Insight 2017

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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
Michaelmas <strong>2017</strong> 6 Alfred-period fort; rather, that must have been built immediately west of some structure surviving from the period of Mercian control. At all events, the suburban character of the occupation around the year 1000 can scarcely be reconciled with the earthwork being a coherent barrier between town and countryside at that stage. For the moment this question must remain unresolved, but debate will certainly continue. The Anglo-Saxon landscape of the Queen’s site is very deeply buried: under the twelfth-century urban replanning, under the late medieval College buildings, and finally under their Baroque successors. There is no possibility of exploring it except by deep excavation, which is why it has remained so mysterious hitherto. Over the past decade, Queen’s has had the confidence and courage to augment its facilities with a new kitchen, lecture-room and library. That has been at the cost of considerable disruption, now happily behind us. An unexpected bonus along the way has been a significant contribution to understanding the origins and early growth of Oxford. Notes and references 1. R. Brown, Provost’s Garden, The Queen’s College, Oxford: Post- Excavation Assessment and Updated Project Design (unpublished client report, Oxford Archaeology, September 2016). 2. J. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Stroud, 1994), 52-4, 61-3, 87-92, 146-52; A. Dodd (ed.), Oxford Before the University (Oxford, 2003). 3. Julian Munby in Dodd (ed.), Oxford Before the University, 172-83. 4. Paul Booth in Dodd (ed.), Oxford Before the University, 183-6. 5. Julian Munby in Dodd (ed.), Oxford Before the University, 24-5, concluding that `the proposed eastern extension remains really quite difficult to reconcile with the archaeological evidence’. 6. J. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, 161. 7. A. Norton and J. Mumford, `Anglo-Saxon Pits and a Medieval Kitchen at The Queen’s College, Oxford’, Oxoniensia, 75 (2010), 165-217, at pp.177-9; S. Teague, A. Norton and A. Dodd, `Late Saxon, Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology at the Nun’s Garden, The Queen’s College, Oxford’, Oxoniensia, 80 (2015), 143 -85, at pp.147-8. 8. J. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, 162-4; Dodd, Oxford Before the University, 35-41. 9. J. Blair, Building Anglo-Saxon England (Princeton, 2018), Fig. 131. 10. Dodd, Oxford Before the University, 260, 397. 11. H.E. Salter, Survey of Oxford, I (Oxford Historical Soc. n.s.14, 1960), 160 (tenement NE 230); Cartulary of Oseney Abbey, ed. H.E. Salter, I (Oxford Historical Soc. 89, 1929), 269-71 12. Salter, Survey, I, 135-47 (tenements NE 173-95, especially 175, 177, 183, 190 with starting deeds no later than 1210). 13. Salter, Survey, I, 92-8 (tenements NE 131-6, especially 131 with a starting deed of c.1220). 14. Great Domesday Book fo. 158v; H.E. Salter, Facsimiles of Early Charters in Oxford Muniment Rooms (Oxford, 1929), No.73. 15. Great Domesday Book fo.154. 16. H.L. Turner, `The Mural Mansions of Oxford: Attempted Identifications’, Oxoniensia, 55 (1990), 73-9; cf. O. Creighton and R. Higham, Medieval Town Walls (Stroud, 2005), 39-40, 81, etc. 17. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, 177. 18. Here I cannot resist recalling that my predecessor, John Prestwich, made this point very powerfully in a lecture that I heard as an undergraduate, in about 1974. I hope he would have relished the thought that urban replanning from the Anarchy period lies directly under Queen’s. 19. J. Blair, `Frewin Hall, Oxford; a Norman Mansion and a Monastic College’, Oxoniensia, 43 (1978), 48-99, at pp.49-64. 20. Salter, Facsimiles of Early Charters, No. 73. 21. Salter, Survey, I, 152-3 (tenement NE 208); Cartulary of Oseney, I, 276-9. 22. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, 112-13. 23. Great Domesday Book fo. 158v. 24. Salter, Survey, I, 152-3 (tenements NE 208-9); Cartulary of Oseney, I, 276; Cartulary of the Hospital of St John the Baptist, ed. H.E. Salter, I (Oxford Hist. Soc. 66, 1914), 344. 25. J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), 330-41. 26. Great Domesday Book fo.158v. 27. C. Dyer ,`Towns and Cottages in Eleventh-Century England’, in H. Mayr-Harting and R.I. Moore (eds.), Studies in Medieval History Presented to R.H.C. Davis (London, 1985), 91-106; Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 340-1. 28. Cf. Creighton and Higham, Medieval Town Walls, 178-84. 29. Results communicated by Jean-Luc Schwenninger in July <strong>2017</strong>. Thanks also to David Radford for his help with this and other sites. John Blair is a Fellow in History here at The Queen’s College and Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology. He was appointed to his present position at Queen’s in 1981. Outside his academic duties, he maintains a long-standing involvement in practical archaeology, and in the worlds of building and landscape conservation. The New Library Project Paul Renton-Rose, Beard Construction For Amanda une 2015 saw the start of the work on site for the new J library project, it had taken years of preparations by the various architects & design teams and now, with the archaeology complete, it was time to start the excavation. This transformed the Provost’s Garden into a construction site and started the engineering process of the New Library. The design team had set the bar very high with a wall to wall excavation that had to be executed with great care & precision to fit the library into the garden area without disturbing the surrounding 1690’s library building, listed walls, not forgetting the reportedly 200-year-old wisteria and copper beech tree. Protection to the west side of the library facade was formed with a 5.5-metre-high screen made from steel supports, ply and Monoflex sheeting. The protection of the historic wall on the south elevation was completed and agreed with all parties so piling could commence. A temporary support for the 38-tonne piling machine required a designed reinforced piling mat of approximately 1000 tonne of stone, this was imported, constructed and plate tested before we allowed the piling to proceed. A strong and stable platform is essential to keeping the rig flat on the ground and not allow excessive movement in the mast. Supporting the ground and historic parts of the Grade I listed
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