Fred Thacker’s Map, 1920.
WHERE THAMES SMOOTH WATERS GLIDE -
Oxford Footbridge,
Osney Footbridge,
Weir Stream,
Osney Railway Bridge,
Bullstake Stream,
Osney Marina,
Osney Lock.
Map: Folly Bridge to Osney Lock
Fred Thacker’s Map, 1920.
As you voyage upstream all the left bank, from Folly Bridge to Medley Weir, is stately in the imagination
with the ghostly towers of departed monasticism. The Dominicans, first in place but second in time,
possessed a settlement that descended to the left bank of the River immediately above the bridge,
often flooded when Thames was high.
They came into Oxford in 1221; and their pioneers were presented
with their first site in the Jewry, where the municipal buildings now stand at the south-eastern corner
of Carfax.
This soon proving too cramped the brethren moved about forty years later to this island
(as it was then, and still is, though not very obviously), which Henry III granted them;
and there continued until the Suppression, leaving not much mark, I think, upon Oxford except place names,
the Blackfriars Road and the Preachers' Pool, the wide water just as you approach the gasworks bridge,
where the southwest corner of their holding lay.
They went the way of the rest, liked though they were
by the people for their preaching. Henry VIII sold their land and buildings for about
£12,000 of modern money; and it all finally passed into the hands of one William Freere of Oxford and
Agnes his wife; "who, to make the best advantage they could, pulled down the church and most part
of the house; and sold the stones, lead, glass, bells, etc., at cheap rates."
Wood found in 1660 only "a peice of ground desolate and naked, and yeilding nothing not soe much as one
stone to give testimony to the Dominicans of Oxford."
The neighbourhood is full now of little poor streets,
along which stretches here and there a length of ancient wall. The narrow stream that constituted the
northern and eastern limits of their island seems largely built over; you see nothing of it where it flows
under St. Aldate's at Rose Place, though it visibly rejoins the Thames upon the left bank just below
Folly Bridge.
Many notable people were buried in their church; they got a good grip upon the gentry!
Piers de Gaveston, the favourite of Edward II, originally lay here, though his remains were soon transferred
to the Dominican church at King's Langley, and there reburied by the king in great state;
"the nobles not caring to be present."
And local people who more intimately concern Thames-side history came hither to their long rest;
of whom I will tell you later.
The Franciscans were close neighbours to the Black Friars, but did not extend down to the modern navigation.
Their story is in the old books; wherein you may read how that, upon the arrival of their two pioneers
at Abingdon one dark and stormy night, the Benedictine brethren gave them a hearty welcome under
the mistaken impression that they were wandering jesters; and spurned them just as heartily out of doors
on finding that they were "professors of an apostolick life."
The Dominicans on the other hand received them at Oxford "familiarly and lovingly," and lodged them well
for "eight dayes space," till they found their own habitation.
The River is not long in giving a foretaste of its meandering.
Old Thomas Fuller waxed mildly satirical over it, three hundred years ago.
"Rowing on the Thames," he says,"the waterman confirmed me in what formerly I had learnt from the maps;
how that river, westward, runs so crooked, as likely to lose itself in a labyrinth of its own making.
From Reading to London by land, thirty; by water a hundred miles.
So wantonly that stream disporteth itself, as if as yet unresolved whether to advance to the sea or
retreat to its fountain."
The good old man's figures are a thought eccentric it is to be wondered what language he would have used
regarding it at Osney, at Pinkhill, and at Buscot.
The first few bends form a depressing scene of modern cottages and untidy naked banks,
often beneath a pall of factory smoke; the very picture of desolation.
After less than a quarter of a mile, however, of broken down sheds, of gasworks and woodyards,
the meadows open out on the right bank, and there are willowed islands, outposts of the rural lovelinesses
ahead. There follow two ugly iron bridges, the first of which belongs to the gasworks.
Some day all our old stone bridges will be ruined by the demon motors, and in their place we shall get
our deserts, troughs such as these.
Just past this first bridge you will see on the left bank a triangular grassy island,
called in old maps George Island. The stream that enters the Thames on its eastern side is the
ancient main navigation from Medley weir. The next land is Osney, an oval island very little
less than a mile long, and about a third of a mile wide at its broadest part, containing both the railway
stations of Oxford.
