THE BARGES.
[CHAPTER II.]
OXFORD TO ABINGDON.
Oxford, from the Upper River; the New Town—The Courses of the River, from Medley Weir to Folly Bridge—The Houses of the Regulars and Friars—The University and Parish Churches—The Halls and Colleges of the Seculars, from the Thirteenth Century to the Reformation—Jacobean Oxford—Classic Oxford—Convenient Oxford—The Architectural Revival—The Undergraduate Revival—The River below Folly Bridge, and the Invention of Rowing—The Navigation Shape of the River—Floods—The Barges—Iffley—Littlemore—Kennington—Radley—Sandford—Nuneham.
THE traveller down stream, who looks for Oxford across the flats of Port Meadow, is aware of a large town, dusky red in colour, skirted by a canal and a railway, and dominated by the slim brick bell-tower of a church, one of the pangs of the architectural renaissance. There, beyond the dingy quarter called Jericho, one may stray through many streets of villas in the Middle Victorian taste, by flower-beds gay with the geranium and calceolaria. Little is wanting that would be found in St. John’s Wood or West Kensington. For this is, in late after-growth, that town of Oxford that meant to be like London, and was like London, before the University came to interfere. It had its Norman castle, its Gild Merchant, its charter, as good as those of London. It was a place where Parliaments met. It had a palace of the kings, and a rich Jewry, and a great mind to trade. But the University sprang up and choked these things. London never had a real University, but only colleges for students of Common Law, and so flourished. In Oxford the town went under, and the University was everything. The “nations” came, and after long war reduced the natives to servitude. But the wheel has turned. The down-trodden race is quickly hiding the University with its new towns of houses and churches, and the very University has lost the monastic rule that allowed its members to camp as an alien garrison in the place. Now they are surely being wrought into the fabric of the town.