the nineteenth century, with annual ‘Town versus Gown’ head-to-heads.

The linking of a college with a particular source of students was established in the reign of Richard II by William of Wykeham, founder of New College in 1379. His college was linked with Winchester School. Since then, colleges have often been associated with towns or regions.

After an infamous ‘Town versus Gown’ riot in 1355, the university was given over-arching powers to rule the city. This shaped the daggers-drawn relationship of townsmen and university men for the next 500 years.

The Fifteenth Century

King Henry IV (1366–1413) frequently set up court at Beaumont Palace, and his son Henry V (1386–1422) was a student at Queen’s College. The latter is also associated with All Souls (founded 1438). The marriage of Henry V to Katherine of France was in the minds of Queens’ founders when they made their dedication.

The High Street gateway of All Souls is decorated with carved souls. The college was founded not just as a place of learning but as a chantry, a place of prayer endowed with money to act as a permanent memorial to the dead. Warden and fellows of the college were instructed to pray for the souls of everyone – a pretty stiff challenge – in particular ‘the illustrious Prince Henry [V], late King of England, Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and of all the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, and others who fell in the war for the Crown of France’.

Edward IV (1442–70) preferred the palace at Langley in Oxfordshire, with its access to the royal hunting grounds of Wychwood Forest. But he was a great supporter of academia, and assumed the title Protector of the University of Oxford. He visited the newly completed Magdalen College on 22 September 1481, entering the city by torchlight where he was welcomed by the university’s Chancellor (also the King’s brother-in-law), Lionel Woodville.

This began a short-lived royal patronage of Magdalen. In 1483 Edward’s brother and successor Richard III stayed at the college and listened to debates in the college hall. He was impressed enough to reward the institution with money and venison. The man who toppled Richard, Henry VII, stayed here too and a requiem Mass is still sung for him each year at the college. His eldest son Arthur (the doomed elder brother of Henry VIII) lodged at Magdalen three times, and the college president Richard Mayhew was one of the deputation sent to Spain to collect Prince Arthur’s bride-to-be (and Henry’s, as it happened), Katherine of Aragon.

The Tudors

An epidemic known as the sweating sickness, or English sweat, ravaged Oxford in 1517, halving the population of the city (and Cambridge too). The outbreak is thought to have been linked to appalling hygiene conditions and/or a lice-borne virus.

Henry VIII permanently changed the landscape of Oxford, closing down its various religious houses and establishing his own King Henry VIII’s college (now known as Christ Church). Meanwhile, the colleges’ refusal to abandon Catholicism caused tensions and outbreaks of violence that were to colour the reigns of Henry and his three successors.

The most famous victims of these turbulent times were the ‘Oxford Martyrs’ – bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. In October 1555, Catholic Queen ‘Bloody’ Mary I, in a violent attempt to remedy the Protestant lurch, condemned these three men to burn at the stake in the town ditch (now Broad Street). The alleged spot is marked with a cross on the road.

Latimer and Ridley went to the flames first, Ridley telling his friend that God would either lessen the pain of the flames, or bolster their spirits to withstand it. In turn, Latimer consoled his companion at the bonfire: ‘Be of good cheer, Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day, by God’s grace, light up such a candle in England as I trust will never be put out.’

Cranmer followed them to the flames in March the following year. He had recanted, out of fear for his life, but facing the flames he now declared, ‘This is the hand that wrote it [the recantation], and therefore shall it suffer first punishment.’ As the fire mounted, Cranmer allowed his right hand to burn. Sources say he cried out, ‘This hand hath offended!’ or, ‘This unworthy right hand!’ throughout.

When Elizabeth I ascended the throne, it was the Catholics’ turn to suffer. In 1589 priests George Nichols, Richard Yaxley, Thomas Belson and Humphrey Pritchard were executed in Oxford at a site on Holywell Street (marked with a plaque).

Elizabeth was the first monarch to receive a monetary gift from the university when she visited in 1566. She was presented with a silver cup worth £10, containing £40 in gold (combined value of about £6,000 in today’s money). Prior to this visit, monarchs had been given traditional gifts such as oxen, sheep, lambs, veal calves and loaves of sugar.

Elizabeth visited Oxford to impress on the townsfolk her resolute views, particularly in matters of religious inclinations. She was here to mark the city as Anglican Protestant, and purge Catholicism and the equally troublesome Puritanism. In a speech at the university, she said: ‘I mean to let the scholars see that I am not in the humour to stand any nonsense.’

Stuarts and Civil War

The accession of King James I was marked by plague. It started in London in 1603 and spread to Oxford. Most students fled, and the Michaelmas term had to be cancelled. All college gates were kept shut, shops were closed – even cats and dogs vanished from the streets. Grass is said to have grown in the thoroughfares.

James’ son Charles I famously chose the city as his base in 1643 during the Civil War. The university was predominantly pro-Royalist, making Oxford a natural choice. His Court and Parliament installed itself at Christ Church, while his Queen’s retinue requisitioned Merton. Their sons, Charles and James, and nephews Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice, installed their own enormous households too, with the symbolic assent of pro-Royalist University Chancellor Archbishop Laud (who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London by Parliament).

