The Little History of Oxfordshire

INTRODUCTION

In acceding to the request to compile a summary of the historical material on which the Early History of Oxford was based, I did not at the moment quite realise what I had undertaken.

James Parker, 1885

The apology quoted above was written in the preface to the new edition of James Parker’s Early History of Oxford, 727–1100. He had underestimated the time it would take to dig through the historical material, and was late getting his book to the publisher. Armed as I am with the internet’s bottomless pit and a huge database based on research from my previous Oxfordshire books, I have fewer excuses than Parker. But I know exactly how he felt.

In terms of its importance in the political, artistic, scientific and social history of Britain, Oxfordshire is equalled only by London. A lot of this is due to the magnetic pull of the university, which has tasted unfair riches of celebrity residents over the centuries. The history of Oxford is in many ways the history of England.

This is what makes it so challenging when considering the county as a whole – trying to balance the ogre of Oxford against the rest of Oxfordshire. So, my approach here has been to fight off Oxford as much as possible, knowing full well that the ogre will loom large without my help. The stories included here were chosen primarily for their entertainment value, punctuated with summaries of the background social and political upheavals that defined each era, to give the flow of history a coherence which, in reality, it most certainly never had.

Oxfordshire presents several faces to the world. It encompasses the Cotswolds, the Chilterns, the North Wessex Downs, ‘Banburyshire’ in the north, Oxford in the south, and a large section, centred on Abingdon, wrested from Berkshire in 1974. A large chunk of it was formerly a royal hunting forest, plonked like a decadent Eden between the rivers Evenlode and Windrush, smothering the land from Burford in Oxfordshire to Bernewood in Buckinghamshire. Most of it was lopped during the seventeenth-century Civil Wars, and the Enclosure Acts mopped up what was left – examples of the many and surprising ways in which history moulds the physical and moral landscape we take for granted.

A brief word about anachronism. I have used the name ‘Oxfordshire’ throughout, even when talking about pre-Anglo-Saxon history. The county didn’t exist before the tenth century AD, but I have grudgingly followed convention and applied the tag to the early bits too. The assertion that Romans, Catuvellauni, and even dinosaurs, gambolled through the thoroughfares of Oxfordshire is nonsense; but there are only so many times you can say things like ‘the part of the country currently known as Oxfordshire’ without losing patience, sanity and readers, in that order.

The timelessness of Oxford and Oxfordshire is just an illusion. They sometimes pretend to be academic and bucolic relics of a Golden Age, but in reality, the city and county have always been at the forefront of progress. For every thatched Cotswold stone cottage there is an office expanding the digital possibilities of modern life; for every former mill there is a Bicester Village designer brand outlet; and for every traditional Morris team there is The Next Big Thing playing in a pub near you (probably The Jericho Arms in Oxford).

All of which makes me think – why on earth would I ever want to live anywhere else?

Paul Sullivan, 2024

1

IN THE BEGINNING WAS …?

A history of Oxfordshire has to start somewhere. The historian in me says it should kick off with the earliest recorded mention of Oxford, in an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry from the year 912; or perhaps with the earliest human settlers more than a thousand years earlier.

However, the imaginary Richard Dawkins perched on my right shoulder disagrees. He says it should all start with the first mammals, or the dinosaurs. But then Stephen Hawking on my left shoulder insists that it should go back much further and begin with Big Bangs and meteorites. The Launton meteorite, specifically.

This lump of interstellar rock, born in our embryonic solar system at some point between the Big Bang and the formation of the earth, crashed to the ground in a garden at Launton, near Bicester, at 7.30 p.m. on 15 February 1830. According to a report in the Magazine of Natural History of 1831:

Its descent was accompanied with a most brilliant light, which was visible for many miles around, and attended with a triple explosion … A man named Thomas Marriot was passing near the garden at the moment, and states that it came rapidly towards him from the north-east, not perpendicularly but obliquely, appearing about the size of a cricket-ball; and that expecting it would strike him, he instinctively lowered his head to avoid it.

So, having satisfied the Hawking in me, I must now appease my inner Dawkins and make honourable mention of the region’s early habitats and wildlife.

Oxfordshire is rich in fossils, and was an important source of material for early scientists trying to determine the true nature of petrified shells and bones. In the north-west of the county Jurassic limestone, shale and sandstone forms the Cotswold hills, the origin of the famously golden-yellow Cotswold Stone that decorates many a town and village in these parts. Locally tagged seams include Banbury Marble, Stonesfield Slate and Forest Marble (named after Wychwood Forest), which has yielded a rich fossil harvest.

