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Oxford
Oxford
Touring the University of Oxford with Westminster's social program was cool, but the highlight of my entire day was seeing Oxford Castle. I was as excited and overawed as I was at the Tower of London! Our trip started bright and early at 7:30 AM, and after an hour and a half ride, we arrived in Oxford. Our tour guide showed us around for an hour and gave us a lot of cool history of the university (see below), then he turned us loose. I bolted for Oxford Castle (left) to squeeze in an hour-long tour, and it was so worth it! Both parts of my Oxford trip are discussed below.
Historical Overview of Oxford
Historical Overview of Oxford
Notes from the tour guide.
Researchers have found evidence of Iron Age settlements in Oxford.
Oxford was originally a border town between the Anglo-Saxon Wessex and Mercian kingdoms, and as such, it was highly fortified. When the Vikings arrived 1200 years ago, Oxford was constantly changing hands between Wessex and Mercia.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, a castle was built here.
In 1096, Oxford saw the emergence of the first 'university' institution. It wasn't called a university yet, and it wouldn't be called such for 200 years. But it was the closest thing England had seen to one. Traveling tutors would come rent out monastic houses or halls and educate priests.
In 1209, there was a big riot. Many scholars got killed, many of them moved to Cambridge. They organized themselves into a guild/organization and called themselves “universitas”. They made sure all masters (teachers) were up to skill level. Once they were an organization, they could ask the monarchy for privileges, including self governing privileges. These were granted.
By the mid-13th century, universities were formed. (University College, Balliol, St. John's, etc.). They still argue which is the oldest. Four colleges per century have been added on to Oxford, mainly for graduates, but eventually for undergraduates as well. Now there’s 39 colleges at Oxford (the last one was founded in 2020).
Buildings were built like castles, and a curfew required all students to be back inside by nine p.m., mainly to avoid being stabbed (casual violence was very common). It was a dangerous town, with lots of risk, because it was a small area full of drunk young men with sharp weapons.
Oxford was originally for what the tour guide called "middling sorts," sons of bakers and tailors (and tradesmen), who could afford to pay. The poor didn’t come here; their only option was indentured servitude. The rich didn’t come; they had private tutors so they wouldn’t have to mingle with commoners. Only later did they go to university, and even then they thought it was beneath them because they thought they knew everything already.
In order to come to university here, students had to know grammar (Latin), rhetoric, and logic. In medieval times, students came here at age 13, since people died young and it took 7 years to graduate. Oxford had a 50% drop out rate, since it was expensive and dangerous, and just starting here was enough to set up a great career.
Many universities closed in the 16th century; King Henry VIII persecuted and closed them due to their early connection to monastic houses. Some merged with other colleges or reinvented themselves.
When women were finally allowed to attend university, women had to have separate colleges. Women couldn’t get degrees, they could only get certifications (until the 1920s, when they could get degrees). There was a cap on how many women could be at the university, all the way until 1979! Since they’re self governing, they were able to get away with that.
28 British Prime Ministers were educated at Oxford. 1600 Nobel Prize laureates were here.
JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis were educated here. They had informal drinking session meetings at a pub called Eagle and Child (colloquially known as the Bird and the Baby).
St John’s College is the largest college at Oxford, established in 1555, and it now has an endowment of $500 million per year. It’s built out of a former monastery.
All the ceremonies take place in the building on the right, including undergraduate graduation, which was taking place while we were there!
The statues on the wall are called “Emperors” and they are not original. Students used to deface them by painting on them over summer, so the university replaced the heads. They couldn’t simply wash the paint off; the stone is limestone, so if you try to wash the paint off, the limestone is taken off with it. These heads are replacements from the 1790s. Students are no longer allowed to climb the poles and paint.
This is the Natural History Museum, which has an original unaltered chalkboard from Einstein with preserved notes.
This library, Weston Library, is a depository library like Cambridge and British Museum, meaning every publisher in the country has to send the library a copy of every book published. It has 13.5 million books and they had to build a warehouse 25 miles away to store them all.
