Manning's Curiosity Projected Into the 21St Century by Brian Durham Percy Manning: the Man Who Collected Oxfordshire, Ed

Home , Beaumont Palace, Castle Mill Stream, North Leigh Roman Villa, Osney Abbey, Otmoor

Manning's Curiosity Projected into the 21st Century by Brian Durham Percy Manning: The Man who Collected Oxfordshire, Ed. Michael Heaney, Pages 289-309

11: Manning’s Curiosity Projected into the 21st Century Brian Durham

Had a man of Percy Manning’s breadth of interests been born a century later, what intellectual ramparts would he have manned in Oxfordshire? Now that his sort of collecting has been recognized as an essential record of humanity’s evolution, such that developments big and small will try to address their respective cultural impacts in a spirit of discovery and understanding, what questions would still have tantalized a Percy Manning a century on? This contribution looks into the mind of the man through his collecting, his writing and his collaboration with his peers, exploring his world with a newly available technique of landscape analysis that would have impressed him and could revolutionize the perception of his 21st-century successor.

The original Manning saw to it that the millennium of Oxford’s first mention, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for AD 911/2, was commemorated (see Chapters 1 and 6). Since that time other Oxford millennia have passed unnoticed, including that of the slaughter of Danes in 1003. This would have seemed an unfortunate case for commemoration in 2003, but only five years later the ‘tumbled’ remains of 35 individuals, some with Scandinavian characteristics, were exhumed on the inner lip of a huge ring ditch under what is now St John’s College, Keble College and Keble Road. 1 The monument is identified as a ‘henge’, the upcast of which would originally have created a counterscarp six metres high, a massive auditorium – the deposition of an untidy heap of humanity in this context might therefore have been witnessed by an 11th-century onlooker from the weathered remains of this slope.

Wallis presents this interment as the outcome of an Oxford ‘massacre’, and it has all the elements for generating a ghost story to match that which Percy Manning published in Folk-lore in 1903.2 In that case the ghosts of the three maidens Kendall, formerly resident in a place called ‘Rewley House’ (a name we will hear again), had haunted locations in the St Thomas area of Oxford for a period after 1714, and were only quietened by the actionsArchaeopress of nine bishops. Manning’s gentle Openaccount of these Access events is redolent of his almost avuncular words relating to Thomas Carter, his collaborator and agent in collecting other folklore in Oxfordshire (see Chapters 1, 7 and 8). Manning’s written fluency in his thirties belies his reported stuttering response as a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate at New College, reported as ‘N’n’n’no’ when asked if he was ready to part company with the college after a spectacularly bad examination performance.

1 Sean Wallis, Oxford Henge and Late Saxon Massacre: With Medieval and Later Occupation at St John’s College, Oxford (Reading: Thames Valley Archaeological Services , 2014). 2 Percy Manning, ‘Stray notes on Oxfordshire folklore (continued),’ Folk-lore 14.1 (March 1903): 65-74 (pp. 66- 67). If nothing else, the henge atrocity seems to have ‘spooked’’the radiocarbon dating of the exhumed skeletal material, see A.M. Pollard, P. Ditchfield and E. Piva, ‘Comments on the skeletal radiocarbon dates’ in Wallis, Oxford Henge and Late Saxon Massacre, pp. 151-157.

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The New College stutter is reported by J.L. Myres,3 who went on to become Wykeham Professor of Ancient History. There is however no hint of intellectual patronizing in Myres’s account, and indeed the two seem to have been close collaborators as joint secretaries of the OAHS. Manning was a friend of Henry Taunt, a commercial photographer of prodigious output (see Chapter 1). He was also close to the Parker family, energetic publishers of archaeological journals. Further, in respect of the purchase of some sculptural remains of Osney Abbey, Manning at age twenty-three persuaded Herbert Hurst to be a go-between with a builder (see Chapter 1) – Hurst as author of Oxford Topography is a considerable scholar, yet prepared to be subservient to a Manning 36 years his junior.4 The image we have might be of a dilettante, but perhaps the more mature picture from the present study is of a chameleon, able to present himself in different ways to different people?

How then shall we commemorate this complex person? The approach taken here is a sequel to an essay that compared two 20th-century heritage careers on parallel trajectories, John Rhodes and the present author.5 It was argued there that addressing the Historic Environment appetites of a generation involves two services, scientific investigation by the ‘knights errant’ of field archaeology, and public presentation by museums. In presentation it was acknowledged that audience appetites would change, either ‘history will get better’ or there might be ‘random cycling’ between social accountability and the agenda of an authoritarian élite. Rhodes, in interpreting the information in front of him, used his wit and charm to mask an implied depth of perception that he never set down in writing – he would have regarded it as unprofessional to reveal his inner tastes. Manning may prove less inscrutable because his legacy takes the form of material collections made for himself (even if he passed them to the Ashmolean) – there would have been fewer constraints on his choices, which were certainly broad-ranging.

We may ask therefore whether Manning’s limited literary output in a period of phenomenal output by his peers represents intellectual stifling by those around him? Was he perhaps saving himself for something that would outshine, for instance, Hurst’s Oxford Topography? Or was the rescue of the Osney sculpture evidence of a buccaneering spirit using the respectability of Hurst to deprive the builder of his property at minimal cost to ManningArchaeopress while to the benefit of the Ashmolean, Open as it were Access the ‘Lara Croft’ of his day? Three criteria offer a framework for assessment of his collecting, i.e. that:

1. He monitored locations where work was being done, or places where artefacts were being sold; 2. He put his own value on objects, whether for their intrinsic interest or his perception of their market value;

3 John Linton Myres, Praeterita: The Memoirs of the Late Sir John Linton Myres Kt OBE (Privately printed, 2012), p. 15. 4 Herbert Hurst, Oxford Topography: An Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press for the Oxford Historical Society, 1899). 5 Brian Durham, ‘A Democratising of Heritage Services over Four Decades: The People of “Anyplace” and their Visitors’, in Martin Henig and Crispin Paine (eds), Preserving and Presenting the Past in Oxfordshire and beyond: Essays in Memory of John Rhodes, pp. 171-177, BAR British Series 586 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013).

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3. He adapted his collecting over his lifetime in ways that reflect his evolving perception rather than simply his personal resources.

New knowledge comes via progressive investigation: collect; describe; compare; analyse; assimilate; predict. Manning’s collecting instinct would have been conditioned by his understanding of the landscape from which his trophies were sourced, which at the time would have been largely two-dimensional, i.e. mapped distribution. Fortuitously, 2016 has brought a remarkable additional dimension to UK archaeological collection, because for the cultivable and habitable floors of Oxfordshire valleys we now have free access to terrain-filtered LiDAR data that offers a way of reconstructing the landscape, inferring for instance how water would have behaved in such a landscape, likewise how people would have behaved, giving a platform on which a neo-Manning can indulge his personal curiosity – his curioscape.

