- The Approach from the South
- Closes, Gates, and Processional Ways
- The Cathedral of the Twelve Angels
- The City by Hour and Season
- Who Lives There, and on What
“Ye shal here the belles or ever ye see the toures, and that is the citee bigynnyng to speke to yow. Ye were in the contree; now ye are in Oxenford, and ye have nat yet passed the brigge.”
The Approach from the South
Of all the roads into Oxford it is the southern that gives the place away, and everybody who writes about the city writes about it. The road runs up through bridge meadow and orchard country: flat, wet underfoot in most seasons, hedged, gated, entirely spoken for. Then the bells arrive. They carry over low water and grass as they cannot carry through built streets, and a traveller who has had two days of open country and its silence finds himself, without warning, inside somebody’s hours. The towers come after the bells, which is the wrong way round, and the wrong way round is the whole effect: first a sound with a shape to it, then a dark shape on a low rise, then the bridge, and only then the ordinary business of a city, carts, tolls, and the smell of a place where several thousand people cook. The southern gate is not impressive. Nor need it be, having been preceded by four miles of announcement.
The bridge is a place in its own right and repays a stop. The meadows about it are working ground and not parkland: hay meadow, held in strips by houses in the city, mown in a fixed order that has been litigated twice in the present century, and grazed by cattle on the aftermath, so that even the grass is somebody’s and has been argued over. The bridge itself carries a toll taken by the city, a chapel of two priests who serve the road, six houses built into the parapet, and a permanent population of perhaps forty who live off the traffic: toll clerks, chapel servants, two ostlers, a smith who does nothing but shoes and wheel repairs, and the women who sell food to people waiting. The waiting is the point. In market weeks the carts queue at the toll while it is still dark, and the queue is where the country tells the city what has happened to it.
A Briton who comes this way and pays attention will have learned three things before he passes the gate: that the country is exhaustively owned, that the day is regulated from a tower, and that somebody has already made a note of him. All three are true. The last is the one visitors take longest to believe.
The other approaches say different things, and say them more quietly. The eastern road from the tithe villages is the workaday one; it arrives at a gate the city does not trouble to decorate, since that is where the grain comes in. The western road along the water is the schools’ road, used by anyone with business at a foundation, and is broad and unbusy. The northern road goes to the marsh. Poorest of the four, it is the approach the North Gate serves, and Oxford would prefer that no visitor of consequence used it.
Closes, Gates, and Processional Ways
“Marke the brede of the strete and thou shalt know what passeth alonge it. Wher it is broad and swept, ther walketh the Church. Wher it is narrow and foul, ther walken thei that maken the Church possible.”
Closes, not squares, are what Oxford is made of. A close is a walled enclosure with a gate. Within the gate stand a hall, its lodgings, its kitchens, its yard, and, as often as not, its own well and its own burial ground, so that it need send out neither for water nor for a grave. The city is largely an aggregation of these with streets run between them, so that Oxford has far more walls inside it than around it, and a stranger walking its length passes perhaps thirty boundaries without crossing one.
The processional ways are the exception, and they are the point. Four broad routes run between the cathedral, the archiepiscopal hall, the chapter court and the two principal gates, kept swept, drained and clear of encroachment by an obligation on the properties that front them. Processions use them perhaps twenty times in a year. Ordinary traffic uses them every day, and the ordinary traffic gives way to nothing except a bell.
Behind the closes run the service lanes, and they are a different city. Narrow, walled on both sides, black with age and rain, they carry what keeps the closes alive: water, fuel, meat, laundry, night soil, and the several thousand souls who move all of it. They are not squalid, Oxford being too well ordered for that; yet they are dark, unswept and entirely unceremonious, and a man may cross the whole city through them without once being seen from a processional way. A great deal of the city’s hired work is done in them.
The gates within the city matter as much as the gates in the wall. Close gates shut at dusk, and after dusk a person is either inside a close, inside a lodging, or abroad in the dark lanes with a reason. Boys carrying messages learn which gates may still be used after dark and which are left to servants, to sextons, and to those who can give an account of themselves. The city’s peace has evening habits as exact as its noon routines. Nobody in particular enforces them, and everybody observes them.
