Kelmscott Manor is forever linked with the name of William Morris, pioneer conservationist and utopian socialist, designer and father of the Arts and Crafts tradition. The manor played a crucial role in shaping his thought: at the climactic moment of his futuristic novel, News from Nowhere, Morris lifts the latch of the Manors garden gate and finds his personal holy grail. Morris was drawn by the organic relationship between Kelmscott and its landscape: the linkage of stone walls and roof tiles to the geology and the soil, and the honest toil of the people to the agricultural cycle . The fruits of the Kelmscott Landcape Project established in 1996 by the Society of Antiquaries of London, the owners of Kelmscott Manor today, this book is a multi-faceted examination of Kelmscotts history. Archaeology, from prehistory to the present day, the architectural development of the Manor before and after Morris knew it, and the art that the village and Manor have inspiredall received rich, illustrated coverage. The result is a vivid portrait of a Thames-side village transformed by its association with Morris, a book which demonstrates the rich connections between culture and landscape in a particular place.

Edition of records of Oxford apprentices provides valuable evidence for historians. Oxford greatly expanded and flourished under the Tudors, as the reviving University provided a growing body of consumers and trade for shopkeepers and craftsmen. They needed apprentices - and in huge numbers, as the material inthis volume demonstrates. It calendars the enrolments of over two thousand apprenticeship contracts made during this period; they are a familiar source for social and economic history and genealogy, but the Oxford material, in both quantity and detail, is quite exceptional. Moreover, sixteenth-century enrolments are much fuller than their more familiar seventeenth-century successors, containing miscellaneous information of great interest, notably lists ofworking tools, details of journeymen's wages, and stipulations about apprentices' behaviour. The data is discussed in an Introduction which re-examines the apprenticeship system on the basis of the unusually plentiful statistics, throwing new light on such matters as length of service, payment of premiums, and the rates of career failure and success. Oxford recruited apprentices from an astonishingly wide area; their places of origin are identified and mapped, and an analysis of their social and geographical origins breaks new ground in the field of migration studies. More prosaically the calendar provides the genealogist and local historian with the names, parentage, and places of origin of thousands of young men from all over England and Wales - crucial raw material for much-needed further research.on the later movements of qualified apprentices. Alan Crossley is a member of the modern history faculty, University of Oxford.

A full colour map, based on a digitised map of the city of Oxford in 1876, with its medieval past overlain and important buildings picked out. Oxford is synonymous with its university but deserves to be known as a city in its own right as well. What the map shows is a city of different parts: areas where the base map of 1876 might still be used today, and parts which are now quite unrecognisable. This second edition of a map first issued in 2015 has been updated and revised to reflect further the editor's recent research. The opportunity has been taken to update the gazetteer of buildings and sites of interest and it is now printed in full colour throughout. The map's cover has a short introduction to the city's history, and on the reverse an illustrated and comprehensive gazetteer of Oxford's main sites of interest, from medieval monasteries to Oxford castle and the working class and industrial areas that lay just beyond the 'dreaming spires' of the city centre.

The latest volume of the British Historic Towns Atlas series covers the internationally-renowned city of Oxford. Famed for its university and its many outstanding historic buildings, the volume presents in mapped form the history of its topographical development. From its prehistoric setting, through its contentious Anglo-Saxon foundation, the medieval establishment of its university, and its sporadic growth after that, the Atlas charts how it became a nineteenth-century city dominated by colleges, churches, university buildings, and its associated publishing industry. The Atlas is presented as a large-format portfolio containing a series of maps showing the city at key points in its history, many illustrations of its buildings and streets, maps to show its setting, and reproduction early maps of the city. A readable text introduces and explains the maps, giving the reader a thorough grounding in how and why Oxford developed, and an explanation of its changing fortunes. A supplementary chapter brings the situation up to date. Whilst many histories of the university have been written, the Atlas concentrates on the topographic development of Oxford as a settlement, and explains it in mapped form. A comprehensive gazetteer lists every building and street shown on the maps, with a short history and references for further reading.

This volume contains the histories of five ancient parishes in the west of Oxfordshire near the river Thames, comprising the small town of Bampton and some 13 villages and hamlets. Though chiefly looking to markets at Witney and Oxford the area was long dominated by Bampton, the centre of a large Anglo-Saxon estate, site of a late Anglo-Saxon minster, and formerly a market town. A detailed account is given of the town's topography, buildings, and economic developments and the organization of the local landscape from an early date is explored. Most villages were nucleated, and despite some controversial early inclosures, notably at Northmoor, open-field farming prevailed until the 19th century. A few scattered hamlets and farmsteads resulted probably from woodland clearance or late colonization, and several settlements were shrunk or deserted in the late Middle Ages. Standlake had a medieval market and fair, and until the late 17th century there was textile and leather working notably at Standlake and Bampton. Important buildings include the former Bampton castle, the 15th-century timber-framed manor house at Yelford, and Cokethorpe House. Bampton church is of unusual size and quality, and carvings in Ducklington church may be associated with a late medieval cult of the Virgin. Cote was an important centre of religious noncon-formity from the 17th century.