Loess, LiDAR and Landscape: 21st-century Approaches for the Neo-Manning

Manning’s Oxfordshire is mainly a fertile landscape, but when first exposed by the retreat of the fourth Ice Age, say 11,000 BC, both uplands and lowlands will have been scraped clean, the surplus accumulating in moraines. As the flow of meltwater subsided, new valley floors would have been revealed, formed by sand and gravel brought from the Cotswolds, the beginning of the Devensian Stage. In some places, notably Oxford’s Port Meadow, the gravel is remarkably flat for a high-energy meltwater river, and it must be assumed that there had been a process of wind-planing that levelled out the braids, creating the so-called Northmoor Terrace.

These valley floors, presently rich agricultural land, would initially have been infertile plains of gravel until there was a covering of finer material. The modern cultivation soil is described by geology as the Sutton Series,6 but where sealed beneath man-made earthworks its pristine version runs like a red watermark through any archaeological section, described by Manning’s mentor Herbert Hurst as ‘the red loam which caps the site of the city’. 7 Particle-size analysis shows that what survives on the Summertown- Radley Terrace under central Oxford is closely similar to that on the Northmoor Terrace at for instance Rewley Abbey (Saïd Business School), and perhaps therefore to that under the King’sArchaeopress Weir barrows 5 km upstream (FigureOpen 11.1).8 Access Hurst’s ‘red loam’ has been described by 20th-century Oxfordshire archaeologists as ‘old alluvium’, ‘brickearth’ and ‘supra-natural’, but increasingly with the German term Löss (Loess). It is reported in continental Europe from the aftermath of each of the four recent Ice Ages, and from South-east England from warm periods in the last glaciation, when unvegetated landscapes would have been exposed by the ice retreat.9 It results

6 For discussion see Gill Hey, Mark Robinson and Julian Munby, ‘Landscape Development, Geology and Soils’, in Gill Hey, Yarnton: Saxon and Medieval Settlement and Landscape: Results of Excavations 1990-96, pp. 27-29 (Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology for Oxford Archaeology, 2004). 7 Hurst, Oxford Topography, p. 33. 8 David Bowler and Mark Robinson, ‘Three Round Barrows at King’s Weir, Wytham, Oxon’, Oxoniensia 45 (1980): 1-8. 9 Michèle L. Clarke et al., ‘New OSL Dating of UK Loess: Two Phases of Late Glacial Dust Accretion in SE England

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Figure 11.1: Particle-size analysis of loam-capping from two terraces

typically from local redistribution of medium-sized particles driven by gusting wind (as opposed to unidirectional wind which creates ‘dunes’), with finer particles including clay being light enough to be carried elsewhere.10 Deposition by ‘rainout’, leading to ‘red rain’, would typically capture more clay than shown in Figure 11.1. Deposition comes from adhesion of the dust to capillary water at the land surface.11

Hurst had observed that in Grandpont ‘the red colour is altogether wanting’, which remained a puzzle to field archaeology a century later.12 It could simply mean that the deposition process happened after the laying down of the Northmoor Terrace but before the final downcutting of the flood plains; it might equally be that overlying biological processes of the reed-swamp formed on the St Ebbe’s flood plain had changed its colour and mixed it.13 Clarification of this process is an item for a neo-Manning agenda, but for present purposes where surviving on dry gravels the deposit is typically a 300 mm depth of homogeneous red-brown loam. This means its base can be used as an indicator of the top of the Devensian gravel, and given its consistent thickness its survival can be used to reconstruct the ground level on which mankind first walked in returning to this new landscapeArchaeopress following retreat of the ice. OpenWe will see therefore Access the importance of the gravel-Loess interface (GLI) in determining where ‘geology’ ends and ‘archaeology’ starts.

Whatever the process of accumulation of the Loess, Oxfordshire does not record archaeological deposits stratified within its thickness. The cultural record instead

and Climate Implications’, Journal of Quaternary Science 22.4 (May 2007): 307–308. 10 I am grateful for discussion with Professor Joseph Mason on the circumstances under which Loess can accumulate. 11 Kenneth Pye, Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits (London; Orlando: Academic Press, 1987), chapter 3. 12 Hurst, Oxford Topography, p. 33. 13 Mark Robinson, ‘The Palaeohydrology of the St Aldates Area of Oxford in Relation to Archaeology and the Thames Crossing’, in Anne Dodd (ed.), Oxford before the University: The Late Saxon and Norman Archaeology of the Thames Crossing, the Defences and the Town, pp. 69-82. (Oxford: Oxford Archaeology, 2003).

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starts at its surface, a surface that has been greatly illuminated by airborne ‘light (laser) detection and ranging’ (LiDAR), providing a model of the landscape at around 1 m spatial resolution, and a much finer vertical resolution. ‘In the United Kingdom the Environment Agency Geomatics Group has used LiDAR for over a decade for the production of cost-effective terrain maps suitable for assessing flood risk.’14 Areas at flood risk inevitably include valley floors, which happen to be the areas attractive to permanent human settlement. The fact that humanity has tended to interfere with the drainage of these areas, such that flooding and silting worsened, is relevant archaeologically because the silt can trap artefacts and occupation surfaces, allowing chronological sequences to be preserved for analysis. LiDAR has the potential to identify these accumulations as flat-topped lenses, and thus to target them for preservation in situ, or for stratigraphic analysis and recording where resources are available.

Since mid-2016 the Agency’s data in ASCII format has been available for download at no cost.15 It is interpreted here using Landserf software developed by Queen Mary College, London, and made available as open source, though not upgraded beyond Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. Kilometre tiles can be joined seamlessly, allowing point interrogation, the generation of surface profiles, and use of colour filtering and solar shading to resolve very fine differences in relative height, irrespective of the quoted error. Manning’s generation was denied this aerial perspective, with its scope for inspecting elements in palimpsest landscapes, and for inferring the directions and intensity of water flows, or flows of colluvium concealing deposit sequences that trap evidence of humanity’s colonization. Our neo-Manning will use it to help understand the pre-settlement geomorphology, allowing deposits to be compartmentalized as landscape tiles and then re-fitted. This process is demonstrated below for Oxford, but we must first consider the experience of the original Manning in field archaeology, in this case Roman.

