Insight 2017

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3 THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE LIBRARY INSIGHT Figure 1 show that the internal layout did not come to resemble the rectilinearity of the late Anglo-Saxon core to the west until after the Norman Conquest. The discovery therefore casts serious doubt on the hypothesis that the eastern half of the city was part of the original Alfredian plan, and (setting aside for the moment the problem of the New College bank) it supports the earlier view that this was a relatively late extension, enclosing organic suburban settlement. The newly-found lane should be seen in relation to Catte Street (the eastern side of Radcliffe Square), where pre-Conquest road-metalling of similar appearance was observed in 1980. 10 Together, these lanes now look like a ‘bypass system’, to channel north-to-south and north-to-east flows of traffic from the Banbury road down Parks Road, and then around the outside of the Alfred-period fortress. Whereas Catte Street presumably led on southwards to a Thames ford, the lane now discovered under Queen’s would have passed the north-east corner of the fort and then made for Magdalen Bridge. When the eastern defences were built (or remodelled as a continuous circuit), the two lanes would have assumed a new character as components of the intramural street-plan. Their northern ends diverged just inside a new gate – Smith Gate – giving access to the city from Parks Road. Whereas Catte Street lost its function as a through-route (it was cut short at Merton Street and then the city wall to the south), the lane across the Queen’s site would have remained the most direct route from Smith Gate to the new East Gate. In other words, it was an earlier incarnation of Queen’s Lane: the present configuration of sharp-angled bends – so familiar (and at times so tiresome) to all members of the College – must have been planned to accommodate blocks of tenements in broad conformity with the rectilinear layout of the original nucleus and the extended walls. When did that happen? Queen’s Lane had assumed its present configuration by c.1240, when it was known as ‘Thorald the Tawyer’s Lane’. 11 The replanning must, however, have
Michaelmas <strong>2017</strong> 4 occurred by c.1210 at the latest, since some individual tenements in the blocks facing the High Street (under the main front of Queen’s and the shops east of the Lane entrance), 12 and the block facing Catte Street (under Hertford College), have sets of deeds starting around or just after that date: 13 the lane must have been diverted before those tenements were laid out. Oxford has a great wealth of medieval deeds, but documentation at the level of individual tenements is essentially post-1200: the fact that the documented properties were evidently well-established when their deeds start pushes the replanning episode back into the twelfth century. That is of course consistent with the excavated evidence that the original lane was disused, and being cut by pits, no later than c.1150. There is a likely connection, though not a necessary one, between the building of the eastern walls (in their developed form of a continuous circuit) and the tenemental replanning. It is in theory quite possible that after the walls were built, the diagonal lane inside them – now entered at its two ends from Smith Gate and East Gate – remained in use for decades or even generations. Alternatively, the walls and the tenementseries that they enclosed could have been created in a single, comprehensive town planning exercise. It is normally assumed that the walls existed at least by the 1080s, but even that is far from clear. Both in Domesday Book, and in the next document that mentions it (a charter of 1153-4), the topographical status of St Peter’s-in-the-East church is left frustratingly ambiguous : ‘St Peter’s church of Oxford’, rather than ‘in Oxford’. 14 Even the charter’s description of it as ‘near the East Gate’ (ecclesia Sancti Petri de Oxenefordia que sita est iuxta portam de est) is not conclusive, since that might refer either to the second East Gate (150 metres south-eastwards) or to the putative original one (250 metres south-westwards). A different approach to this problem concerns the so-called ‘mural mansions’: the special group of tenements that, according to Domesday Book, ‘were free in King Edward [the Confessor]’s time of all customary obligations except armyservice and repairing the wall’. 15 While the pre-Conquest origins of the system are thus certain, Hilary Turner’s topographical analysis in 1990 showed that the ‘mural mansions’ capable of being located on the ground concentrated heavily in the north-east part of the developed city, east of Radcliffe Square and north of High Street. 16 That cannot reflect late Anglo-Saxon arrangements in any simple or Figure 2
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Insight 2017

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