Oxford and Its Story

by Cecil Headlam

of the city’s life and represents the spirit of municipal liberty which animated her citizens, and the progress of their municipal freedom.

The bell which swung in Carfax Tower summoned the common assembly to discuss and to decide their own public affairs and to elect their own mayor. And this town-mote of burghers, freemen within the walls, who held their rights as burghers by virtue of their tenure of ground on which their tenement stood, met in Carfax Churchyard. Justice was administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the “penniless bench”[22] of later times, without its eastern wall. And around the church lay the trade guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment.

Carfax Church, with all its significance of municipal life, stands at the top of High Street, the most beautiful street in the world. Still, by virtue of the splendid sweep of its curve comparable only to the Grand Canal of Venice or the bend of Windermere, and by virtue of the noble grouping of its varied buildings, the most beautiful street in the world; in spite of modern tramways and the ludicrous dome of the Shelley Memorial, “a thing resembling a goose pye,” as Swift wrote of Sir John Vanburgh’s house in Whitehall; in spite of the disquieting ornamentation of Brasenose new buildings and the new schools; in spite even of the unspeakably vulgar and pretentious façade of Lloyd’s Bank, a gross, advertising abomination of unexampled ugliness and impertinence, which has done all that was possible to ruin the first view of this street of streets. Let us leave it behind us with a shudder and pass down the High till we find on our left, at what was once the end of “Schools Street,” the lovely twisted columns of the porch which forms the modern entrance to S. Mary’s Church.

What Carfax was to the municipal life of Oxford, S. Mary’s was to the University. It was the centre of the academical and ecclesiastical life of the place. And the bell which swung in S. Mary’s tower summoned the students of the University sometimes to take part in learned disputations among themselves, sometimes to fight the citizens of the town.

Here then, between the Churches of S. Martin and S. Mary, the life of this mediæval University town ebbed and flowed. In the narrow, ill-paved, dirty streets, streets that were mere winding passages, from which the light of day was almost excluded by the overhanging tops of the irregular houses, crowded a motley throng. The country folks filled the centre of the streets with their carts and strings of pack-horses; at the sides, standing beneath the signs of their calling, which projected from their houses, citizens in varied garb plied their trades, chaffering with the manciples, but always keeping their bow-strings taut, ready to promote a riot by pelting a scholar with offal from the butchers’ stall, and prompt to draw their knives at a moment’s notice. To and fro among the stalls moved Jews in their yellow gaberdines; black Benedictines and white Cistercians; Friars black, white and grey; men-at-arms from the Castle, and flocks of lads who had entered some grammar school or religious house to pass the first stage of the University course. Here passed a group of ragged, gaunt, yellow-visaged sophisters, returning peacefully from lectures to their inns, but with their “bastards” or daggers, as well as their leather pouches, at their waists. Here a knot of students, fantastically attired in many-coloured garments, whose tonsure was the only sign of their clerkly character, wearing beards, long hair, furred cloaks, and shoes chequered with red and green, paraded the thoroughfare, heated with wine from the feast of some determining bachelor. Here a line of servants, carrying the books of scholars or doctors to the schools, or there a procession of colleagues escorting to the grave the body of some master, and bearing before the corpse a silver cross, threaded the throng. Here hurried a bachelor in his cape, a new master in