Vignette 1 - Manning Excavating at Alchester 1892, and Insights from LiDAR

We first hear of Manning’s heritage curiosity at Alchester, now a field between Wendlebury and Bicester, but originally a planted town of the Roman conquest of Britain. TheArchaeopress Roman administration was a focus Open for the interest Access of the young Manning for reasons that were popular with his generation, and he co-directed the trenching with J.L. Myres.16 Christopher Hawkes later wrote: ‘in 1892 the late Mr Percy Manning and Mr (now Prof) J.L. Myres excavated in the NW angle of the central cross roads’.17 If Manning and his digging colleagues (Figure 1.3) had known that a century later this Roman town was to yield tree-ring dates within two years of the Claudian invasion, would they have been surprised?18 Perhaps not. But if Manning had followed the line

14 Historic England, ‘Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging)’, https://historicengland.org.uk/research/ approaches/research-methods/airborne-remote-sensing/lidar/. 15 Available as the result of a search for ‘LiDAR’ at https://data.gov.uk/data/search?q=lidar. 16 ‘Recent discoveries’, Archaeologia Oxoniensis 1 (1892); 32-36 (p. 34). 17 Christopher Hawkes, ‘Excavations at Alchester, 1926’, Antiquaries Journal 7.2 (1927): 155-184 (p. 157). 18 Eberhard W. Sauer, ‘Alchester: Origins and Destiny of Oxfordshire’s Earliest Roman Site’, Oxoniensia 71

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Figure 11.2: LiDAR model of Alchester environs. (Red `X’ locates Manning and Myres’s excavation 1892; broken red lines indicate Akeman Street (E-W) and Towcester-Dorchester road (N-S); blue: land below 60 m OD; white: land above 65 m OD. )

of the Roman road south towards Dorchester and asked himself why Roman engineers had built a road across what is now soggy Otmoor rather than its surrounding slopes, would he have simply assumed that in the 1st century AD this geological bowl was less intimidating than it would be to a modern engineer? 19 We see from the LiDAR that while the remains of ridge-and-furrow cultivation survive extensively on this landscape, only a fragment Archaeopressof embanked road is still detectable leadingOpen South (Figure Access 11.2). I am grateful to John Moore for drawing my attention to the questions raised by Otmoor, redolent of the questions raised by water management elsewhere in the county as we will see.

This first Oxfordshire location in which we can visualize the young Manning is itself a place of contrasts. Sauer’s investigations were well in train when Henig and Booth published their Roman Oxfordshire (2000), and Sauer’s interpretation of the biography of the veteran Lucius Valerius Geminus; the importance of studying a short-lived annex to a settlement in getting straight to the otherwise inaccessible foundation horizon of

(2006): 1-30. 19 R. Chambers, ‘A Roman timber bridge at Ivy Farm, Fencott with Murcott, Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensia 51 (1986): 31-6.

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the main settlement, and his inspired link of both to the chronology of the Claudian invasion, all make dramatic reading.20 We have to assume that Manning would have been impressed, and we can share that sentiment in the face of Sauer’s sure-footedness in asking questions that gave him such a clear and relevant narrative.

If the origin of Alchester is confirmed, what of its strategic context? The road Akeman Street that forms a northern arc from London to Cirencester is mirrored by a southern arc of Portway through Silchester. Whether by intent or not, both roads are aligned to avoid the multiple crossings of the Thames that would be needed by a single straight (i.e. typically ‘Roman’) alignment between London and Cirencester. Henig and Booth say ‘there is no firm evidence that (Akeman Street) followed a significant earlier route’,21 but Manning’s Alchester is almost symmetrically opposite Silchester on the southern arc, and if it was laid out between the Claudian landings of AD 43 and the Sauer narrative of the winter of AD 44-45, we are seeing an astonishing feat of surveying even if under the Pax Romana.

The pragmatism of these arcing roads is however diminished by the line of the road that links their two apogees, being as watery as the arcs are dry, including the crossing of Otmoor. And while Silchester sits on a great Iron Age centre, Alchester is a formulaic plantation tucked just back from the line of Akeman Street. If members of the team that Manning and Myres assembled were driven by nostalgia for a heroic age in Western Europe, what would they have thought of Sauer’s contribution a century and a quarter later: the earliest biography of an Oxfordshire resident, the veteran Lucius Valerius Geminus; and the possibility that Flavia Domitilla and her son had spent time in this Oxfordshire field before her husband became the emperor Vespasian, and that son the emperor Titus?22 Would they have celebrated their own pioneering contribution, or would they be pressing for proof? Prosaically, Sauer notes that the archaeological record that might provide such proof may be progressively degrading with successive dry summers and consequent lowered water tables, items for the attention of our neo- Manning.23

Vignette 2: The Excavated North Leigh Roman Villa In 1910 we seeArchaeopress Manning aged 40 standing beside unweathered Open stonework Access of the Oxfordshire Roman villa at North Leigh (Figure 11.3). Assuming he stands in the north-west range, he has his back to the loop of the River Evenlode while facing towards a shed erected by the Duke of Marlborough to protect a fine Corinium school mosaic from depredation by souvenir hunters.24 This villa, on a scale of the greatest in Britain, lies a mile behind the line of Akeman Street (further back than does Alchester), and is representative

20 Sauer, ‘Alchester’; Martin Henig and Paul Booth, Roman Oxfordshire (Stroud: Sutton, 2000). 21 Henig and Booth, Roman Oxfordshire, p. 49. 22 Sauer, ‘Alchester’, p. 10. 23 Brian Durham, Robert van de Noort, Vibeke Vandrup Martens and Michel Vorenhout, ‘Organic Loss in Drained Wetland Monuments: Managing the Carbon Footprint’, Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites 14.1-4 (2012): 85-98. 24 English Heritage, ‘History of North Leigh Roman villa’, http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/ north-leigh-roman-villa/history/.

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of a cluster of smaller villas in the Ditchley area. Manning is photographed beside the curving wall of what Paul Booth identifies as a plunge-bath, newly exposed in the Francis Haverfield excavation of 1910. We must be prepared to look at the excavated remains through Manning’s eyes - would he attempt to construct a virtual landscape? He looks posed, as typical of portraits at a time when photographic emulsions were relatively slow and expensive, and we can Figure 11.3: Percy Manning at North Leigh Roman villa, 13 July 1910. only guess his thinking. On a summer afternoon with the land behind him falling away towards the river, he carries a clipboard in his right hand, and perhaps a pointer or stave in his left. He is not dressed for excavation, perhaps he was conducting a tour for the local society, catering to an appetite for communal understanding?

