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OXFORD
OXFORD ANDREW LANG CHAPTER I--THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY
Most old towns are like palimpsests parchments which have been
scrawled over again and again by their successive owners. Oxford
though not one of the most ancient of English cities shows more
legibly than the rest the handwriting as it were of many
generations. The convenient site among the interlacing waters of the
Isis and the Cherwell has commended itself to men in one age after
another. Each generation has used it for its own purpose: for war
for trade for learning for religion; and war trade religion and
learning have left on Oxford their peculiar marks. No set of its
occupants before the last two centuries began was very eager to
deface or destroy the buildings of its predecessors. Old things were
turned to new uses or altered to suit new tastes; they were not
overthrown and carted away. Thus in walking through Oxford you see
everywhere in colleges chapels and churches doors and windows
which have been builded up; or again openings which have been cut
where none originally existed. The upper part of the round Norman
arches in the Cathedral has been preserved and converted into the
circular bull's-eye lights which the last century liked. It is the
same everywhere except where modern restorers have had their way.
Thus the life of England for some eight centuries may be traced in
the buildings of Oxford. Nay if we are convinced by some
antiquaries the eastern end of the High Street contains even earlier
scratches on this palimpsest of Oxford; the rude marks of savages who
scooped out their damp nests and raised their low walls in the
gravel on the spot where the new schools are to stand. Here half-
naked men may have trapped the beaver in the Cherwell and hither
they may have brought home the boars which they slew in the trackless
woods of Headington and Bagley. It is with the life of historical
Oxford however and not with these fancies that we are concerned
though these papers have no pretension to be a history of Oxford. A
series of pictures of men's life here is all they try to sketch.
It is hard though not impossible to form a picture in the mind of
Oxford as she was when she is first spoken of by history. What she
may have been when legend only knows her; when St. Frideswyde built a
home for religious maidens; when she fled from King Algar and hid
among the swine and after a whole fairy tale of adventures died in
great sanctity we cannot even guess. This legend of St. Frideswyde
and of her foundation the germ of the Cathedral and of Christ
Church is not indeed without its value and significance for those
who care for Oxford. This home of religion and of learning was a
home of religion from the beginning and her later life is but a
return after centuries of war and trade to her earliest purpose.
What manner of village of wooden houses may have surrounded the
earliest rude chapels and places of prayer we cannot readily guess
but imagination may look back on Oxford as she was when the English
Chronicle first mentions her. Even then it is not unnatural to think
Oxford might well have been a city of peace. She lies in the very
centre of England and the Northmen as they marched inland burning
church and cloister must have wandered long before they came to
Oxford. On the other hand the military importance of the site must
have made it a town that would be eagerly contended for. Any places
of strength in Oxford would command the roads leading to the north
and west and the secure raised paths that ran through the flooded
fens to the ford or bridge if bridge there then was between
Godstowe and the later Norman grand pont where Folly Bridge now
spans the Isis. Somewhere near Oxford the roads that ran towards
Banbury and the north or towards Bristol and the west would be
obliged to cross the river. The water-way too and the paths by the
Thames' side were commanded by Oxford. The Danes as they followed
up the course of the Thames from London would be drawn thither
sooner or later and would covet a place which is surrounded by half
a dozen deep natural moats. Lastly Oxford lay in the centre of
England indeed but on the very marches of Mercia and Wessex. A
border town of natural strength and of commanding situation she can
have been no mean or poor collection of villages in the days when she
is first spoken of when Eadward the Elder "incorporated with his own
kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides of Watling Street"
(Freeman's Norman Conquest vol. i. p. 57) and took possession of
London and of Oxford as the two most important parts of a scientific
frontier. If any man had stood in the days of Eadward on the hill
that was not yet "Shotover" and had looked along the plain to the
place where the grey spires of Oxford are clustered now as it were
in a purple cup of the low hills he would have seen little but "the
smoke floating up through the oakwood and the coppice"
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
The low hills were not yet cleared nor the fens and the wolds
trimmed and enclosed. Centuries later when the early students came
they had to ride "through the thick forest and across the moor to
the East Gate of the city" (Munimenta Academica Oxon. vol. i. p.