A close is a jurisdiction as much as an enclosure, and that is the practical fact a stranger must grasp. Inside its gate the close’s own officers govern: its porter admits and refuses, its steward disciplines its servants, its head deals with its members, and the city constable does not enter without leave except in pursuit. A man who has done something and reached a close gate has, for the moment, left the city. The closes guard this jealously; the council resents it annually; and the arrangement has survived every attempt to reform it since the charter.
The porters are therefore among the most useful people in Oxford, and are paid accordingly, by more than one employer. A porter knows who came in, and when, and with whom, and how they looked; he decides whether a message reaches a fellow within the hour or the next morning; and he can, entirely within his discretion, keep a visitor standing in the street long enough for the matter to become somebody else’s. Companies working the city learn the porters before they learn the principals, and pay them first.
The Cathedral of the Twelve Angels
“The ground was helde vertuous or ever the stones were leyde upon it, and the stones do but seye aloude what the ground hadde alredy seyd stille.”
The cathedral gathers the whole city into one silhouette, and it was built to. It stands on ground long held to be charged with holy virtue, a claim that predates the building, predates the reclamation of Aerth, and is not, in the chapter’s careful formula, a matter on which the Church has pronounced. The valleys hold that crops do better within sight of the towers. The chapter neither endorses this nor discourages it; the tithe returns are consistent with it; and that, too, the chapter does not mention.
The building is long rather than tall, with a central tower that carries the great bells and two western towers that carry the lesser. Its cloisters, chapter house and treasury lie to the south; the archiepiscopal hall adjoins it to the east; and immediately beyond that lies the granary yard of Halden Close, which is the arrangement that tells a visitor most about how Oxford works. Grain, judgement and prayer stand within a hundred paces of one another, and always have.
Inside, the cathedral is worn rather than splendid. The steps are trodden hollow. The stones of the floor are lettered over with four centuries of burials, and anyone waiting reads them. The twelve angel figures of the dedication stand in the choir, dark with lamp smoke and of markedly different periods and workmanship: four are held to be original, the rest replacements, and which four is a dispute that flares in the schools about once a generation.
It is also a working building, in a sense that impresses visitors from the capital. Petitions are heard in it. The calendar is declared from it. The dead of the city, and a good many of the valleys, lie buried under and around it, in a burial ground administered with a rigour that shapes family fortunes. Nobody in Oxford thinks of the cathedral as a place one visits; it is the place where a great many things are decided, and the decisions are the reason for the architecture rather than the other way about.
The burial ground is the cathedral’s most consequential department and the one that touches most families. Ground within the walls, ground in the close, ground in the outer yard, ground beyond it: four different things, with four different prices and four different meanings, so that where a family lies is a public statement of where it stands. The sacrist administers this. The sacristy is therefore where a great many of Oxford’s quieter arrangements are made, since a promise about a grave is a promise nobody wants written down.
The bells are the other department that reaches outward: six in the central tower and eight in the western pair, cast at four different dates, the oldest of them older than the present building and reset twice. A licensed company under the precentor rings them, and the licence is heritable in practice, three families having supplied ringers for two centuries. The bells are also the province’s clock; hence the Office of Bells guards its computation so fiercely, and hence a cracked bell is a matter for the chapter and not for the fabric fund.
The City by Hour and Season
“Oxford has three cities in it and they change places three times a day. The provisioning city wakes first, the governing city at nine, the learned city when it pleases, and by candle-light all three pretend the other two were never there.”
The city wakes from its provisioning side, in the dark before light: cart axles and stable doors; the markets setting up; water, fuel, bread and meat moving through the service lanes into thirty closes at once; the almshouse queues forming. Of Oxford’s three cities this is the largest by population and the least written about, and it has finished its principal work before the second has properly begun.
The governing city starts with the bells and the opening of the courts. Petitioners arrive and wait, in archways, in the cloister, on the stone steps of the cathedral, carrying tallies, letters and grievances from parishes that may be two days off: reeves from the valleys, village priests, stewards, litigants, and the professional intermediaries who make their living by knowing which door to stand at. By mid-morning the processional ways are busy with people who have travelled to be told to come back.