A Manning View of the Origins of Oxfordshire’s County Town

We have seen the young Manning at Alchester, imbued him with a perspective on the Romanization of Oxfordshire, and again in his middle years with a perspective on the villa at North Leigh. He lived much of his life in Oxford, and his promotion at age 42 of the 1912 exhibition in the Town Hall (see Chapters 1 and 6) must have seen him supervisingArchaeopress his material in the Assembly Rooms. Open He had already Access in 1906 recorded the basements of the Leopold Arms, where he could have visualized part of Oxford’s medieval north gate: but was his interest in that case directed at felons and martyrs of the Bocardo jail or at the defences of the early town, part of the complex recorded in 1772 including the architecture of St Michael at the Northgate tower opposite?25

It is at this stage we must juxtapose Manning with the person of Henry Minn, who seems to have done the photography in 1906. Both men were in their mid-thirties, but their lives had been quite different, and their written legacies likewise. The contrast is exemplified in the pencil records of two re-development sites, the replacement of

25 H.E. Salter (ed.), ‘A Survey of Oxford in 1772’, in Surveys and Tokens, edited by H. E. Salter (Oxford Historical Society, 75 (1923)), pp. 11-72.

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the Leopold Arms in 1906 and Tredwells Yard (now Boswell’s basement) in 1911.26 If Manning had been employing Minn, as he appears to have done with Thomas Carter in their joint collecting of folklore (see Chapters 1, 7 and 8), one would imagine a different relationship, and one would not expect Minn to have devoted himself for forty years after Manning’s death to the same role of diligently recording the changing city.27

Whether or not money changed hands in the documenting of these demolition sites may be less relevant than Minn’s note about the Tredwell’s Yard record ‘Traced from measurements by P Manning, Feb 1911’.28 The faint pencil record at Leopold Arms appears to show two hands, a confident technical script and a more hesitant one. Both may be Manning’s, because his signature is confident, but to a non expert it seems that both men annotated this site drawing, even if Minn then took it away to consolidate it with a disciplined draughtsmanship (Figure 11.4). Are we seeing here a deference from Minn, the watchmaker’s son, to his financially independent collaborator; was he being kind to the ‘aphasic’ Manning; or were they a team of equals with a shared curiosity? Assuming the measurements were made with a tape measure (a man at each end) the third option may be more likely.

Either way we must suspect that Manning, only four years younger than in his North Leigh portrait (Figure 11.3) was sometimes alone on this building site, presumably outside site shift hours, while he made his measurements, driven no doubt by the zeal that was later to drive a generation of urban archaeologists in the second half of the 20th century. Thus we may allow the possibility that the three mugs accessioned by the Ashmolean were Manning’s own finds,29 not purchased at the site gate as seems to be the case with donations from others.30

Aside from Henry Minn, whose diligence is self-evident, we must visualize Manning’s contacts with the many accomplished historians of his day, from Myres to James Parker, H.E. Salter and Hurst. Hurst pioneered the objectives of the present contribution by overlaying his own detailed commentary on Leonard Hutten’s Elizabethan perambulations around the city that they had shared, if four centuries apart.31 Hurst is very happy to take issue with Hutten’s views, for instance on the location of the ford of Oxford.32 Ironically for purposes of the present chapter, Hutten commences his tour by descendingArchaeopress Hinksey Hill in Berkshire and along theOpen causeway to Access Folly Bridge, suggesting that already in the 16th century this was seen as the important way into Oxford. Either way, it gave Hurst a framework on which to record his own observations of the city, and

26 Dodd, Oxford before the University, pp. 399-400. 27 Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. d. 495. 28 Bodl. MS Top. Oxon a.24, ff. 3,4. 29 AM Accessions Register AN1921.218-220; also Mellor, Pots and People, p. 75, Figure 89. 30 For example, T.E. Lawrence, described in Mellor, Pots and People, pp. 59-65. 31 Hurst, Oxford Topography, passim, based on Leonard Hutten, ‘The Antiquities of Oxford: Dissertation’, in Charles Plummer (ed.), Elizabethan Oxford: Reprints of Rare Tracts, pp. 33-108 (Oxford: Clarendon Press for the Oxford Historical Society, 1887) (perambulation pp. 83-104). 32 Hurst, Oxford Topography, p. 16. In the context of the ‘Western Approaches’ seminar below, it must be possible that Hutten was in fact referring to Stanford and Mayweed ford on the Old Abingdon Road, an attribution that Hurst might not have contested so fiercely.

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Archaeopress Open Access

Figure 11.4: Leopold Arms, Cornmarket Street 1906. All dimensions in feet.

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if he has to argue himself into Hutten’s perspective, in so doing he provides additional colour and clarity to the landscape that he and we in turn are looking at.

So in celebrating AD 911/2, how would Manning have visualized the newly founded town that was later to be protected by his early gatehouse masonry at the Leopold Arms/Bocardo site? Oxford’s medieval walls still stood in places, as Hurst notes on the north side of Brewer Street, although questioning its originality. The Brewer Street wall is (now) without bastions, but the comparable north wall was recognizable and Hurst offered a date based on the shape of its bastions.33 He noted that St Michael’s tower has a doorway for stepping onto the allure of the city wall, he saw its quoins as part of the gate architecture, but hesitated to think of it as part of the defences except in a limited way. 34 Did therefore Manning’s contemporaries consider what had protected the town at the 10th-century date they were commemorating in 1912? And what of the town’s interior? Hurst had seen the pre-settlement ground surface at Carfax exposed during the demolition of St Martin’s church, and he recognized a red soil above the gravel, but did he assume the whole town had risen above it like a tell?35

Manning had clearly worked with Hurst, his senior by 36 years, and would be aware of at least some of the content of the older man’s 1899 treatise. A more conventionally scientific approach to English towns generally had to wait for the 1960s, at which point it started to be recognized that if a given town had not been established under Roman administration then the next rash of foundations came in the reigns of Alfred the Great and his children. The burghal hideage was known to Stenton as a principle of communal defence,36 at a time when urban archaeology was developing a morphology of these places. Oxford was in the thick of this movement, with weekend conferences at Rewley House agonizing over how to define ‘burh’ and ‘town’ and the transition between them.37 The local agony is preserved in articles of the time and in the minds of one or two survivors, and the positions taken were and remain very real. Considerable attention has been paid to the location of the burghal west gate, a focus of active debate between historians and archaeologists in 2016 as described now.

