erections of its Norman earls. But a result of his presence, which bore
more directly on the future of the town, was seen in the remarkable
developement of its domestic architecture. To the wealth of the Jew, to
his need of protection against sudden outbursts of popular passion, very
probably to the greater refinement of his social life, England owes the
introduction of stone houses. Tradition attributes almost every instance
of the earliest stone buildings of a domestic character to the Jew; and
where the tradition can be tested, as at Bury St. Edmunds or Lincoln, it
has proved to be in accordance with the facts. In Oxford nearly all the
larger dwelling-houses which were subsequently converted into halls bore
traces of their Jewish origin in their names, such as Moysey's Hall,
Lombards', Jacob's Hall. It is a striking proof of the superiority of
the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses around them that each of
the successive town-halls of the borough had, before their expulsion,
been houses of Jews. Such houses were abundant in the town, not merely
in the purely Jewish quarter on Carfax but in the lesser Jewry which was
scattered over the parish of St. Aldate; and we can hardly doubt that
this abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of
the causes which drew teachers and students within its walls.
The same great event which flung down the Jewish settlement in the very
heart of the English town bounded it to the west by the castle and the
abbey of the conquerors. Oxford stood first on the line of great
fortresses which, passing by Wallingford and Windsor to the Tower of
London, guarded the course of the Thames. Its castellan, Robert D'Oilly,
had followed William from Normandy and had fought by his side at Senlac.
Oxfordshire was committed by the Conqueror to his charge; and he seems
to have ruled it in rude, soldierly fashion, enforcing order, heaping up
riches, tripling the taxation of the town, pillaging without scruple the
older religious houses of the neighbourhood. It was only by ruthless
exaction such as this that the work which William had set him to do
could be done. Money was needed above all for the great fortress which
held the town. The new castle rose on the eastern bank of the Thames,
broken here into a number of small streamlets, one of which served as
the deep moat which encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the
wide castle-court; to the north of it on a lofty mound rose the great
keep; to the west the one tower which remains, the tower of St. George,
frowned over the river and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress
lay the Bailly, a space cleared by the merciless policy of the
castellan, with the church of St. Peter le Bailly which still marks its
extent.
The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the Church as on the
townsmen. Outside the town lay a meadow belonging to the Abbey of
Abingdon, which seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his
garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the Abbey; he had wiled away
one of its finest manors from its Abbot Athelm; but his seizure of the
meadow beside Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day they
threw themselves weeping before the altar of the two English saints
whose names were linked to the older glories of their house. But while
they invoked the vengeance of Dunstan and AEthelwold on their plunderer,
the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. At last Robert
dreamt that he stood in a vast court, one of a crowd of nobles gathered
round a throne whereon sate a lady passing fair. Before her knelt two
brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their mead and pointing
out the castellan as the robber. The lady bade Robert be seized, and two
youths hurried him away to the field itself, seated him on the ground,
piled burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed haybands in his face,
and set fire to his beard. The earl woke trembling at the divine
discipline; he at once took boat for Abingdon, and restored to the monks
the meadow he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by the
restitution of his plunder, and he returned to set about the restoration
of the ruined churches within and without the walls of Oxford. The tower
of St. Michael, the doorway of St. Ebbe, the chancel arch of Holywell,
the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are fragments of the
work done by Robert and his house. But the great monument of the
devotion of the D'Oillys rose beneath the walls of their castle.
Robert, a nephew of the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine
of Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the English of Leland.
"Edith used to walke out of Oxford Castelle with her gentlewomen to
solace, and that oftentymes where yn a certen place in a tree, as often
as she cam, a certain pyes used to gather to it, and ther to chattre,
and as it were to spek on to her, Edyth much mervelyng at this matter,
and was sumtyme sore ferid by it as by a wonder." Radulf, a canon of St.
Frideswide's, was consulted on the marvel, and his counsel ended in the
erection of the priory of Osney beneath the walls of the castle. The
foundation of the D'Oillys became one of the wealthiest and largest of
the English abbeys; but of its vast church and lordly abbot's house, the
great quadrangle of its cloisters, the almshouses without its gate, the
pleasant walks shaded with stately elms beside the river, not a trace
remains. Its bells alone were saved at the Dissolution by their transfer
to Christchurch.
