Oxford | Page 4

the
Cherwell has commended itself to men in one age after another. Each
generation has used it for its own purpose: for war, for trade, for
learning, for religion; and war, trade, religion, and learning have left on
Oxford their peculiar marks. No set of its occupants, before the last two
centuries began, was very eager to deface or destroy the buildings of its
predecessors. Old things were turned to new uses, or altered to suit new
tastes; they were not overthrown and carted away. Thus, in walking
through Oxford, you see everywhere, in colleges, chapels, and churches,
doors and windows which have been builded up; or again, openings
which have been cut where none originally existed. The upper part of
the round Norman arches in the Cathedral has been preserved, and
converted into the circular bull's-eye lights which the last century liked.
It is the same everywhere, except where modern restorers have had
their way. Thus the life of England, for some eight centuries, may be
traced in the buildings of Oxford. Nay, if we are convinced by some
antiquaries, the eastern end of the High Street contains even earlier
scratches on this palimpsest of Oxford; the rude marks of savages who
scooped out their damp nests, and raised their low walls in the gravel,
on the spot where the new schools are to stand. Here half- naked men
may have trapped the beaver in the Cherwell, and hither they may have
brought home the boars which they slew in the trackless woods of
Headington and Bagley. It is with the life of historical Oxford, however,
and not with these fancies, that we are concerned, though these papers
have no pretension to be a history of Oxford. A series of pictures of

men's life here is all they try to sketch.
It is hard, though not impossible, to form a picture in the mind of
Oxford as she was when she is first spoken of by history. What she
may have been when legend only knows her; when St. Frideswyde built
a home for religious maidens; when she fled from King Algar and hid
among the swine, and after a whole fairy tale of adventures died in
great sanctity, we cannot even guess. This legend of St. Frideswyde,
and of her foundation, the germ of the Cathedral and of Christ Church,
is not, indeed, without its value and significance for those who care for
Oxford. This home of religion and of learning was a home of religion
from the beginning, and her later life is but a return, after centuries of
war and trade, to her earliest purpose. What manner of village of
wooden houses may have surrounded the earliest rude chapels and
places of prayer, we cannot readily guess, but imagination may look
back on Oxford as she was when the English Chronicle first mentions
her. Even then it is not unnatural to think Oxford might well have been
a city of peace. She lies in the very centre of England, and the
Northmen, as they marched inland, burning church and cloister, must
have wandered long before they came to Oxford. On the other hand, the
military importance of the site must have made it a town that would be
eagerly contended for. Any places of strength in Oxford would
command the roads leading to the north and west, and the secure, raised
paths that ran through the flooded fens to the ford or bridge, if bridge
there then was, between Godstowe and the later Norman grand pont,
where Folly Bridge now spans the Isis. Somewhere near Oxford, the
roads that ran towards Banbury and the north, or towards Bristol and
the west, would be obliged to cross the river. The water-way, too, and
the paths by the Thames' side, were commanded by Oxford. The Danes,
as they followed up the course of the Thames from London, would be
drawn thither, sooner or later, and would covet a place which is
surrounded by half a dozen deep natural moats. Lastly, Oxford lay in
the centre of England indeed, but on the very marches of Mercia and
Wessex. A border town of natural strength and of commanding
situation, she can have been no mean or poor collection of villages in
the days when she is first spoken of, when Eadward the Elder
"incorporated with his own kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both
sides of Watling Street" (Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. i. p. 57),

and took possession of London and of Oxford as the two most
important parts of a scientific frontier. If any man had stood, in the
days of Eadward, on the hill that was not yet "Shotover," and had
looked along the plain to the place where the grey spires of Oxford are
clustered now, as it were