New College was transformed into a warehouse of munitions and hardware, while Oriel produced cannons and housed the King’s Privy Council. The Mill at Osney set to work grinding gunpowder instead of flour. New Inn hall became the Oxford Mint, churning out coinage to pay the army, using melted down college plate and other metalware purloined from university and household alike. The new university schools at the Bodleian became stores for foodstuffs and workshops for clothing and other necessities.

The inhabitants of Oxford were heavily taxed to finance the King’s military takeover. All men aged between sixteen and forty-five were forced to enlist in the army, a gibbet was erected at Carfax and the plague that continued to rage through the populace simply added insult to injury.

The Parliamentarians began the first of three sieges of the city in June 1644, and the king decided to leave town before the fighting began in earnest. While a chunk of his army heaved towards Abingdon as a diversion, Charles briefed his Privy Council on general tactics and fled the city disguised as his sons’ tutor’s servant, at 9 p.m. on 3 June.

At the beginning of 1645, Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army declared the seizure of Oxford its number one priority, and on 21 May the Parliamentarians’ military mastermind Thomas Fairfax began the siege. He watched proceedings from the frontline, literally dodging bullets on one occasion, while his artillery proved how far it could penetrate the enemy ranks when a cannon ball was fired from Old Marston to the walls of Christ Church 1 mile away. But the killer blow proved elusive, and in November that year Charles was able to take up residence in Oxford once again. Fairfax installed himself at 17 Mill Lane, Marston, now known as ‘Cromwell House’, scene of negotiations over the long-drawn out Treaty of Oxford a few months later.

Charles managed to flee Oxford yet again in April 1646. Skirmishes continued, even while a peace treaty was being hammered out. When, on 20 June 1646, the Royalists officially surrendered, Charles’ commanders felt betrayed by the politicians and the king, claiming they could still win the battle for Oxford. But it was all bluster. The treaty was signed at the Audit House, Christ Church, by the Governor of Oxford and Thomas Fairfax.

On 22 June the fallen hero Prince Rupert and 300 Royalist aristocrats were given safe passage from the city, and two days later the Treaty came into operation. Fairfax’s army patrolled the streets to maintain order, and the Royalist evacuation began. The 3,000 soldiers, who had survived three successive sieges, were marched from the city. Charles went to the block on 30 January 1649.

The Later Stuarts

The Civil War hostilities, seemingly exhausted, weren’t actually over at all. The Parliamentarians encountered a lot of negative feedback from Royalist Oxford. Mrs Fell, the wife of the Dean of Christ Church, refused to vacate the premises when requested to do so, and she had to be carried bodily into the quadrangle, screaming abuse at her man-handlers, a squad of Cromwell’s musketeers.

During the Commonwealth of Oliver and Richard Cromwell (1649–60), Oxford picked up the pieces and thrived, with most of the colleges having heads elected by the post-monarchy establishment. Both Cromwells were Chancellor of the university during their years in power, but college heads installed under the Commonwealth were unceremoniously booted out in the Restoration after Charles II ascended in 1660. In many cases, this was little more than a spiteful political gesture, and bad news for academia. Historian Anthony Wood was one of the era’s witnesses. ‘Some Cavaliers that were restored were good scholars, but the majority were dunces,’ he commented. One of the worst struck was Exeter College, which received Joseph Maynard as its head, or Rector:

Exeter College is now much debauched by a drunken Governor whereas, before, in Doctor Conant’s time, it was accounted a civil house, it is now rude and uncivil… The Rector is good-natured, generous and a good scholar, but… he is much given to bibbing [drinking], and… he will sit there, smoke, and drink till he is drunk, and has to be led to his lodgings.

Wood was equally scathing when assessing the new breed of Restoration student: ‘Their aim is not to live as students ought to do,’ he said, ‘but to live like gentry, to keep dogs and horses, to turn their studies into places to keep bottles, to swagger in gay apparel and long periwigs.’

Charles II set up court in Oxford during the Great Plague of London, 1665–66. His successor James II caused a minor uprising when he installed a Catholic head at Magdalen College in 1687. In spite of this unpopular interference, Oxford retained Jacobite (i.e. pro-Stuart, supporting the surviving heirs of the old dynasty) sympathies after the demise of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, in 1714.

When King William III (husband of penultimate Stuart monarch Mary II) visited Oxford in 1695, the Sheldonian Theatre prepared a grand feast. The monarch, however, believed that Jacobite plotters were attempting to poison him and boycotted the party.

The Georgians and Jacobites

When the official celebrations for Hanoverian George I’s birthday were enforced in Oxford on 28 May 1715, its Jacobite sympathies manifested in riots, led by university students. A mob dismantled the town’s celebratory Georgian bonfire, and any window sporting a candle – a mark of loyal celebration of the King’s birthday – was smashed. Presbyterian minister William Roby, staunch supporter of the Hanoverian succession, was put in the town stocks, and his effigy was burnt. There were too few town constables to disperse the crowds.

Pro-Stuart feeling peaked on the following day, the anniversary of the Restoration of King Charles II. People ran through the streets shouting, ‘King James III! The true king! No usurper!’ Oriel, a pro-Hanoverian College, was stoned and several people were injured.