This volume contains the history of the four large parishes in north Oxfordshire that formed the hundred of Banbury: Banbury, Charlbury, Cropredy, and Swal-cliffe. The four parishes do not constitute a single, compact area, and are linked together because they belonged in the early Middle Ages to the bishops of Lincoln and probably represent ancient estates exempted from royal dues for the benefit of the bishops' predecessors in the see of Dorchester. Banbury itself contains an early castle and represents the successful estab-lishment of a 'new town' in the 12th century. From 1554 to 1832 it was a parliamentary borough; it was widely known for its Puritanism, and won a place in literature not only for the Banbury Cross of the nursery rhyme but also for its cakes, cheese, and ale. Its character as a market town was changed by industrial growth in the 19th century, the traditional textile industries yielding to the manufacture of agricultural implements, which was in turn over-shadowed in the 20th century by food-manufacture, light engineering, and alu-minium. By contrast, Charlbury, lying 14 miles south-west of Banbury, is a small and relatively little-known market town which was a centre of the gloving industry. Both Charlbury and the rural parishes of Cropredy and Swalcliffe are unusually well documented because they contained exten-sive estates of abbeys and colleges. Each of the four parishes contains several separate villages, and, in all, the volume covers an area of over 20,000 acres and more than 20 settlements.

This volume contains the histories of 19 parishes in the northern part of Wootton hundred, stretching from Stonesfield, Wootton, and Tackley in the south to Deddington, Barford St. Michael, and South Newington in the north; the other parishes are Glympton, Heythrop, Rousham, Sandford St. Martin, the Astons, the Bartons, the Wortons, and the three Tews. The area, bounded on the east by the river Cherwell and on part of the west by the river Glyme, contains the small, well documented, market town of Deddington, two outstanding country houses at Heythrop and Rousham, and many other notable secular and ecclesiastical buildings. Probably the best known village is Great Tew, whose development is here reinterpreted in the light of new evidence. The many deserted village sites in the area are treated in detail, and special attention has been given to the arrangement of open fields, of which a local feature was the development within a single vill of two separate sets of fields, known as ends or sides, as at Deddington, Duns Tew, and South Newington. The complex arrangements for the periodical division of common meadows are well documented in some parishes, particularly North Aston. A feature of religious life in the area was the establishment at Nether and Over Worton in the early 19th century of a strong, locally influential, tradition of evangelical Anglicanism. The volume is illustrated with 20 pages of plates, two church plans, and numerous parish and village maps.

Records of the crimes committed in Oxford, and the punishment meted out, reveal much of life at the time. Most historical studies of English justices of the peace have concentrated on the work of county commissions, leaving the sparser records of city and borough justices largely neglected. This early order book of the city of Oxford's justices in quarter sessions illustrates the special problems of an urban magistracy in a rather special place, at a time when both university and city were feeling the strain of rapid population growth in a cramped environment.It shows, sometimes in harrowing detail, how the Oxford Bench [an unusual mix of shopkeepers, brewers, lawyers, and university dons] struggled to control crime, vagrancy, disorder, and poverty in a divided community. Much of thebusiness of these early seventeenth-century courts would be all too familiar to the modern magistrate: an endless stream of cases of petty larceny, assault, abusive behaviour, unlicensed ale-selling; hopeless recidivists testing the patience of the court to its limit. The sanctions available to the seventeenth-century JP, however, were very different, fines and imprisonment being much less common than consignment to the whipping post, the cage, the stocks,the ducking stool, the House of Correction and, when all else failed, the gallows.

Part of a series covering all English counties, this volume provides an historical account of the county of Oxford, including the southern part of Wootton Hundred, the towns of Eynsham and Woodstock, and the parishes of Begbrooke, Bladon, Cassington, Cogges, Combe, and Wolvercote.

Oxford was an important town long before it acquired fame as the seat of a university. This landmark volume, lauded on its first publication as 'a compendium and a treasure house', traces the history of the city from its earliest origins to the rise of the 20th-century motor industry, exploring as well the complex and changing relationship between 'town and gown'. The book is in two parts, the first of which provides a chronological narrative of Oxford's development, and of its social, economic and civic life. The second comprises detailed encyclopaedic accounts of particular topics and institutions.