The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys was tested in the
struggle between Stephen and the Empress. Driven from London by a rising
of its burghers at the very moment when the crown seemed within her
grasp, Maud took refuge at Oxford. In the succeeding year Stephen found
himself strong enough to attack his rival in her stronghold; his knights
swam the river, fell hotly on the garrison which had sallied without the
walls to meet them, chased them through the gates, and rushed pell-mell
with the fugitives into the city. Houses were burnt and the Jewry
sacked; the Jews, if tradition is to be trusted, were forced to raise
against the castle the work that still bears the name of "Jews' Mount";
but the strength of its walls foiled the efforts of the besiegers, and
the attack died into a close blockade. Maud was however in Stephen's
grasp, and neither the loss of other fortresses nor the rigour of the
winter could tear the king from his prey. Despairing of relief the
Empress at last resolved to break through the enemy's lines. Every
stream was frozen and the earth covered with snow, when clad in white
and with three knights in white garments as her attendants Maud passed
unobserved through the outposts, crossed the Thames upon the ice, and
made her way to Abingdon and the fortress of Wallingford.
With the surrender which followed the military history of Oxford ceases
till the Great Rebellion. Its political history had still to attain its
highest reach in the Parliament of De Montfort. The great assemblies
held at Oxford under Cnut, Stephen, and Henry III., are each memorable
in their way. With the first closed the struggle between Englishman and
Dane, with the second closed the conquest of the Norman, with the third
began the regular progress of constitutional liberty. The position of
the town, on the border between the England that remained to the
West-Saxon kings and the England that had become the "Danelagh" of their
northern assailants, had from the first pointed it out as the place
where a union between Dane and Englishman could best be brought about.
The first attempt was foiled by the savage treachery of AEthelred the
Unready. The death of Swegen and the return of Cnut to Denmark left an
opening for a reconciliation, and Englishmen and Danes gathered at
Oxford round the king. But all hope was foiled by the assassination of
the Lawmen of the Seven Danish Boroughs, Sigeferth and Morcar, who fell
at a banquet by the hand of the minister Eadric, while their followers
threw themselves into the tower of St. Frideswide and perished in the
flames that consumed it. The overthrow of the English monarchy avenged
the treason. But Cnut was of nobler stuff than AEthelred, and his
conquest of the realm was followed by the gathering of a new gemote at
Oxford to resume the work of reconciliation which Eadric had
interrupted. Englishman and Dane agreed to live together as one people
under Eadgar's Law, and the wise government of the King completed in the
long years of his reign the task of national fusion. The conquest of
William set two peoples a second time face to face upon the same soil,
and it was again at Oxford that by his solemn acceptance and
promulgation of the Charter of Henry I. in solemn parliament Stephen
closed the period of military tyranny, and began the union of Norman and
Englishman into a single people. These two great acts of national
reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous assembly
which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In
the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort
to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties.
Followed by long trains of men in arms and sworn together by pledges of
mutual fidelity, they wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which,
frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of our constitutional
system. On the "Provisions of Oxford" followed the regular
establishment of parliamentary representation and power, of a popular
and responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-government.
From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, it is time to turn
back to the humbler annals of the town itself. The first event that
lifts it into historic prominence is its league with London. The
"bargemen" of the borough seem to have already existed before the
Conquest, and to have been closely united from the first with the more
powerful guild, the "boatmen" or "merchants" of the capital. In both
cases it is probable that the bodies bearing this name represented what
in later language was known as the merchant guild of the town; the
original association, that is, of its principal traders for purposes of
mutual protection, of commerce, and of self-government. Royal
recognition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford from the
time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, islands, pastures already
belonged to it, and amongst them the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead"
so familiar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow,
and which still remains the property of the freemen of the town. The
connection between the two cities and their guilds was primarily one of
traffic. Prior even to the Conquest, "in the time of King Eadward and
Abbot Ordric," the channel of the river running beneath the walls of the
Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up "that boats could scarce pass as
far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London
and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the
south of his church, the two cities engaging that each barge should pay
a toll of a hundred herrings on its passage during Lent. But the union
soon took a constitutional form. The earliest charter of the capital
which remains in detail is that of Henry I., and from the charter of his
grandson we find a similar date assigned to the liberties of Oxford. The
customs and exemptions of its burghers are granted by Henry II., "as
ever they enjoyed them in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in
like manner as my citizens of London hold them." This identity of
municipal privileges is of course common to many other boroughs, for the
charter of London became the model for half the charters of the kingdom;
what is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which in Henry II.'s time
already linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest
about judgment in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered
to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatever the
citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right."
The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were assimilated
by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they
shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of
London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of
one and the same custom, law, and liberty."
In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate
than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of
London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general
freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the
city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But
it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed
with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a
coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London
and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to
have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of
half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the
town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students
huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or
dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly
discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power
of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to
penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was
narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The
precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded
it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little
church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The
Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern
horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the
bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to
the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town,
lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very
heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various
streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor
service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst
these various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the
more intense that it was so closely cabined and confined.