Reconstructing a Western Route into Oxford, Tile 1: The Summertown- Radley TerraceArchaeopress Elements Open Access Assembling the conclusions of ‘Loess, LiDAR and Landscape’ above together with several vignettes of Manning’s archaeological curiosity including early Oxford, it is timely that a pressing geographical question should have come to the fore coinciding with the Manning centenary. This is the relative importance of two routes into Oxford from historic Berkshire, which were examined in a stimulating seminar on Oxford’s ‘Western Approaches’ inspired by Alan Crossley, Honorary Editor of the forthcoming (2017) Oxford

33 Hurst, Oxford Topography, p. 68. 34 Hurst, Oxford Topography, p. 68. 35 Hurst, Oxford Topography, p. 46. 36 F.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 265. 37 See Martin Biddle, ‘Towns’, in David M. Wilson (ed.), The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 99-150 (London: Methuen, 1976).

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Historic Town Atlas, and convened by Tom Hassall at the premises of Oxford Archaeology, Janus House, Osney Mead, on 25 July 2016.38

In the present chapter we saw above that both Leonard Hutten and Herbert Hurst had approached Oxford by the southern route across Folly Bridge, but the seminar saw it as important for this not to eclipse the potentially older route from the west via the documented medieval site of Oxen Ford.39 The present paper analyses this contradiction by characterising the settlement potential of the landscape as discrete ‘tiles’. Tile 1 is the raised Summertown Radley Terrace (up to 62 m OD). It is approached from the west across Tile 2, the adjacent flatter and lower Northmoor Terrace (around 56 m OD), and from the south across Tile 3, the even lower flood plain (around 55.5 m OD).

Working from the known therefore, on Tile 1 a classic Roman or Saxon urban layout would have a west gate on the projected line of Queen Street, now Bonn Square, with St Ebbe’s Street and New Inn Hall Street as intramural roads, being Hurst’s Royal-ways.40 The Bonn Square location was refuted in the opening statement of the seminar, Hassall pointing out that the Oxford’s original west gate could not be in this location because its presence would have distorted the build-up of street surfaces as recorded in the Castle Street section of 1970. His point is well illustrated by the dramatic camber inside Oxford’s 1771 north gate, maintaining headroom under the arch of the gate, depicted by Malchair and preserved in a print owned by Manning himself .41

If early Oxford had a west gate on the Queen Street axis it must therefore have been west of Bonn Square, in which case it could have been swallowed up in the growth of the castle defences. To reach such a gate, the extant model would have the west road always approaching the city up the slope of gravel from the line of either St Thomas’s High Street or Osney Lane. Interestingly the modelling of the pristine topography from observations of the gravel–Loess interface is showing that a route from Osney Lane to the end of Queen Street would run more oblique to the contours of the geological terrace than would a route from St Thomas Street which would logically have been steeper (Figure 11.5). Either route would have reached the top of the slope before passing Hassall’s half-cellared building aligned square to it above 61 m OD.42 Alan Crossley raised a third option based on a reconsideration of 1st-edition OS mapping and older. HeArchaeopress pointed to a trackway named the Open ‘Alley’ leading Access from Osney towards a potential crossing of the Castle Mill Stream at Swan’s Nest even more oblique to the GLI contours. It will be for him to present the case for this valuable alternative, in which connection the present writer has drawn his attention to the New Market close to this route towards Queen Street, which is recorded as leased with the Swan’s Nest in 1571.43

38 ‘Oxford’s Western Approaches: Discussion Document, 25 July 2016’ available on request from the author. 39 ‘Oxford’s Western Approaches’; H.E. Salter, Medieval Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press for the Oxford Historical Society, 1936), p. 1. 40 Hurst, Oxford Topography, p. 68. 41 Bodl. G.A. Oxon a.64, no.6. 42 T. Hassall, ‘Excavations at Oxford Castle 1965-73’, Oxoniensia 41 (1976): 232-308 (pp. 249, 251, 252, figures 8-10). 43 Hurst, Oxford Topography, p. 76.

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Figure 11.5: Provisional layout of primary burh and proto-castle overlaid on contours of gravel- Loess interface (GLI), Tiles 1-3.

The Alley model would seem almost to glance past the site of Oxford castle, but the other two must cross it. The north-east corner at least of the castle, and hence of any pre-Conquest ‘proto-castle’ on the same footprint, would have been on a level with the town, dropping away to the West and South. We have seen that a putative town gate, rampart and defensive ditch between the Castle Street section and the Hassall half-cellar could have disappeared in enlargements to the Castle Bailey ditch; similarly any approach road up the slope from Osney Lane would have been destroyed by the Victorian basement of the prison C Wing and the adjoining exercise yard. The only hint of anything resembling a road on this line is a black rectangle on the castle south-west wall illustratedArchaeopress on the Christ Church map of 1615. Open44 Access The putative west gate presupposes of course that the original Alfred-type stronghold had been sub-rectangular, with the ‘proto-castle’ as a separate triangle. There are sufficient examples of promontory burhs to challenge that model, and for Oxford the case for a regular combination of west gate, rampart and ditch rests on an observation behind George Street where a ditch at least 12 m wide appeared to return south from the main city ditch in the garden of the then Oxford University Social Studies Library.45 If parallel to New Inn Hall Street such a ditch and gate combination would fall within

44 Eleanor Chance, Christina Colvin, Janet Cooper, C.J. Day, T.G. Hassall, Mary Jessup and Nesta Selwyn, ‘Castle’, in A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 4, the City of Oxford, ed. Alan Crossley and C.R. Elrington, pp. 296-300 (London: Victoria County History, 1979), p. 298. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol4/ pp296-300. 45 Dodd, Oxford before the University, p. 402.

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the width of the later castle ditch. Ultimately our neo-Manning might therefore press for dedicated confirmatory boreholes within St Peter’s College. Meantime however the footprint of the castle will be accepted as being a triangular addition to an essentially rectangular primary defensive enclosure (Figure 11.5).

The Western Approaches seminar duly considered the political demands on such a proto- castle, and Alan Crossley reasonably anticipated the existence of a building that could have housed the national assemblies of the reigns of Aethelred II, Cnut and successors. A century (at least) from its foundation, Oxford is argued from its mint output to have been a Midlands economic powerhouse, and Blair outlines the assumed horse-trading of Oxfordshire among 11th-century sub-earldoms.46 Candidates for a great council venue within Oxford overall are as follows, three falling within the putative proto-castle:

1. Oxford proto-castle: a. A purpose-built shire hall – perhaps one or both aisles of the structure depicted on the Christ Church map of 1615, discussed perceptively by Hurst;47 b. Space within St George’s Tower (flush inside wall-faces);48 c. A timber hall at Castle B/C-Wing.49 2. A property predating All Saints Church that had forced a diversion of the mid- road drain.50 3. A minster centred in the area of the cathedral.51 4. A minster at St Peter-in-the-East.52 5. A pre-Norman residence at Beaumont, leaving mid-Saxon Ipswich ware.53 6. Remains of the henge enclosure east of St Giles’ church.54

