Historic Oxford

This lively and authoritative account of Oxford’s historic background describes the origins of the prosperous medieval town and of its university and colleges. David Sturdy draws on a lifetime’s knowledge of Oxford, its archaeology, architecture and archives, to examine the many myths and legends that have sprung up there. Using medieval documents, he restores the ‘Ox-ford’ to its authentic site west of the town and explains that the notion that it lay to the south, along St Aldate’s Street, is a modern misconception.

Now overcrowded and reviled, Cornmarket, the main shopping street for a thousand years, is one of the most fascinating streets in Europe, richly documented in charters and leases and through archaeological records of Saxon and Norman times. The author gives lively portraits of Restoration life in the tiny parish of St John, of the city’s Georgian antiquaries and their pranks and rivalries, of serious nineteenth-century scientists and reformers, and of twentieth-century industrialists and ministerial vandals.