It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared
within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The
twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic
philosophy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the age of a
great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rhone and
the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival
of individual, human life in the industrial masses of the feudal world
that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of
eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa
from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France
to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a
milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and
political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet townships of
Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like
the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no
foreign Caesar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a
king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's
peace shielded them from that terrible oppression of the mediaeval
baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life
or death. The peculiarity of municipal life in fact in England is that
instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life
around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with
that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within
the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went
with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his
burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his
tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural
tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In township or manor
alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice,
commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to
furnish in time of war. The progress of municipal freedom, like that of
national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of
popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few
great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that wrested liberty from
the French seigneur or the century of warfare that broke the power of
the Caesars in the plain of the Po.
Much indeed that Italy or France had to win by the sword was already the
heritage of every English freeman within walls or without. The common
assembly in which their own public affairs were discussed and decided,
the borough-mote to which every burgher was summoned by the town-bell
swinging out of the town-tower, had descended by traditional usage from
the customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The close
association of the burghers in the sworn brotherhood of the guild was a
Teutonic custom of immemorial antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper
round the common fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the guild
cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neighbourhood that of loyal
association, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid. The regulation of
internal trade, all lesser forms of civil jurisdiction, fell quietly
and without a struggle into the hands of the merchant guild. The rest
of their freedom was bought with honest cash. The sale of charters
brought money to the royal treasury, exhausted by Norman wars, by the
herd of mercenaries, by Crusades, by the struggle with France. The towns
bought first the commutation of the uncertain charges to which they were
subject at the royal will for a fixed annual rent. Their purchase of the
right of internal justice followed. Last came the privilege of electing
their own magistrates, of enjoying complete self-government. Oxford had
already passed through the earlier steps of this emancipation before the
conquest of the Norman. Her citizens assembled in their Portmannimote,
their free self-ruling assembly. Their merchant-guild leagued with that
of London. Their dues to the Crown are assessed in Domesday at a fixed
sum of honey and coin. The charter of Henry II. marks the acquisition by
Oxford, probably at a far earlier date, of judicial and commercial
freedom. Liberty of external commerce was given by the exception of its
citizens from toll on the king's lands; the decision of either political
or judicial affairs was left to their borough-mote. The highest point of
municipal independence was reached when the Charter of John substituted
a mayor of their own choosing for the mere bailiff of the Crown.
It is hard in dry constitutional details such as these to realize the
quick pulse of popular life that stirred such a community as Oxford.
Only a few names, of street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure
records, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thirteenth
century. The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the
"Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four roads meet, was the centre of the
city's life. The Town-mote was held in its church yard. Justice was
administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the
"penniless bench" of later times, without its eastern wall. Its bell
summoned the burghers to counsel or to arms. Around the church lay the
trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to
the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn
market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the
stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to
the castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay a nest of
huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue and traversed from time to
time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew, whose burying-place lay far
away to the eastward on the site of the present Botanic Garden. Soldiers
from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of
Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims
wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide. It was a rough
time, and frays were common enough,--now the sack of a Jew's house, now
burgher drawing knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young student
lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town
seemed well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to
his door, the summons of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in
hand and banners flying to enforce the king's peace. Order and freedom
seemed absolutely secure, and there was no sign which threatened that
century of disorder, of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which
humbled the municipal freedom of Oxford to the dust.
THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.
For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption
from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along
the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of
a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire
through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is,
besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from
the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne.
There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to
the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south.
There is the same contrast in an ethnological point of view, for one is
traversing the watershed that parts two different races, and enough of
difference still remains in dialect and manner to sever the Acquitanian
from the Frank. And historically every day brings one across some
castle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere name in the pages
of Lingard or Sismondi, but which one actual glimpse changes into a
living fact. There are few tracts of country indeed where the historical
interest ranges equally over so long a space of time. The river which
was the "revolutionary torrent" of Carrier had been the highway for the
Northmen into the heart of Carolingian France. Saumur blends the tenth
century and the sixteenth together in the names of Gelduin and Du
Plessis; Chinon brings into contact the age of the Plantagenets and the
age of Joan of Arc. From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to
the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La Vendee there is a
continuous chain of historic event in these central provinces. Every
land has its pet periods of history, and the brilliant chapters of M.
Michelet are hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identifies
the splendour and infamy of the Renascence with the Loire. Blois,
Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the magnificence of their ruin the
very spirit of Catherine de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers.
To Englishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a greater
charm. Nothing clears one's ideas about the character of the Angevin
rule, the rule of Henry II. or Richard or John, so thoroughly as a
stroll through Anjou.