Material evidence exists for Option 1b, where St George’s Tower was shutter-built on its inside but not outside faces, reversing that at St Michael at the Northgate; and Option 1c, in that a timber building that might be on a scale to house a Great Council has been recorded beneath the Castle’s south-west rampart.55 A counter-argument to Option 1c is its level: the GLI modelling shows this location as being overlooked by, for instance, the sunken-floored building excavated by Hassall east of County Hall, and by the site of the later Shire Hall or Sessions House (Option 1a) as inferred from excavated footings.56 In similar vein, Crossley asked the July seminar if the area of the castle and putative proto-castleArchaeopress were in a subservient relationship Open to the town, Access that is, ‘why did the 46 John Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Stroud: Sutton; Oxford: Oxfordshire Books, 1994), pp. 106-107; Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 415. 47 Hurst, Oxford Topography, pp. 81-82; Oxford Archaeology, Oxford Castle Excavations, forthcoming. I am grateful to Kirsty Smith and Anne Dodd for access to a pre-publication draft, November 2016. 48 Oxford Archaeology, Oxford Castle Excavations. 49 Oxford Archaeology, Oxford Castle Excavations. 50 Dodd, Oxford before the University, p. 265, figure 5.25. 51 Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, p. 87. 52 Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, p. 113. 53 Daniel Poore and David R.P. Wilkinson, Beaumont Palace and the White Friars : Excavations at the Sackler Library, Beaumont Street, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford Archaeological Unit, 2001). 54 Wallis, Oxford Henge and Late Saxon Massacre. 55 Oxford Archaeology, Oxford Castle Excavations. 56 Hassall, ‘Excavations at Oxford Castle’, pp. 249-252, figures 8-10; Oxford Archaeology, Oxford Castle Excavations, illustrates a twin-aisled hall north under forecourt of present Malmaison hotel.

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Conqueror place his motte there?’ Pending publication, in seeking a best fit reflecting the economic and strategic importance of pre-Norman Oxford at the time of the first of these great councils in 1015,57 neo-Manning would need to consider the possibility that one at least of the aisles of the Option 1a structure had been in place in time to welcome Aethelred, his court and his second wife Emma of Normandy.

The location we are here projecting for a proto-castle has a wet defence in the form of the Castle Mill Stream. A new factor is therefore Norton’s profile of the gravel surface across this line, because it shows none of the character of the Devensian watercourse at St Aldate’s/Grandpont, so on available gravel exposures it is reasonable to postulate that the mill stream was man-made.58 For date, work on Irish mills has begun to corroborate the 7th-century date inferred from an incomplete tree-ring sequence at a multiple mill site on the Thames at Old Windsor.59 This means we can be reasonably sure that the engineering skill required to create a mill at Oxford was available to the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia from as early as AD 690. There is no local evidence to make either this or Osney mill so early, but the drop in level from Tile 2 Northmoor Terrace to Tile 3 flood plain makes this an ideal location for mill-works, and the shape of the proto- castle with apex at St George’s Tower at the edge the flood plain makes it reasonable to suppose the layout of our proto-castle was responding to a mill. Neo-Manning would ask why a proto-castle would not have given itself a longer waterfront onto the Castle Mill Stream, and one possibility is that a protected waterfront was less important to the proto-castle than was the mill itself.

North of the castle site the modern topography has been truncated by the castle ditch; the canal basin; the ramp of George Street leading to the town north gate; and Brokenhayes/Gloucester Green. Seeking a pristine geomorphology here, the GLI contouring (Fig. 5) allows for the possibility that Brokenhayes/Gloucester Green became a massive gravel quarry alongside the steady ramp of Irishman’s/George Street up to the Northgate. A corollary is that Beaumont would not have been a geological ‘mont’, i.e. the name may reflect artificial enhancement of the natural ground surface or (perhaps more likely) defensive embanking in either the Anarchy (AD 1135-1154) or the Barons’ Wars (AD 1215-1267). For Tile 1 therefore,Archaeopress the simplest provisional model Open includes a Accessproto-castle in the form of a triangular sloping enclosure separate from the burh, controlling a traditional route from the west and controlling a water mill on an artificial leet, thereby protecting the seat of the earls of Oxford.

57 David Hill, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), maps 222-224. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, p. 159. 58 Andrew Norton, ‘Excavations at 67-69 St Thomas’ Street, Oxford’, Oxoniensia 71 (2006): 347-392 (p. 385, figure 15). 59 See Colin Rynne, ‘Mills and Milling in Early Medieval Ireland’, in Neil Jackman, Caitríona Moore and Colin Rynne The mill at Kilbegly: An Archaeological Investigation on the Route of the M6 Ballinasloe to Athlone National Road Scheme, pp. 115-174 (Dublin: The National Roads Authority, 2013); Derek Keene, ‘Old Windsor’, in David Lewis, Windsor and Eton, pp. 5-16 (Oxford: Historic Towns Trust, 2015).

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Reconstructing a Western Route into Oxford: Tile 2 - The Northmoor Terrace Elements

Manning’s collecting took him to the western valley floor of the city, including finds from the Minster Ditch downstream of the Salter location for the Oxen Ford place name, being our second element in arguing a morphogenesis for Oxford and its west approach. Here the writer is grateful for discussions with David MacDonald of British Geological Survey (BGS), and for sight of BGS’s analysis of the Thames flood plain which helps to define the shape of Tile 2.60 The Northmoor Terrace has been exposed archaeologically at the Newsquest site on Osney Mead, bringing it close to the edge of the Minster Ditch and Manning’s river finds. There are proposals for comprehensive redevelopment of Osney Mead in the next ten years that would confirm this, but provisionally the Minster Ditch will be taken as the downstream edge of the Northmoor Terrace at Osney Mead and hence the south edge of Tile 2.

For the west edge of Tile 2 I am grateful to Dr MacDonald for his view that the Seacourt Stream has the deepest channel profile on the Thames flood plain. This is not immediately obvious from the cross-section illustrated by Newell, and it remains to examine other cross sections for the profile of the top of gravel and base of silted channels. Meantime, given the conclusion above that the Castle Mill Stream has none of the character of a Devensian channel in comparison with that at St Aldate’s; given the contouring of top of gravel;61 and pending new data on Osney Mead and the documented Oxen Ford location, the best fit provisionally favours the continuation of the Seacourt Stream as still the main channel as it passes North Hinksey (Figure 11.6). This leaves open the question of whether the line of Osney Mill Stream is natural? A trench excavated in the rear garden at 12 Barrett Street in May 2007 showed the local GLI at 55.51 m OD,62 and if Osney Town had been as closely studied archaeologically as St Thomas’s parish it might show that, like the Castle Mill Stream, Osney Mill Stream is also an artificial leet – another question for our neo-Manning.

