Oxford

Előszó

According to legend, at the beginning of the 8th century Frideswide, a princess who had vowed to become a nun, fled to Oxford to escape an unwanted suitor Her pursuer was struck blind as he entered the town; her prayers restored his sight, and in gratitude he gave up the chase. Frideswide stayed in Oxford and founded a priory where she was eventually buried, and iater she was canonised. Her story represents the earliest tradition of a settlement at what is now Oxford, and archaeological evidence suggests that there may indeed have been a church on the site of St Frideswide's Priory (where Christ Church is now) in the 8th century. Oxford may have originated as a settlement outside the priory gates. The medieval chroniclers gave it a more glamorous history: Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote his History of the Kings of Britain here, numbered it amongst the cities of King Arthur's realm. In fact the first attested reference to Oxford is as late as 912, when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Edward the Elder (a son of King Alfréd) took control of the town and the surrounding area, which occupied an important strategic position between his territory in Wessex and country held by the Danes. The town owes its name to its location on a major crossing-point of the Thames. The exact whereabouts of the originál ford have been much debated: probably it was near the present Magdalen Bridge. Being at the centre of southern England, Oxford was on important lines of communication, linked by road and the River Thames to London and to the Midlands by the Cherwell, a navigable tributary of the Thames. From the first it was a markét town, for it lay on two major trade routes, from the Midlands to Southampton and from London to Gloucester and the Welsh bordér. A reminder of Saxon Oxford survives in the city's regular street plan, probably first laid out by Edward the Elder. The ancient centre is oblong, and was encíosed by a wall with four gates. Roads ran between the north and south gates (roughly on the line of Cornmarket and St Aldate's Streets) and between the east and west gates (on the line of the High and Queen Streets). Their intersection, at the city's centre, is called Carfax (from the French quatre voies, four ways). Oxford's only remaining Saxon building, the tower of the Church of St Michael at the North Gate (1), was built cl 000-50. By 1066 Oxford had expanded far beyond the town walls, and with about 1000 houses and 11 churches was the sixth largest town in England. It was often at the centre of political life: here Harold Harefoot was elected king (1036) and Edmund Ironside died mysteriously (1016), and Edward the Confessor was born nearby in 1005. The Normans established control over Oxford with the Vissza