How do you map a medieval town? A seemingly simple question but one which, when your brain starts churning it over, seems fraught with challenges. Modern cartography maps standing features (even street layouts) to give a decent impression but if we want to peel back the layers of history to present in graphic form an authoritative (if never definitive) and meaningful view of the development of urban settlements and communities, restoring lost buildings and landscapes, what sources might we use and what might the results look like? For anyone interested in the history and topography of medieval Oxford, the town and the university, these questions were answered in brilliantly engaging style by Julian in his lecture. Even better, the Oxford atlas, published in 2021 under the editorship of Alan Crossley and retailing at £70, provides over 100 illustrations of historic views with subsidiary period maps and other analytical maps showing, for example, the layout of parishes. Oxford is one of a new generation of historic towns for which atlases and maps have recently been produced by the Trust; others include Bristol, Winchester, Southampton and London.

If we begin by looking at the sources employed in mapping medieval Oxford (and by medieval we mean any time between c. 300 and c. 1540), Oxford is, of course, unusually fortunate to so many academic institutions, the colleges whose archives and libraries have retained a vast array of indispensable material. Julian claims without exaggeration that Oxford has as many illustrations and maps as any other historic town in this country. This has produced an enormous amount of written and visual work on which the editors could rely; Oxford has a long antiquarian tradition and has been subjected to much modern archaeological, architectural and archival investigation. Projects to map other towns were hindered by the lack of diversity of records: Coventry, for example, relies largely on the register of the priory there, whose copies of city rentals and title deeds can make it difficult to locate buildings precisely.

Antiquarian interest in Oxford’s history goes back at least to the seventeenth century. One of the most influential accounts is The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford published in 1674 by Anthony Wood (1632-1695). Much of its cartographic importance lies in the superb illustrations of colleges drawn by David Loggan who had access to an earlier map of Ralph Agas (c. 1540-1621). Loggan produced an aerial map view of Oxford in the 1670s: larger than A3, it shows the town in incredible detail, perhaps being the most detailed of any European town plan, depicting gardens, bowling greens and even pumps. Alongside early writers and map makers Oxford features heavily in the nineteenth-century works of the topographical artist, architect and antiquary John Buckler and his son, John Chessell Buckler.

Oxford’s most revered historian, however, is Herbert Edward Salter. He published around thirty-five books and editions of records on Oxford, many of which aimed to establish the locations of the academic halls and properties. In 1934 he produced a Map of Medieval Oxford that showed properties of multiple dates. Salter’s notebook survives; it gives details on the premodern houses of Oxford, though not everything is included. Ultimately published as a Survey of Oxford, this remains an incredibly useful guide; however, be warned, the survey was never completed and following up Salter’s references can be tricky.

Salter, as did his predecessors and do his successors, had access to a vast amount of archival evidence which has survived both locally in college muniments and nationally in internationally renowned library and archive collections. Written evidence often provides key information needed to establish plot locations, dimensions and rebuilding, realignment or remodelling over time. These include (but are not limited to) medieval and post-medieval deeds, essentially sales, leases or exchanges of property or land written on parchment (prepared animal skin – usually sheep or goat) authenticated with the parties’ seals and/or signatures and often, though not always, precisely dated. They are the stock-in-trade of urban historians and so are critical for mapping towns. Merton College, for example, retains a number of rentals of city and college property, including the sale to the college in 1267 of his house by the local Jewish businessman Jacob son of Moses. Other Oxford colleges have large collections of deeds which enable reconstruction of place and community to be plotted with some degree of accuracy. For those looking for contemporary plans, or at least sketches, Julian recommends post-medieval leases.