The West Approach in Tile 2

Alan Crossley has re-examined H.E. Salter’s case for the Oxen Ford at Hinksey, and is comfortable that its location is correctly identified.63 The seminar similarly accepted the notion Archaeopressof a Roman road down Harcourt Hill,Open which has sinceAccess been corroborated locally, but echoing Crossley’s own question reasonably asks where should the traveller go next after crossing the ferry and/or the ford? The simplistic answer must lie in study of the area North-east of the ‘ford’ site, to connect the river crossing with one or more of the Salter zig-zag routes (Figure 11.7). Initial emphasis is placed on a simplistic spinal route aiming towards the second terrace, shown red. For corroboration the only extant data for pre-landfill Osney Mead is a 1933 Allen air photo, but it is a high-altitude

60 A.J. Newell, Morphology and Quaternary Geology of the Thames Floodplain around Oxford. British Geological Survey Open Report, OR/08/030 (Keyworth: British Geological Survey, 2007). 61 Newell, Morphology and Quaternary Geology, p. 9, figure 4. 62 David Jenkins, personal communication. 63 Salter, Medieval Oxford, p. 1; Alan Crossley, personal communication.

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Figure 11.6: Thames-Cherwell confluence inferred as two alluvial fans pushing the Thames to west side of valley floor. view and the negative plate has an over-developed grainy emulsion.64 The digital scan may be showing two parallel darker strips consistent with wet areas flanking such a route, but if so the ‘strips’ have defied improvement of contrast in the original plate.65 If the distribution of tones proves to be real this would not be unreasonable, because experience is that any given location on the valley floor will have become wetter over time as waterways were controlled and channels silted,66 and a Roman/mid-Saxon route here would therefore need to be protected against winter flooding.

The simplistic red route (Figure 11.7) has been made to crank at the point where it meets the northern edge of the modern Osney Mead, thence a straight track on the line of South Street, Barrett Street and Osney Lane. With this as a model, the Allen aerial photographyArchaeopress strips would be cutting the corner Open of the Osney Access Mead crank. Another potential source is the Christ Church survey of c. 1848 that provides the layout of meadowland rights, and logically would illustrate the evolution of the mead, but there is nothing resembling a route on a radius from the Oxen Ford site, and prima facie the recorded plots predate Crossley’s ‘ferryman’s causeway’ of 1467.67

64 Sturdy, Historic Oxford, p. 20, figure 9a, p. 20; AM Allen Air Photograph Archive, AA 1650. 65 I am grateful to Ian Cartwright for supplying high resolution scans of the plate. 66 M.A. Robinson and G.H. Lambrick, ‘Holocene Alluviation and Hydrology in the Upper Thames Basin’, Nature 308.5962 (26 April 1984): 809-814. 67 H.E. Salter, ‘The meadows between Oseney and Botley’, in his Cartulary of Oseney Abbey, Volume 2, pp. 443- 444 and facing p. 634. (Oxford: Clarendon Press for the Oxford Historical Society, 1929).

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Figure 11.7: Options for reconstructing the western route into Oxford (southern routes via Abingdon Road omitted for clarity). Archaeopress Open Access Reconstructing a Western Route into Oxford: Tile 3 - The Southern Flood Plain

The ‘Western Approaches’ seminar by common consent did not address the flood plain south of the historic city, designated here as Tile 3, because the hydrogeology and hence the geoarchaeology become relatively more complex. It is nevertheless relevant because we have seen above that Hutten and Hurst each start their topographical accounts by approaching Oxford from the south, thereby adding ammunition to concerns that the western route had been neglected. The ambient gravel surface in Tile 3 is typically at least 1 m lower than the adjoining Northmoor Terrace at Paradise Square and at White House Road, with a deeper channel down to 52 m under Shire Lake.68 Confirming Hurst’s

68 Robinson, in Dodd, Oxford before the University, p. 68, figure 3.3.

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observation, the Loess capping is not demonstrable in Tile 3, the gravel instead covered by a variable thickness of silt described as a reed-swamp deposit.69

The north edge of Tile 3 has a natural channel draining water from a spring line at the interface of the Summertown-Radley Terrace and the Oxford Clay, recorded at 89 St Aldates. 70 A similar feature was demonstrated in July 2015 at the Westgate Open Day, described there as the proto-Trill Mill Stream. Provisionally we will call the ambient gravel in Tile 3 the ‘flood plain’ to distinguish it from the Northmoor Terrace in Tile 2. If the spring-line channel is continuous through these sites, it is falling westward at a gradient steeper than the ambient gravel. If the adjoining flood plain were to be projected east and west it would link the flood plains of the Cherwell and the Thames, and the issue for neo-Manning would be whether the water that had sculpted this surface was the Thames flow having swung eastward at North Hinksey/Osney, or of the Cherwell flow having swung west at St Clement’s.

Bore-hole data kindly provided by BGS for top of gravel is presently not definitive on the flood plain gradient in Tile 3.71 The answer may come from modelling of the top of gravel related to design of the Environment Agency’s Oxford and Abingdon Flood Alleviation Scheme (OAFAS),72 pending which this confluence area might prove to be an ‘alluvial fan’ created by the Cherwell strewing its gravel burden in the path of the Thames, as postulated in Figures 11.6 and 11.7.73 If so, turbulence at the actual mixing site could be indicated by scouring of the clay base, leaving an extra depth of gravel, and such a depth is reported 1 km downstream of North Hinksey.74 Possibly significant, the only other example of such deepening on this valley floor is at Wytham where the inflow of the periglacial Kidlington channel of the Cherwell would have met the Thames flow, which could again define the location of turbulence from mixing of two flows. If a hydrogeological case is made for turbulence having created the North Hinksey scour, this would imply that the St Ebbe’s flood plain had geologically carried water of the Cherwell in a westerly or south-westerly flow, inferring that the present eastward flow of the Thames under Folly Bridge arises from a reversal, potentially engineered by man.75 Such a reversal would not be unprecedented on the Thames.76

The attempt to reconstruct flow lines in this way seems to be novel on the Thames flood plain,Archaeopress but worthwhile nonetheless if it wouldOpen help a neo-Manning Access to place the

69 Hurst, Oxford Topography, p. 33; Robinson, in Dodd, Oxford before the University, p. 77, figure 3.7. 70 Dodd, Oxford before the University, p. 68, figure 3.3 and p.90, figure 3.16; Newell, Morphology and Quaternary Geology, p. 2, para 3.1, 71 I am grateful to David MacDonald for supplying a spreadsheet of historic borehole data.. 72 Environment Agency, ‘Oxford Flood Alleviation Scheme’, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ oxford-flood-risk-management-scheme/oxford-and-abingdon-reducing-flood-risk. 73 The confluence of the Feshie with the Spey (Scotland) illustrates present day fan morphologenesis: see Alan Werritty, Trevor B. Hoey and Andrew R. Black, ‘The Geomorphology and Management of a Dynamics, Unstable Gravel-bed River: The Feshie-Spey Confluence, Scotland’, in Celso Garcia and Ramon J. Batalla (eds), Developments in Earth Surface Processes, Volume 7, pp. 213–224 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005). 74 Newell, Morphology and Quaternary Geology, pp. 16-17, figures 12, 13. 75 Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, p. 104. 76 R.H.C. Davies, ‘The Ford, the River and the City’, Oxoniensia 38 (1973): 258-267; pace John Blair, Waterways and Canal-building in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 268.

