Insight 2017

5
THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE LIBRARY INSIGHT
direct way, since several of the tenements whose proprietors
were charged with wall-duty in a writ of 1227 must have taken
shape after Queen’s Lane assumed its present dog-legged form.
A more straightforward explanation would be that these
tenements do not relate to the Anglo-Saxon system of wallmaintenance
at all, but rather to a twelfth-century extension of
it. On that view, one might envisage an agreement whereby the
Crown allowed the extended walls to be built, on condition
that the burden of maintaining them was apportioned between
the tenants of the new house-plots that were thus enclosed and
protected.
Perhaps, then, there is something to be said for a new
hypothesis: that the eastern walled circuit in its developed
form, and the planned tenements inside it, were laid out
together at a date not long before the abandonment of the
settlement on the Provost’s Garden site by the 1150s. In Henry
I’s reign Oxford was already recovering from its post-Conquest
depression, and growing fast. 17 Another obvious possibility is
that the Anarchy years of 1139-53 (which despite the political
chaos were an era of strong economic growth. 18 ) created a
compelling incentive to defend the valuable church of St Peter,
and the now densely-settled zone between it and the city wall.
It would have helped that the two powerful magnates with a
direct interest in this part of eastern Oxford and Holywell
manor were Angevin supporters, well-placed at court: Henry
d’Oilly, the heir of Robert d’Oilly who had held St Peter’s
church and Holywell in 1086, and Henry of Oxford, Matilda’s
local henchman, who built a massive Romanesque house in the
west of the city. 19 The 1153-4 charter mentioned above is an
(ultimately ineffectual) grant by Henry d’Oilly to Oseney Abbey
of St Peter’s church, which at that point was firmly in the
clutches of John of Oxford, Henry of Oxford’s son and future
bishop of Norwich. 20 John may well have been responsible for
the sumptuous Romanesque rebuilding of the church that still
largely survives (now St Edmund Hall library), and he certainly
enjoyed a large and apparently complex residence west of St
Peter’s churchyard, occupying what is now the eastern half of
the Back Quad at Queen’s. 21 If the extension of the walls and
the replanning of the area inside them happened in, say, the
1140s, it is almost certain that the two Henrys were involved in
one way or another.
At this point we need to take a step back, and consider the
status and fortunes of St Peter’s church: it may have been the
single most important influence on the urban developments to
its west. Although the early ecclesiastical heart of Oxford was
certainly St Frideswide’s, there is persuasive circumstantial
evidence that St Peter’s-in-the-East was also an Anglo-Saxon
monastic complex, possibly one of a series established on the
peripheries of Mercian centres by King Alfred’s daughter
Æthelflaed. 22 During the tenth to twelfth centuries, it was often
the fate of formerly independent minsters to be annexed as
essentially the private property of secular and ecclesiastical
magnates. Domesday Book (which unfortunately says nothing
here about pre-Conquest arrangements) makes it clear that this
had happened to St Peter’s by 1086: both the church and its
manor of Holywell were controlled by the Norman baron
Robert d’Oilly. 23 Its later twelfth-century status, as the personal
church and residence of a great curial ecclesiastic, looks equally
typical. The absence of early sources should not disguise from
us the former wealth and status of this church, which would
certainly have been surrounded by a substantial precinct and
associated buildings.
We have no evidence for what that complex was like (the
broken circle shown on Figure 2 is purely schematic), but it
could have included a significant part of what would become
the walled extension north of High Street. There are hints of it
in thirteenth-century deeds describing the tenements on the
easternmost part of the Queen’s site: Bishop John’s house
comprising a ‘messuage with houses, orchard(?) and the whole
courtyard … in the churchyard of St Peter’s’ (mesuagium cum
domibus et uirgulto et tota curia … in atrio Beati Petri), and the
tenement to its south ‘in St Peter’s churchyard’. 24 An odd
feature of these descriptions is that they ignore the intervening
Queen’s Lane, which certainly existed when they were written.
The explanation is presumably that they were carried over
from earlier documentation, dating from a time before the
replanning, when St Peter’s and its peripheral structures
dominated the local landscape.
If we take another step backwards, that perspective helps to
set the early eleventh-century occupation in context. If the
Queen’s site was suburban in the sense that it was outside the
eastern rampart of the city, it was also suburban in the sense
that it developed on the periphery of an Anglo-Saxon minster:
many eleventh-century towns began as what an Alfred-period
translator (rendering Bede’s phrase urbana loca into Old
English) called ‘minster-places’. 25 This was therefore a place of
a rather special and unusual kind, arising from the original
placement of St Peter’s some way outside the fort: a suburb, as
it were, twice over. And indeed it offers a classic illustration of
the kind of small-scale cultivation for urban consumption that
underlies so many places of this kind. The Domesday account
of Holywell manor in 1086 mentions 23 men ‘having little
gardens’ (hortulos habentes). 26 Smallholders of this kind, who may
have combined obligations to their lords with marketgardening
and craft production, were very common of the
edges of eleventh-century towns. 27 Maybe some of their wares
were sold from the roadside buildings now identified under the
Provost’s Garden.
Having said all that, there remains the problem – a big and
important one – of the New College bank. The feature
observed in 1993 is scarcely diagnostic physically: a city
defence constructed in the twelfth century would probably still
have been earthen, 28 and it is not obvious that the bank
material of a rampart built in, say, 1150 would look different
from one built in, say, 1000. However, Optically Stimulated
Luminescence (OSL) results just released point to the startling
conclusion that this feature, or parts of it, was constructed in
the eighth century. 29 This remarkable new evidence (for
immediate access to which I am deeply grateful to Ben Ford of
Oxford Archaeology) raises implications that cannot be
considered properly here, let alone answered. Possibly the
eighth-century earthwork was a linear bank – or even a
monastic enclosure around St Peter’s – that survived as a
relict landscape feature to be incorporated into the twelfthcentury
defences. It is hard to see it as an integral part of the