High Constable Stephen Poynt

High Constable of Oxford and the practical street authority of the Market Council at Tallow Hall, keeping tolls, streets and market order in a city where the chapter disputes every yard of jurisdiction.

Oxford is chapter, cathedral and school, but it is also a lay city, governed from Tallow Hall by a twelve-alderman Market Council that holds the market, the tolls, the ward constables, the poor rate within the walls and a body of liberties older than the chapter’s convenience. Stephen Poynt is its High Constable, the enforcement counterpart to Senior Alderman Matthew Brome, and the man who gives the small civic watch its practical edge in streets, tolls and market order.

His difficulty is jurisdiction. Council and chapter are in permanent low-grade dispute over the streets between the closes, and the precedents have grown so intricate that both sides keep specialists in them. Poynt is not one of the specialists, but he must act on their conclusions at night, at a barrier, with a cart waiting. He is said to know to the yard where the council’s writ ends, and to prefer closing a street before a dispute begins to arguing about it afterwards.

Oxford regards him as a civic officer rather than a soldier, and he takes care to keep it so. His watch is small, and he relies on notices, barriers and knowing the carriers of the Fellowship of the Four Roads by name, since that body can inconvenience chapter and council alike when grain is on the move.

Companies meet him when an errand in Oxford crosses a toll, a market or a night barrier, or when the question of which authority governs a particular street becomes their problem rather than the lawyers’. He is fair, brisk and not easily impressed by a chapter seal.

In person

Poynt is tall, lean and fit, in his late forties, with short dark-brown hair greying at the temples, a short dark moustache and a narrow, hard face with a pronounced jaw and slightly crooked nose. His pale-grey eyes miss little; an old scar runs through his right eyebrow and another across one knuckle. He wears the dark Oxford civic-watch coat with muted blue detail, polished practical boots, gloves and the High Constable’s badge, and carries a short staff of office and a wallet of warrants.