A nearby passage is called “St Helen’s Passage” with a sign that says “education through intoxication.” It leads to a pub, the oldest pub in the area, and allegedly, Bill Clinton used to go there when he was a Rhodes Scholar.
The tall tree in the courtyard of New College is where Draco Malfoy was turned into a ferret in the movie adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The scene was filmed on site. The site, New College, was opened in 1379 after the Black Death, because people were worried there weren’t enough priests and they needed to train more.
This statue was the inspiration for Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter. The infirmary in Harry Potter, when Hermione is treated once petrified and Harry is injured, was filmed on location here in a dancing hall at Oxford. A lot of sketches of Oxford were used to conceptualize what Hogwarts looked like.
The doors indicate what subjects were once taught there (in this case, Natural Philosophy). The courtyard beyond the doors was added to make more room for lectures.
This building was built by John Ratcliffe, the physician to Queen Anne. Oxford was in decline; they weren’t producing many scientists, compared to Cambridge, so Oxford was seen as less important. (Oxford produced lawyers and clergymen.) To show they were still important, they built another building. Building new buildings was an example of eighteenth century showmanship and meant to revitalize attendance.
This is All Souls University, a research college at Oxford University. It has 56 fellows, but only 8 students in the whole college. Applicants have to pass 3 tests to get in: two 10-12 page papers, and a defense of their paper to the fellows. Only TWO students per year get accepted. Two! Out of thousands! When Hayley and I did the math, we saw that an applicant has about a 0.03% chance of getting accepted, even after all that work.
This is Christ Church, a former Benedictian monastery. When Christ Church was established, Wellesley (Henry VIII’s second in command) had suppressed the monks and was given the land to build his own college. Wellesley fell out of favor and was charged with treason when he failed to secure an annulment for Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, so Henry took over Wellesley’s college. This college became a finishing school for the wealthy after their years of tutoring. Seventeen Prime Ministers were educated here. The dining hall inspired Harry Potter’s dining hall, but it’s a functioning dining hall year-round, and they couldn’t close it to students even for a day or two. People at Warner Brothers just had to take sketches and recreate it.
This is Oxford's War Memorial Garden.
Oxford Castle (A.K.A. The Best Part!)
Oxford Castle (A.K.A. The Best Part!)
This is why I'm fascinated by Oxford Castle, and why I was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning to get to visit it. It's the location of one of my favorite historical events, from the Anarchy period of British history! In 1142, the rightful English Queen, Empress Matilda, was at war with her cousin Stephen, who’d usurped her throne before she could be crowned. (Imagine how that would've changed the course of history, if the first English queen was crowned in the 1100s instead of 1558!) His forces had besieged her here at Oxford Castle, and she was staying up in St. George's Tower. With supplies running close to empty, her surrender was imminent. But even if her own ascension to the throne was unlikely, she didn’t want to stop fighting for the birthright that was also her son’s. So instead of surrendering, she dressed herself and three knights in white sheets, climbed out of the window (bottom left) during a blinding blizzard, and walked right through the siege. No one saw her due to the snow. As she escaped, she walked backwards in the snow so her footsteps led to the tower. Once she and her knights reached the River Thames, she rode skates across the frozen river and escaped the siege. She never got her throne back, but the story of her escape is still remembered!
These very steep steps lead up to St. George's Tower. Known as Norman trick steps, they were meant to be steep, narrow, and unpredictable, so that knights storming the tower would fall and impale themselves on their swords. I climbed 101 stairs to get to the top, and let me say, it was not fun!
This is Empress Matilda's room, where she escaped through the window from St. George's Tower. (Her bedchamber was later converted to a horror of a prison cell housing up to 30 men, with poor sanitation, rampant illness, and dead bodies left in the corner. But I prefer to remember this room as the site of her daring escape, rather than the 1500s prison cell.)
This hill is called Castle Mound.