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colonization of the site of Oxford in a waterscape perspective. By putting Tiles 1, 2 and 3 together we can see the Summertown-Radley Terrace as a ridge or peninsula with a top at about 62 m OD +/-1 m, the Northmoor Terrace (St Thomas; Port Meadow) grading from 58.8 m OD at King’s Weir to around 55.5 m OD at Osney, and the St Ebbe’s flood plain at least 1 m lower. For the Northmoor Terrace the BGS drift geology map is less clear cut, showing patches of gravel between areas of ‘alluvium’, but this may be simplistic if it does not acknowledge a covering of Loess now cultivated (see Loess LiDAR and Landscape above), i.e. where ‘alluvium’ is around 300 mm thick it may in fact be Hurst’s loam capping.

Reconstructing a Western Route into Oxford: Provisional Conclusions

We have seen that the Western Approaches seminar initiated by Alan Crossley, by posing questions of the archaeology, has inspired a reassessment of the most concealed cultural landscape in Oxfordshire, that which survives as fragments under the county town. The by-products are:

1. Recognition that the gravel terraces at Oxford may for a period have been an ‘island’. 2. Definition of the ‘Loess’ capping soil layer, formerly ‘brickearth’ or ‘supra- natural’. 3. A contour map of the pre-settlement landscape reconstructed from the gravel- Loess interface. 4. Acceptance of the primacy of a Thames crossing at North Hinksey and the Oxen Ford. 5. Four candidates for the line of that route over time. 6. A refining of the area of archaeological interest at Osney Mead.

Alan Crossley’s objective of finding an incontestable candidate for an early road link from the Oxen Ford to the town site has therefore delivered huge tangential benefits, and can be a framework for narrowing down the western options. It can also be a springboard for revisiting the archaeohydrology of the Cherwell confluence south of the historicArchaeopress city. Open Access A Neo-Manning Curioscape for Oxfordshire

Hopefully the above Roman vignettes and the application of surface and drift geoarchaeology techniques to the site of Oxford have bridged a century of curiosity between Manning and our fictional neo-Manning, and we should take stock. One of the more obscure putative venues for an Aethelred II Great Council above was the recently discovered ‘Oxford henge’ between St Giles and Parks Road. We need not here address the original role of such great earthworks in the evolution of society, but their distribution implies that they fulfilled a Bronze Age social need; might that need have been replicated in 11th-century Oxford in a process of ethnic cleansing? This was a troubled time in England, where Scandinavian raiding parties small and large were parasitizing a prosperous society, which was in turn learning to protect itself.

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Turning south from the henge, an onlooker would have seen a prosperous town that was learning to use the harsh Corallian fieldstone for stone buildings, by encasing it in copious lime-rich mortar. As a town it was also rising in the world, physically. Only the first layer of streets shows signs of wear, and it must be assumed that the burghers had rapidly learnt to replace this surface with stone sets bedded in a generous thickness of gravel, sets that were reused at the next resurfacing so that only the gravel survives, except in one place.77

Anne Dodd in 2003 provided an elegant statement of the historical and numismatic arguments for the date of foundation of Oxford, and importantly she made a structural distinction between the existence in AD 911/2 of ‘Oxford and the lands thereof’ and the potentially separate construction of a formalised Wessex-type burh before AD 919.78 Neo- Manning would therefore ask for physical evidence of the transition of ‘place’ to burh: the singed branches used to tie back the timber rampart-facing at St Michael’s Street; the first street surfaces in some cases suggesting an almost ritual spreading of gravel; the possibility that metrical analysis of the 1772 survey can show the ghost of equal subdivision of large properties existing already at the foundation;79 and why the High Street mid-road drain diverts in front of such a property on the north frontage. In case the AD 911/2 Chronicle entry is referring to an entity at Oxford capable of ‘owning’ significant land, maybe even land as large as ‘Oxfordshire’, neo-Manning would want to collect all such strands, use his Yorkshire pragmatism to imagine the transition process in total, and to ask himself if the central property that forced the drain to be diverted (now Lincoln College Library) might have been home to whoever controlled the lands of Oxford, supported by minster communities to west, east and south.

Pragmatically our neo-Manning would also need to review Oxford’s land communications under the six provisional conclusions listed above, including the likelihood that the natural crossing of the Thames lost its primacy to a south route, and has since become archaeologically ‘dormant’ pending redevelopment of Osney Mead to its modern economic potential.80 Would such a challenge appeal to the buccaneering young man who had tried to negotiate down what he needed to pay for some Osney Abbey sculpture that he had already deposited in a museum? The modernArchaeopress buccaneer, the field archaeologist, Open negotiates nowadays Access with reasonable arguments in the corridors of town-planning power, and holds his/her material discoveries in trust between the owner and a museum. Percy Manning might recognize this process, and approve.

77 Dodd, Oxford before the University, p. 260, no. 54; cf. H.E. Salter’s view of the rarity of medieval encroachment in his Medieval Oxford, p. 87. 78 Dodd, Oxford before the University, pp. 31-32. A newly discovered Oxfordshire silver hoard can be read to infer that around AD 879 the Mercian king Ceolwulf II was ignobly ‘disappeared’ in circumstances not entirely creditable to Alfred the (so-called) Great. This new perspective on power-politics in Oxfordshire in the generation preceding the foundation of Dodd’s burh at Oxford is proposed in John Naylor and Gareth Williams, King Alfred’s Coins:Tthe Watlington Viking Hoard (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016), pp. 23-28. 79 Salter, ‘A Survey of Oxford’. 80 Oxford Archaeology, among the most creditable heritage consultancies in the world, found its sixth and most enduring home in the former Olivetti building on Osney Mead, right next to the Minster Ditch.