Life in the Earliest Towns: Origins of Towns, 8th, 9th and 10th centuries, and the Norman Arrival, 11th and 12th centuries AD

With one or two possible exceptions, Romano-British towns did not survive as commercial centres. Town development in Britain had to begin all over again. New centres arose as markets, as extra-mural settlements of craftspeople, traders and families next to monasteries, or as refuges in time of trouble or attack, most famously during the years of Viking threat in the 9th and early 10th centuries. Oxford began as a riverside settlement of the 8th century, lying just outside the grounds of the monastery of St Frideswide, where the road to Abingdon forded the Thames. Around 900, King Alfred or his son Edward the Elder created a defended town or burh by surrounding the settlement with an earthen bank and ditch.

The layout of the little town was a defensive one, with its four gates to north, south, east and west, and with defensive towers which still survive to the north (St Michael’s) and west (St George’s) (both are probably of the first half of the 11th century). All this is still reflected today in central Oxford’s street plan and place-names. A grid of streets, running in Roman fashion at right angles between the four main ones, was gradually filled with long, thin plots, each with its one-storey timber house and long garden for pigs, chickens, cess-pits and any craft or industrial activities.

When Norman forces arrived in 1066, Oxford was a busy and important enough place to be chosen as the site of a castle, which was designed to overawe the Saxon inhabitants. At first an earth and timber construction sited on the west side of the existing town defences, the bailey held all the amenities required for the life of the Norman garrison, while the motte (Oxford Castle Mound) provided a lookout up and down the Thames and across the Chiltern Hills, as well as down onto the property of every Saxon in town.