Medieval: Oxford

Oxford
http://www.historictownsatlas.org.uk/content/map-historic-oxford

The university developed gradually in the 12th century as a loose association of masters and scholars under a magister scholarum. It emerged in the 13th century as a major factor in the town's economy, masking for a time any decline foreshadowed by changes in the wool trade. It was the existence of the university, too, which attracted the Dominican and Franciscan friars to Oxford immediately on their arrival in England in 1221 and 1224. As long as its numbers were low there was presumably no great friction between the university and the town, but in 1209 occurred the first of a series of violent incidents which were to have a profound effect on the development of both bodies. The townsmen hanged two clerks for a murder of which they were apparently innocent, and the university dispersed. The matter was not settled until 1214 when the town submitted to the papal legate and suffered severe financial penalties; the mayor, bailiffs, and 50 leading burgesses agreed to take a public oath every year to abide by the settlement. The university emerged from the incident as a stronger, more highly organized body, under a new official, the chancellor, but the peace between town and gown was short-lived. In 1228.

townsmen attacked and wounded scholars and the town was placed under an interdict. In 1232 seven townsmen, including the future mayor Adam Fettiplace, were imprisoned for injuring clerks. There was further violence in 1236, and that year the town was set on fire, apparently deliberately. No townsmen were involved in the attack in 1238 by a number of clerks on the papal legate who was staying at Oseney; the legate's brother was killed and the legate himself forced to flee for his life. As a result of the outrage the university was placed under an interdict, scholars had to find sureties for their good behaviour and were forbidden to enter or leave Oxford; their goods were taken into the king's hand by the mayor and bailiffs. Most scholars appear to have had no difficulty in finding townsmen to act as sureties for them, perhaps because even in 1238 the value of letting lodgings and supplying the other needs of the scholars was recognized.Despite such mutual dependence intermittent quarrels between town and gown continued throughout the 1240s, resulting in 1242 in the appointment of the sheriff and a former mayor, Peter Torold, to keep the peace in the town, and in 1248 in the taking of the town into the king's hands after the killing of a clerk. Another 'great controversy' between the burgesses and the university was recorded in 1251.
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In 1334 Oxford ranked 8th among English provincial towns on the basis of taxable wealth. In 1377, when 2,357 adults were assessed for poll tax, it ranked 14th in population, and showed signs of recovery after the savage onslaught of the Black Death in 1348-9.
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Some features of Oxford's decline were common to other English towns, since massive population loss through plague was a national experience and many towns suffered from changes in the wool and cloth trades. Few, however, were so transformed in this period. The town lost its political importance as the resort of kings and the meeting-place of great councils. Its position as the head of navigation on the river Thames was taken by Henley, and the wealthy merchants who had dominated the town's economy and government were replaced by lesser men. Above all, the relative positions of town and university were reversed, and by the end of the period the town's economy depended almost entirely on supplying the university's needs. Growing awareness of a decline in Oxford's fortunes in the early 14th century coincided with a prolonged period of social unrest in the town and its neighbourhood, culminating in a great town-gown riot on St. Scholastica's day 1355; as a result of that and previous conflicts the university's privileges were so increased that it controlled many aspects of town life until the 19th century.

The university's monopoly of much of the walled area also dates from the later Middle Ages, when the continued reduction of Oxford's trade and population made possible the acquisition by colleges of central sites, leaving only a much reduced commercial area around Carfax.

The university's population seems to have reached a peak soon after 1300; it has been estimated at c. 1,500 in the early 14th century, c. 1,200 in 1400, and c. 1,000 in 1438. (fn. 165) The number of houses leased to graduates or as academic halls by Oseney abbey and St. John's hospital was highest between 1292 and 1317. Many halls were vacant in the years immediately after the Black Death, and after a brief recovery in the 1360s the number of halls leased to graduates by the abbey and hospital fell fairly steadily from the last quarter of the 14th century.

In the later Middle Ages the town's suburbs contracted, and within the walls there was structural decay and an abundance of vacant plots. Very little church building or restoration may be dated to the century following the Black Death. The gloomiest picture was that drawn by a jury in 1378 of a thirteen-acre site in the north-east corner of the town: the land, neither built-up nor inclosed, was a dump for filth and corpses, a resort of criminals and prostitutes, and it was felt that the building of New College there would be an advantage to the whole town. Such indictments, coupled with the townsmen's repeated complaints of poverty, may exaggerate the town's distress. For the reduced population there were compensations: the university, and particularly the expanding colleges, provided immediate employment, particularly in building work, and secure long-term opportunities for a wide variety of tradesmen. Wage-rates were high and rents low. Although the rate of freeman admissions in Oxford is not known before the 16th century, an increase in the entry fee in the later Middle Ages may imply that the freedom was still attractive to outsiders; the decline in population may have been greatest among the lower ranks of urban society, the proportion of freemen to other inhabitants much higher than before.

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol4/pp3-73

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