This is the perimeter of Oxford Castle, or rather, what's left of it.
An aerial view of what Oxford Castle used to look like, at the height of its power.
This is what Oxford Castle probably looked like at the height of its power.
Me standing on the overlook on the very top of Oxford Tower.
This crypt is located below the castle. The chapel was destroyed, but the underground crypt was blocked off and forgotten about until it was later rediscovered.
These pillars are what later prisoners built while they were imprisoned here, to learn a trade so that when they were released, they had skills and didn’t fall into poverty. (This was considered to be a better alternative to the pointless hard labor prisoners had to endure for several centuries.)
On the other side of the wall was the dungeon where people were tortured. The entrance has long since been blocked off, but you can still approach it from an underground tunnel on the other side.
A Victorian-era prison cell, when jailors realized putting one prisoner in each cell would be more sanitary and cut down on disease.
This was the cushy room of Mary Blandy, a woman of the gentry imprisoned here for 'accidentally' killing her father with hemlock. (Personally, I think she's innocent of knowledge of the crime, even if she did do it; her lover convinced her it was a love potion that would make her father allow them to get married.) In medieval prisons, highborn prisoners could pay off the guards to get better lodgings, as Mary Blandy did. Sadly, she was still executed.
Oxford Castle is home of the first mugshots!
This is the youngest ever inmate here, only 8 years old. She was sentenced to 7 days of hard labor here for allegedly stealing her neighbor’s pram (stroller). It was going to be a longer sentence, but the judge “took pity” on her family and didn’t want the stigma of having a convict daughter to follow them.
Some other mugshots. The boy in the top right, who looks about 12, is actually 17. He was imprisoned for nearly a month for stealing a loaf of bread, but I can hardly blame him; he was clearly malnourished.
This is the debtor’s prison. The wooden poles separated seven cells, with iron bars spanning from the center of the room to the wall. These cells had zero privacy, since there were no walls, only bars. The longest serving inmate here spent 30 years imprisoned here!
This is a straitjacket, with insignia meaning that the prisoner belongs to the crown.
This is the prison's first infirmary.
Stratford-Upon-Avon
Stratford-Upon-Avon
I barely made it back to the tour bus after the Oxford Castle tour came to a close, but I hopped on and we continued our trip to William Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-Upon-Avon. (According to our tour guide, "Strat" means "street," and "ford" references "water," so the name of the settlement means Street by the River Avon.) The house behind me is the home of Shakespeare's parents, and it's also where his father John made and sold custom-made gloves.
William Shakespeare lived here until he was 18, when he had to marry Anne Hathaway (who was 26), because she was six months pregnant with his child. Like his father, who married into the gentry of the Arden family, Shakespeare married up into a landowning family. His first daughter was named Susanne. They had two more kids, then Shakespeare left for London. He continued to provide for them.
This room in Shakespeare's house likely functioned as a storeroom for food.
This is the bedroom of Shakespeare's parents, and it's also where he was born.
Examples of toys Shakespeare might have had were scattered around his parents' bed.
This is the boys’ room, with one bed shared by all three Shakespeare boys (William, Gilbert, and Richard) until they were 18, when they moved out and got married. Sharing a bed this small must’ve been uncomfortable, but it was meant to conserve heat due to the lack of insulation.
Shakespeare’s father John and his five apprentices would make custom-made gloves in here, then sell them through a window facing the street (next photo).
This window in John Shakespeare's workshop faced the street and acted as a storefront. A single pair of gloves could take up to six months to make! There wouldn’t have been glass, that was a later addition.
This is where the Shakespeare family ate dinner. The food was prepared in a building outside to lower the risk of the house catching on fire; unfortunately, that building is now gone. Cupboards were used to display expensive items, like glass cups or porcelain plates. The furniture in this room is at least 500 years old!
This room, the parlor, contained the nicest and most expensive bed, which was reserved for special guests. Showing off the best bed was meant to show a family's status and wealth.
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