These relics caused headaches for seventeenth-century Robert Plot, first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Fossilised seashells found inland posed the obvious question: how did they come to be here in the rocks of Oxfordshire, so far from the sea?

Plot refused to believe that England could experience earthquakes sufficient to raise cockle beds to hill-top level. He also ruled out another popular theory of the time – that the Biblical Deluge, of Noah’s Ark fame, was responsible. If the Flood had been a gentle accumulation of water, Plot reasoned, it would not have evicted the shellfish from their sea beds and left them stranded on hills and mountains; and, if violent, it would have scattered the animals rather than leaving them in the neat, ordered beds he had observed. Crowded shellfish beds suggested that these were established colonies that would have needed far longer than the Flood’s forty days to become rooted.

Robert Plot had a couple of alternative theories. He suggested that urinous salts – i.e. fossilised puddles of urine – may have been involved in some deposits. But his chief theory was that fossils were formed at the beginning of Creation, when God was ‘dispersing the Seminal Virtue of Animals through the Universe’. When this divine outpouring hit water, it resulted in living shellfish; but if the creative juices hit ‘an improper Matrix’ such as earth, they produced shellfish-shaped inanimate stones.

OF DINOSAURS AND OTHER GIANTS

The grand matriarch of Oxfordshire wildlife is the Megalosaurus, a carnivore from the Middle Jurassic. Robert Plot, the man with the fossil theories mentioned above, had the first crack at identification. He examined a thigh bone, discovered at Cornwell near Oxford, and went against received opinion by rejecting the theory that it belonged to a Roman-era elephant. He suggested instead that it was evidence of an ancient race of humanoid giants.

The truth, finally nailed in the early 1800s, would have been as outrageous to Robert Plot as his giants theory seems to us. The bone belonged to a previously unsuspected group of enormous reptiles. When Oxford University canon William Buckland discovered further remains of the creature at Stonesfield, he named the animal Megalosaurus bucklandii. In 1842, Richard Owen, professor of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, placed Megalosaurus in a new class of animals – the dinosaurs.

Megalosaurus at Woodstock Museum. (Photo by Magdalena Sullivan)

Oxfordshire proved to be a hotspot for dinosaur finds. Remnants of all the following beasts can be viewed in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH). Cetiosaurus oxoniensis, translating as ‘Oxford whale lizard’, was a Brontosaurus-type beast, unearthed at Chipping Norton in 1825, and another at Kirtlington in 1860. Eustreptospondylus oxoniensis (‘Oxford well-turned vertebra’), belonged to the family that later produced the Tyrannosaurus rex. It was discovered in 1871 in a brick pit at Summertown in Oxford. Camptosaurus prestwichii, a member of the iguanodon family, came to light at a brick pit on Cumnor Hurst, south-west of Oxford, in 1880.

Ardley is the only place in Britain to have been given the status of Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on account of its dinosaur footprints. The 165-million-year-old tracks, embedded in the Jurassic limestone, were made by a Megalosaurus and a herd of Cetiosaurs. They were discovered in 1997, and the SSSI designation came in 2010, the Megalosaurus tracks having been carefully removed and reinstalled at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock in 2009. There are also casts of the Ardley tracks on the front lawn of the OUMNH.

Megalosaurus was William Buckland’s first scalp in a personal Oxfordshire prehistoric portfolio that went on to include the flying reptile Rhamphorynchus bucklandii, and the Jurassic mammal Phascolotherium bucklandii, also known as the Stonesfield Mammal, after the village quarry where it was discovered. Phascolotherium was a night-hunter, resembling the modern-day possum. It appears to be a common ancestor of all types of mammal found on earth today.

THE PREHISTORIC UNIVERSITY

That’s Hawking and Dawkins dealt with. Meanwhile, the real history of Oxfordshire begins with the first people. And yet we search in vain for a tidy human beginning, an Adam-and-Eve-type origins story.

It’s therefore tempting to fall into the comforting arms of folklore. Writing nearly 900 years before viral Fake News came along to undermine our efforts to understand the world around us, historian Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote an epic British pseudo-history in which King Brutus, grandson of King Priam of Troy, lands on the shores of a Giant-inhabited island around 1100 BC, polishes off its small population, and renames it Britain. Brutus founds a university at Lechlade, which, three generations later, is relocated to the city of Caer Memphric, aka Oxford.

This city was founded by King Mempricius. He was an out and out rotter, Oxford’s original villain, spurning his queen for a string of male lovers and killing anyone who got in his way. Thank goodness, then, that he was eaten by wolves during a badly planned hunting trip, at some point around 1010 BC.

All of which, sadly can be written off as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s attempt to give his employers at Oxford University an untouchable pedigree. He was simply telling them what they wanted to hear – that Oxford’s place at the heart of academia went further back than any other city’s.

