Physical Features 9 



In early English times the main wooded mass of the country was 

 dotted with hamlets, each with its own communal arable and grazing land, 

 which in Norman times were affiliated as manors to large military land- 

 owners ; Robert d'Oili, the first governor, collected some fifty manors by 

 marriage with a Saxon lady. In the fourteenth century, following depopula- 

 tion and the decay of the feudal system, land tended to go out of cultivation, 

 cattle-rearing and the small holder again becoming dominant factors. 1 In 

 the sixteenth century the country was still predominantly wooded (Camden, 

 1586) ; on the west there was continuous forest over the Boar's Hill district 

 from Wytham to Abingdon. Another great belt on the E. took in Shotover 

 and ranged NW. to Stanton St. John. Open waste and heath-land extended 

 over Bullingdon to Magdalen Bridge. Cutting of the woods went on in the 

 seventeenth century, in the time of the civil war ; and during the eighteenth 

 century, as the country began to settle down after the wars, agriculture 

 tended to improve, enclosure set in on a large scale, hedges were multiplied, 

 and the general aspect of the countryside began to approximate its present 

 appearance. Old main roads rose to the tops of the hills above the clay as 

 soon as possible, passing over open country without hedges ; the London 

 road over Shotover Plain, and the road to the west through Ferry Hinksey, 

 Botley, over Wytham Hill to Eynsham. Much of the inter-communication 

 of villages was by mere cross-country tracks, suitable for pack-horses rather 

 than wheeled traffic. Many field-tracks between farms became public foot- 

 paths ; others have been ploughed up, and the connexion lost, as has much 

 of the Roman road. Enclosures in the eighteenth and early nineteenth 

 centuries have completely changed the older order of the country, as the 

 advent of the railway has that of the urban area. 2 



The modern city has spread largely northward along the most con- 

 siderable gravel patch between the Isis and the Cherwell, extending some 

 two miles along the Banbury and Woodstock Roads, and again about a mile 

 eastward along the gravel patch of the Iffley and Cowley Roads. The levels 

 of the water-meadows have remained largely unaffected, and the greater 

 part of this area is probably much as it was when first cleared ; but the 

 higher ground has been progressively deforested and put under agricultural 

 control, until little is left of the original woodland covering the undulating 

 land beyond the alluvial swamp-area. The city area is 4,676 acres, or 

 about 7 sq. miles. 



In mediaeval times the City walls followed the flood-level on the river 

 side, as still seen in Merton Meadows, and the river-gates were on the rise 

 just above the Thames ford (Aldgate), and near the Botanic Garden (East 

 Gate) where the Cherwell widened over shallows. The land outside the 

 gates was utilized as the town-tip for refuse, which might be more or less 

 washed away by winter floods, as a simple and effective method of sanitation ; 

 or remained to raise the level of the. ground (as it is still employed in Port 

 Meadow), to be subsequently built over. A portion of this area was allotted 

 to the Jews for a burial-ground ; and such made-ground marks the original 



the Norman Church itself (i 160). The tree is now some 25 ft. high, with canopy 55 ft. diam. ; it was 

 probably once pollarded to give pole-shoots : the trunk 6-8 ft. diam. is a mere shell, and the head 

 of foliage is formed by a mass of epicormic shoots which are continually produced. 



' Plot (1705), Natural History of Oxfordshire; Murray (1912), The Making of Oxford ; Enc. 

 Brit., nth edition, Oxford; Guntber (1912), The Oxford Country; Orr (1922), A short history oi 

 British Agriculture : For general Oxford literature the volumes of Anthony Wood, Parker, Boase, etc. 



' As a picturesque ' City of spires ', Oxford is said to have looked its best at the beginning of the 

 nineteenth century; Godley (1908), Oxford in the Eighteenth Century. At present the remains of 

 the older City are buried in a mass of buildings, in which red-brick villas and rows of small inferior 

 houses are dominant, seen over a foreground in which railway, gas-works and allotment-areas are the 

 most conspicuous features. The population in 1789 was 8 300; in a hundred years it increased to 

 50,000. 



