Insight 2017

Michaelmas 2017 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