The learned city keeps its own hours and is resented for them. Lectures, disputations and the copying rooms run to a timetable that answers to the schools rather than to the bells, and the schools have defended this since the conformity as a matter of principle, so that undergraduates and copyists are seen in the streets at hours when nobody else has business there and the streets are otherwise empty. The provisioning city finds this comic. The governing city finds it irritating.
The seasons move all three. Harvest leaves the schools empty and the courts full of tithe business. The thaw brings the burial corrections and the road disputes. Winter and its cold shrink the city to the closes and the lanes, and make the almshouse the busiest institution in it. The great processions fall in the spring and at the turn of the year, and on those days the provisioning city works twice as hard so that the governing city may appear not to work at all.
The almshouse deserves separate notice, being the largest single charitable establishment in the belt and the point at which the city meets its own poor. It feeds daily, lodges some hundreds, and administers the outdoor relief that keeps many valley families in their villages rather than on the road. By the standards of the realm it is generous. Yet it is administered with a moral scrutiny that visitors from the capital find intolerable: the almoner’s officers know who drinks, who has been idle, whose children are unbaptised, and act on all three.
Night belongs to a fourth city, which the other three do not discuss. Once the close gates shut, the dark lanes carry the traffic that cannot be conducted by day: the taverns that serve servants rather than masters, the two streets the council has decided not to reform, the fences who deal in what leaves the closes, and the meetings between people who cannot be seen meeting. The city watch is small and knows exactly where not to walk after dark. Oxford’s night is quieter than London’s, and considerably more purposeful.
Who Lives There, and on What
“Reckon four servants to every scholar and eight to every canon, and then reckon who feeds the servants. The city is not learned. The city is a great household with a learned room in it.”
The population divides more sharply than in most towns, and is entirely aware of the divisions. At the top stand perhaps two hundred people: the archbishop’s household, the dean and canons, the heads of the schools, the Halden establishment, and the four or five merchant families rich enough to be treated as gentry. Below them lies the professional city: proctors, clerks, copyists, notaries, physicians, licensed apothecaries, schoolmasters. They are perhaps two thousand in all, and the layer in which most of the city’s ambition lives.
Below that the trades, which are substantial and organised. Building in stone and timber keeps masons, carpenters and glaziers; the book work keeps parchment-makers and bookbinders; the bell-founders serve the whole province; and brewers, bakers and tanners feed and clothe the rest, the tanners downwind. Behind all of them stand the carriers who bind the town to the valleys. Oxford’s guilds are weaker than London’s, because the chapter and the schools between them are the largest customers in the city and prefer to negotiate one by one, a fact the trades resent and have never been able to change.
Below that again the service population, which is the majority: household servants, kitchen staff, porters, water-carriers, laundresses, stable hands, gardeners, and the men who empty things. Many are from the valleys and go home for harvest. Their wages are poor, their lodging is provided, and their real security is the alms system. And beyond all of them, in the lanes and outside the gates, are the people the city needs and does not count: the seasonal poor, the road population, the carriers’ families, the servants who have lost one place and not yet found another. Oxford is markedly better than the capital at keeping hunger from these people, and markedly worse at letting them settle. The almshouse will give a man bread for a week. The city will not give him a room, and the difference is not oversight but settled policy.
Money in Oxford flows in a shape that surprises people used to trading towns. The largest sums move not as trade but as rent, tithe and endowment, from the chapter’s estates and the foundations’ rent rolls, from the house’s tithe, and from the fees of the courts. Actual commerce is secondary, and knows it; hence the city has no great bank, and hence a merchant family that wants standing buys land and marries a foundation bursar’s daughter rather than expanding its warehouse.
For anyone arriving with money to spend, the consequence is that Oxford is expensive in ways that appear on no list. Lodging within the walls is scarce, because the closes hold so much of it. Access is fee’d at every stage, the petition, the copy, the seal, the expedition of the matter, and none of the fees is illegitimate. A Briton with a straightforward business and no introduction should budget three times what the business appears to cost and six times as long, and should find an intermediary before the first week is out.