HISTORY OF THE DAUBENY LABORATORY 

 AT MAGDALEN COLLEGE 



THE land upon which the Daubeny Laboratory Buildings History of 

 stand was originally part of the low-lying water-meadow, e l e * 

 afterwards named Parys Mede, which lay to the east of the 

 city, and was not built upon because it was frequently flooded 

 by the Cherwell. The level of this part of the meadows 

 had, however, been artificially raised upon more than one 

 occasion, for in digging trenches for the foundations of the 

 new building of 1902, some six or seven feet of made ground 

 containing abundant potsherds, were dug out before the firm, 

 untouched subsoil was reached. 



Our forefathers of the Middle Ages allowed the Jews to 

 use this waste land for a burial-ground, as we learn from 

 the earliest records we have of this spot, dating from the 

 twelfth century 1 , which were confirmed m the seventeenth 

 by Lord Danby, whose experience is recorded by Wood: 

 * Sufficient testimonies of which area or coemitery of the 

 Jews . . . were the number of men's bones that were found and 

 dug up at the foundation of the Physick Garden wall 2 ' ; and 

 more recently Dr. Daubeny himself, when the foundations of 

 the Laboratory Building were dug, came upon a great number 

 of human bones. Dr. Daubeny's assistant, John Harris, 

 witnessed their reinterment under the evergreen oak, near the 

 Bridge, in a sawpit which had been used by the builders, 

 and later on a full-length skeleton was exhumed near the 

 Herbarium by Mr. E. Chapman, when a trench was dug 

 for the purpose of curing the dampness of the walls. 



1 'In 1177 the Jews of Oxford had a cemetery without the East Gate, 

 where the Tower and South Side of Magdalen College now stand ; after- 

 wards this was transferred to the opposite side of the road, in the present 

 Botanical Garden, where a mass of human bones was dug up in 1642.' 

 Boase, Oxford, p. 24. 



2 Wood, MS. fol. 228 b. Cf. Chandler's Life of Waynjlete, p. 89, note. 