So, folklore only offers brief, romantic respite from the pressing issue of where Oxfordshire’s human history begins. Instead, as my proper starting point, I’m turning to a far more grounded and inspiring Oxfordshire origin, one that does away with the need for meteorites, dinosaurs, fossils and folklore.

So, in the beginning there was …

THE RIDGEWAY AND THE ICKNIELD WAY

This was the first thoroughfare of the region, a natural highway that makes use of the chalk escarpment of the Chilterns, the M40 of its day. It was the Ridgeway that brought people to, from and through this portion of the island – an inroad into the human story.

With the final meltdown of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, the chalk ridge would have been poking up from the damp valleys, as inviting as a sturdy bridge over a muddy river. If you were heading this way, the Ridgeway was the only road in the county, being a thoroughfare, a vantage point, and a comforting certainty in a world of wilderness and unknowns. It was also the only route on which you could keep your feet dry at all times of the year.

The ancient pathway follows the chalk ridge in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It runs parallel to part of a prehistoric routeway called the Icknield Way, named after the British tribe the Iceni. This sits lower down on the north side of the chalk escarpment, part of a road that runs for over 360 miles from Lyme Regis in Dorset to Hunstanton in Norfolk. Quite why the Icknield Way avoids the ready-made path on the chalk ridge is a mystery.

Transport through the ages: view of the M40 from the Ridgeway.

Natural historian Robert Plot wrote in 1677:

It is called by its old name at very many places, lkenildway, to this very day. Some indeed call it lcknil, some Acknil, others Hackney, and some again Hackington, but all intend the very same way, that stretches itself in this County from North-east to South-west; coming into it (out of Bucks) at the Parish of Chinnor, and going out again over the Thames (into Berks) at the Parish of Goring … it passes through no town or village in the county, but only Goring; nor does it (as I hear) scarce anywhere else, for which reason ’tis much used by stealers of cattle.

It was this road that brought people to this part of the world in the first place, a soon as the ice receded. The driving force behind early settlement was probably flint. Most of Oxfordshire is just a stone’s throw – preferably one shaped into an axe- or arrow-head – from abundant supplies; and the mother of all flint supplies lay at the northern end of the Icknield Way, at Grimes Graves in Norfolk.

Oxfordshire’s chief Palaeolithic flints – the earliest human litter in the area – have been unearthed at Rotherfield Peppard, Berinsfield, Iffley, Crowmarsh, Benson, Ewelme, Stanton Harcourt, Cassington, Goring, and Wolvercote and Osney in Oxford. See how long you can look at them in their Ashmolean and Woodstock Museum of Oxfordshire display cases before glazing over.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW STONE AGE

Neolithic (New Stone Age) settlers displaced the aboriginal peoples of the area more than 5,000 years ago. They built the first permanent settlements and followed an agricultural rather than hunter-gatherer way of life (including the earliest crops, livestock and extensive forest clearance). They also made pots in rudimentary kilns, and expanded on the tool portfolio by adding wood, bone and other rocks to the traditional all-purpose flint.

The Neolithic settlers erected monoliths and stone circles such as the Rollright Stones and The Devil’s Quoits near Stanton Harcourt, and engineered high-tech burials involving long barrows. The Neolithic long barrow checklist includes one of the finest in the island – Wayland’s Smithy near Ashbury. There are other examples in the county – although none as impressive as Wayland’s – including one at Shipton and a reconstruction at Ascott-under-Wychwood.

This all predates the earliest ‘Celtic’ settlers of the Iron Age. It’s possible that we have a fleeting glimpse of these earlier peoples in fairy stories of strong, short-statured, loyal but vengeful goblins who help around the house and farm but easily take offence, at which point they become vengeful monsters. In Oxfordshire folklore the fairy presence is limited to a few desultory sightings at Neolithic monuments such as Wayland’s Smithy and the Rollright Stones, where they were last glimpsed in the late nineteenth century. (The association is celebrated with a wooden sculpture of three dancing fairies, erected at Rollright in 2017 by sculptors David and Adam Gosling. Like the original fairies, the sculpture is temporary, but should withstand the elements long enough for visitors to get a glimpse within half a dozen years of this book’s publication date.)

In the 1960s fourteen bodies were unearthed at Wayland’s Smithy. Recently dated to the mid-fourth century BC, they appear to be the remains of war victims. Skewered by arrows, dismembered by dogs or wild animals, they were later gathered up and buried at the site. This all suggests that the Neolithic era was every bit as violent as the ages that followed.

THE STORY OF TRACING BEAKERS

At some point between 2000 and 1500 BC, settlers from