Outside of these surviving single-sheet documents, copies of similar transactions survive in monastic cartularies, compendia of deeds and other property records created by and for monastic houses as evidence of title. Many of these outside of college collections (colleges not being dissolved during the Reformation) fell into the hands of antiquarians, such as Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Hans Sloane and Thomas Hearne, whose collections form key pillars of the British Library, and can be dispersed across the country. To take one example, the cartularies and deeds of Osney abbey, an Augustinian house just to the west of the town centre, are currently to be found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Christ Church College Archives, Oxfordshire History Centre and The National Archives (TNA). Also at TNA are the Hundred Rolls of 1279, the returns to Edward I’s survey of his rights, which again provide descriptions of properties and lands in the town. A further survey of 1772 for the paving tax proved especially useful for establishing the width of properties as the frontages of every house in Oxford were measured.

Written sources provide one key type of evidence for reconstructing and mapping the medieval urban landscape. But more obvious – and more obviously accessible for most of us – are surviving buildings, whether still standing, in ruins, marked out as archaeologically excavated footings or uncovered and then recovered by archaeological excavation. Oxford has 1551 listed buildings, sixteen Conservation Areas but, surprisingly (at least to an outsider), ONLY ten medieval houses. Much has gone with the colleges and the rebuilding of commercial centre. Oxford Archaeology has published numerous excavation reports and observations in its journal Oxoniensia. One interesting insight for those of us not professionally versed in archaeology is that mapping enforces precision and enforces some rigidity in expressing postulation. This can lead to controversy and disagreement even over completed maps. This is the case with the Saxon town where, as Julian noted, no one can agree on what has been found in the ground and what it means; the emerging consensus is that a fortified town built by King Alfred or Edward the Elder was extended following the Conquest to include extensions at the western and eastern ends. The archaeology of Oxford is always changing: during the course of producing the Atlas a previously unknown henge (Keble Henge) emerged to document Neolithic Oxford.

So, how does medieval Oxford materialise from the mapping work of the Historic Towns Trust? The basic mapping practice is to overlay the 25-inch Ordnance Survey map with medieval buildings (surviving and lost) depicted in different colours. In a series of maps the medieval town develops on the east bank of the river Cherwell. For 1050 we have churches, town walls and fairly certain boundary markers but less certainty about the streets. By 1150 the castle has been constructed and a complete circuit of town wall, as well as the king’s houses in the northern suburb. Even more precision about the shape and layout of the castle is revealed in a seventeenth-century lawsuit between Christ Church and the citizens. Deponents from the parish gave superb evidence which was later expressed in a map of c. 1617, complete with a swan on its nest to show the site of The Swan brewery! Talking of beer, the c. 1400 map shows inns and taverns concentrated in the town centre while the academic halls were slightly more disparately spread to the east. By 1500 Magdalen College had taken over the Hospital of St John, and the period map shows a much higher percentage of property in the university’s or colleges’ hands. Mapping in such great detail over time demonstrates that landed wealth had gradually passed to the dead hand of academia and the Church.

Listening to Julian (and the other speakers in the series), you get a real sense of the passion with which he approached mapping medieval Oxford. His personal interest in tracing and plotting stone houses in Oxford shone through. Weaving the expert knowledge he and the team has about Oxford’s archival heritage and the built environment (standing or below ground) has produced a stunning collection of historic maps about one of the world’s great centres of learning. The processes of archival discovery, archaeological excavation and technological innovation mean, of course, that new discoveries will be made that will lead to new, richer maps being produced. Something to look forward to, for sure.

Further resources:

The publications of the Historic Towns Trust can be purchased from all good retailers and are listed on their website: Welcome to the Historic Towns Trust and the British Historic Towns Atlas | Historic Towns Atlas

Oxoniensia, journal of Oxford Archaeology, available online by subscription here

The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, ed. Anthony Wood (1675)

A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 3, the University of Oxford, ed. H.E. Salter and Mary D. Lobel (London, 1954)

A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 4, the City of Oxford, ed. Alan Crossley and C.R. Elrington (London, 1979)

Historical Towns in Oxfordshire. A Survey of the New County, ed. Kirsty Rodwell (Oxford, 1975)

H.E. Salter, Map of Medieval Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934).

H.E. Salter, Medieval Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

Survey of Oxford, ed. W.A. Pantin and H.E. Salter, 2 vols, Proceedings of the Oxford Historical Society, New Series, nos 14 and 20 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)

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