ABSTRACT
The story now moves about twelve miles from North Moreton to Oxford. In the early seventeenth century Oxford was a very different place from the city with which the modern tourist or student will be familiar. The distinctive complex of university buildings that now fills its centre was largely incomplete in 1600; Oxford was still a medieval city. Most of its inhabitants, of whom there were maybe 4,000 by 1600, lived in the area of ninety acres or so enclosed by the city walls, although suburbs were beginning to open up to the south, along the road to Abingdon, to the north, an area of university expansion, and to the west, where there was a well-founded settlement at Osney. Inside the walls there was some social zoning, with the area to the east of Carfax dominated by the university, that to the west by Oxford's citizens. By 1600, however, general population pressure and the expansion of the student body meant that there was extensive building within the city, mainly dwellings thrown up in courts and alleys off the main roads. Some central areas, for example around the university church of St Mary the Virgin, were kept swept and clean, but most of the city was characterized by the squalor generally associated with urban life of the period, with the ditches on the city's peripheries resembling open sewers. There was little industry in Oxford. Tax returns of 1534 revealed a situation that was unchanged in 1600: 75 per cent of taxpayers (in effect, economically substantial males) worked in the victualling, clothing or service trades, obviously largely dependent on the university for employment, while a further 10 per cent of taxpayers worked directly for the university. Despite the odd friction, the sometimes homicidal medieval confrontations between town and gown were a thing of the past: the relation between the university and Oxford was, by now, an essentially symbiotic one.