60). In the midst of a country still wild Oxford was already no
mean city; but the place where the hostile races of the land met to
settle their differences to feast together and forget their wrongs
over the mead and ale or to devise treacherous murder and close the
banquet with fire and sword.
Again and again after Eadward the Elder took Mercia the Danes went
about burning and wasting England. The wooden towns were flaming
through the night and sending up a thick smoke through the day from
Thamesmouth to Cambridge. "And next was there no headman that force
would gather and each fled as swift as he might and soon was there
no shire that would help another." When the first fury of the
plundering invaders was over when the Northmen had begun to wish to
settle and till the land and have some measure of peace the early
meetings between them and the English rulers were held in the border-
town in Oxford. Thus Sigeferth and Morkere sons of Earngrim came
to see Eadric in Oxford and there were slain at a banquet while
their followers perished in the attempt to avenge them. "Into the
tower of St. Frideswyde they were driven and as men could not drive
them thence the tower was fired and they perished in the burning."
So says William of Malmesbury who so many years later read the
story as he says in the records of the Church of St. Frideswyde.
There is another version of the story in the Codex Diplomaticus
(DCCIX.). Aethelred is made to say in a deed of grant of lands to
St. Frideswyde's Church ("mine own minster") that the Danes were
slain in the massacre of St. Brice. On that day Aethelred "by the
advice of his satraps determined to destroy the tares among the
wheat the Danes in England." Certain of these fled into the
minster as into a fortress and therefore it was burned and the
books and monuments destroyed. For this cause Aethelred gives lands
to the minster "fro Charwell brigge andlong the streame fro
Merewell to Rugslawe fro the lawe to the foule putte" and so forth.
It is pleasant to see how old are the familiar names "Cherwell"
"Hedington" "Couelee" or Cowley where the college cricket-grounds
are. Three years passed and the headmen of the English and of the
Danes met at Oxford again and more peacefully and agreed to live
together obedient to the laws of Eadgar; to the law that is as it
was administered in older days that seem happier and better ruled to
men looking back on them from an age of confusion and bloodshed. At
Oxford too met the peaceful gathering of 1035 when Danish and
English claims were in some sort reconciled and at Oxford Harold
Harefoot the son of Cnut died in March 1040. The place indeed was
fatal to kings for St. Frideswyde in her anger against King Algar
left her curse on it. Just as the old Irish kings were forbidden by
their customs to do this or that to cross a certain moor on May
morning or to listen to the winnowing of the night-fowl's wings in
the dusk above the lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned to
enter Oxford and to come within the walls of Frideswyde the maiden.
Harold died there as we have seen but there he was not buried. His
body was laid at Westminster where it could not rest for his
enemies dug it up and cast it forth upon the fens or threw it into
the river. Many years later when Henry III. entered Oxford not
without fear the curse of Frideswyde lighted also upon him. He came
in 1263 with Edward the prince and misfortune fell upon him so
that his barons defeated and took him prisoner at the battle of
Lewes. The chronicler of Oseney Abbey mentions his contempt of
superstitions and how he alone of English kings entered the city:
"Quod nullus rex attemptavit a tempore Regis Algari" an error for
Harold attemptavit and died. When Edward I. was king he was less
audacious than his father and in 1275 he rode up to the East Gate
and turned his horse's head about and sought a lodging outside the
town reflexis habenis equitans extra moenia aulam regiain in
suburbio positam introivit. In 1280 however he seems to have
plucked up courage and attended a Chapter of Dominicans in Oxford.
The last of the meetings between North and South was held at Oxford
in October 1065. "In urle quae famoso nomine Oxnaford nuncupatur"
to quote a document of Cnut's. (Cod. Dipl. DCCXLVI. in 1042.) There
the Northumbrian rebels met Harold in the last days of Edward the
Confessor. With this meeting we leave that Oxford before the
Conquest of which possibly not one stone or one rafter remains.
We look back through eight hundred years on a city rich enough it
seems and powerful and we see the narrow streets full of armed
bands of men--men that wear the cognisance of the horse or of the
raven that carry short swords and are quick to draw them; men that
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