Post-medieval Oxford - Oxford City Council

illustrates a more intensively developed area. The college now possessed more
formal garden designs while the adjacent domestic structures appear to comprise
extensive ranges of buildings. The High Street itself is much wider at this point and it
would appear the detached structures on the south side had been demolished and
partially replaced with a series of domestic tenements with a substantial area of
market gardens to the rear along the east wall of the city. The Botanic Gardens now
occupied the space adjacent to the river.
Limited archaeological evidence has come from the grounds of the Gardens
comprising a 17th century low stone wall in 1954 (UAD 162), and a clay pipe in 1958
(UAD 1313). Several archaeological investigations in the garden and deer park to the
rear of Magdalen College have recovered miscellaneous finds and fragmentary
features including ceramic wig curlers, (UAD 782), iron candlesticks, (UAD 1176),
and a substantial ditch that may have formed part of the Civil War defences along
with 17th century domestic waste (UAD 478), and a stone wall of a probable postmedieval
date (UAD 582). Excavations at Longwall Quad in 1995 recorded a
substantial post-medieval pottery assemblage that may have been associated with
the tenements fronting onto Longwall Street, (Roberts 1999: 284). On the south side
of High Street, a 2010 evaluation in the car park of the Eastgate Hotel, indicated a
hiatus between 13th-14th century pit digging and activity in the mid- to late 17th
century when a single storey building or buildings were erected. The walls were
robbed in the later 17th or 18th centuries and a layer of soil was imported raising the
ground level by c. 0.5m (Cotswold Archaeology 2011).
The southern suburbs
The southern suburbs from Christ Church to the River Thames are illustrated on the
Agas’ map as a series of plots fronting onto St Aldates with the Trill Mill Stream
enclosing them to the east, Christ Church Meadow beyond and a second,
(Blackfriars), stream to the west with the former lands of the Blackfriars and the
Greyfriars behind.
As noted above, garden soils have been recorded overlying the medieval Greyfriars
at Paradise Square (UAD 315; 539), the buildings having been largely destroyed
following the Dissolution, (Hassall and Halpin et al. 1984:173). The Greyfriars site
was divided by 1544 and the City Wall became a property boundary, (ibid.: 175).
Substantial quarrying was recorded during excavations at the Greyfriars site which
was sufficient to destabilise the City Wall and necessitate the rebuilding of a less
substantial property boundary, although there was no evidence for new structures
until the 19th century.
Archaeological investigations on St Aldates since the 1970s have indicated continued
occupation since the 12th century at least, with little development beyond the
established tenements (Durham 1977: 89). A building survey of 89-91 St Aldates
prior to demolition recorded the two storey 17th century house, with timber frame and
stone front and side walls. The roof had been removed when another floor was
added in the late 18th or early 19th century. The house had been refronted and refenistrated
in the 18th century (Wilkinson in Dodd ed. 2003: 101-2). An example of a
plain vernacular 16th or 17th timber framed rear (kitchen or service) wing was subject
to building recording at 84 St Aldates in 1991 (Munby 1991).
The western suburbs
Agas’ 1578 map illustrates tenement development along St Thomas’ High Street,
(then the main road out of the city), Holybush Row and The Hamel, with long narrow
tenement plots some 80 metres in length. Loggan’s map of 1675 shows a similar
OXFORD ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESOURCE ASSESSMENT- POST MEDIEVAL
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