THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.
To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is best known as the church of the University, and the church of St. Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless observer some idea of the town's greatness before University life began, is known to most visitors simply as Christchurch Chapel. In all outer seeming Oxford appears a mere assemblage of indifferent streets that have grown out of the needs of the University, and this impression is heightened by its commercial unimportance. The town has no manufacture or trade. It is not even, like Cambridge, a great agricultural centre. Whatever importance it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by the almost total cessation of river navigation. Its very soil is in large measure in academical hands. As a municipality it seems to exist only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police. The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body which reigned supreme within its walls.
Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation. Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor, Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older authority of the Mayor.
The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left its mark not on the town only but on the very constitution and character of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then, when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank of English municipalities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The little monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of Ælfred. But though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a political importance under Æthelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence. But the men themselves are dim to us. Their town-meeting, their Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fashion as the Freeman's Common Hall; their town-mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or judging and law-making in their busting, their merchant guild regulating trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or honey or marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way.
Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the Norman within its walls. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral: the piety of the Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the city and founded within their new castle walls the church of the canons of St. George.
But Oxford does more than illustrate this outburst of industrial effort; it does something towards explaining its cause. The most characteristic result of the Conquest was planted in the very heart of the town in the settlement of the Jew. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a town within a town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its peculiar commerce, its peculiar dress. The policy of our foreign kings secured each Hebrew settlement from the common taxation, the common justice, the common obligations of Englishmen. No city bailiff could penetrate into the square of little streets which lay behind the present Town-hall; the Church itself was powerless against the synagogue that rose in haughty rivalry beside the cloister of St. Frideswide. The picture which Scott has given us in 'Ivanhoe' of Aaron of York, timid, silent, crouching under oppression, accurately as it represents our modern notions of the position of his race during the Middle Ages, is far from being borne out by historical fact. In England at least the attitude of the Jew is almost to the end an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. His extortion was sheltered from the common law. His bonds were kept under the royal seal. A royal commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence against these "chattels" of the king. The thunders of the Church broke vainly on the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. In a well-known story of Eadmer's the Red King actually forbids the conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith: it was a poor exchange which would have robbed him of a valuable property and given him only a subject.
At Oxford the attitude of the Jewry towards the national religion showed a marked consciousness of this royal protection. Prior Philip of St. Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name of "Deus-cum-crescat," who stood at his door as the procession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with "Deus-cum-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and snatching the crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.