The second bridge is that of the Great Western Railway, which running north cuts Osney lengthwise
into two unequal parts.
Immediately beyond is a little cluster of interesting things. The Pot Stream re-enters on the right bank;
one of several side streams into which the Thames divides above Oxford.
Just across the footbridge which spans its mouth is a monument to a lad of twenty-one, who lost his life
on the fifteenth of June, 1869, after saving two lives here from drowning.
And looking back to the city there is a fine view of the grim old Castle frowning as vigilantly over the
meadow levels as when Sir Robert d'Oilli erected it about 1073 to keep the troublesome citizens of
Oxford in order under their new and terrifying masterful sovereign.
"He raised with digging deep Trenches to make the River run round it, and made high Hills with
lofty Towers and Walls thereon, to overlook the Town and Country adjacent;
the Building of which [by sweated Jews cost but 20 Marks."
The present tower, the only one left of several, served as the campanile to the church of St. George
which d'Oilli founded within the walls. It has survived his bridge, but only to be rather
shabbily enclosed within the precincts of the county gaol. This strong old soldier d'Oilli
got into trouble with the monks over it. A wail went up from Abingdon:
"Amongst other evil deeds he took away a certain mead that lay outside the walls of Oxford with the King's consent, and made it over to the soldiers of the Castle for their use. This loss grieved the brethren of Abingdon more than any other evil."
Yet he was buried amongst them in 1091 in that abbey whose quiet ruins I know nine miles southward;
and his wife by his side. He is said in late life to have softened his ways in consequence of a dream,
wherein he beheld himself in a royal palace, and a great queen upon her throne.
By her stood two monks of Abingdon, who knelt before her as he approached, and cried out that
it was he who usurped her possessions and diminished her glory.
She commanded him to be thrust forth into a meadow, and being forced to sit some little boys
brought damp grass and setting fire to it smoked him. Whereupon he and his wife agreed to make reparation;
she comforting him with: "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth. "
The tree-clad mound its neighbour is far older than the Castle. King Edward the Elder, son of Alfred,
heaped it up in the opening of the tenth century as a link in a chain of fortification against the Danelagh.
Queen Maud, besieged in the Castle by King Stephen, escaped in the night over the ice and snow to Wallinglord with an escort of but two or three knights, passing on the way a bribed sentinel of the king. She seems to have been an expert at this sort of business, having once escaped from Winchester on horseback during a pretended trance, and from Devizes as a corpse in a coffin.
Osney old lock, says Mr. S. C. Hall, who with his wife (was it dux foemina facti? one wonders) wrote that charming old book of theirs about 1850, was extremely picturesque, and a great favourite with painters. Did they work it as threadbare as their successors did Iffley? Dilapidated it was even in his time. The present lock, however, nearly a mile from Folly Bridge, has something of the same pleasant surroundings, approached along a willowed bank and overhung with tall shady elms.
Now behind the mill buildings that border the lock you will find a ruined arch and a window or two, the only material relics of the Augustinian monastery that once made the River approach to Osney so much statelier than now. It is the second. you reach, and the first in time, of three great religious establishments that bordered the modern navigation above Folly Bridge. Robert d'Oilli, son of Nigel the first Robert's brother,"a soft man, fonder of women than of fighting," founded the original Norman building in 1129 as a mere priory, here upon the southern half of Osney island. His wife, who had been Edith Forne and a favourite with Henry I, used to walk out pleasuring from the Castle along the meadows and the labyrinth of little watercourses even more numerous then than now; and remarked that in one place there was always a company of magpies who freely screamed and chattered at her and her gentlewomen. It grew upon her like a portent, and of Raduiph of St. Frideswide she sent and enquired the interpretation. The monk requested to be allowed to view the spectacle with his own eyes, and having done so, and taken a little time for consideration, explained,"wiliest pye of all," that the birds were souls in purgatory, and their chattering a petition that she would build a convent near their haunts and purchase their repose. "And is it so indeed? " said she; "now, de pardieux, if old Robin my husband will conceede to my request! " After some argument her husband granted her prayer, and Ralph became first prior. It rose to an abbey and was rebuilt and enlarged in 1247, so that its church ultimately came to contain twenty four altars. "This Society, and its Attendants and Servants, had within themselves a Tannery upon the River Eld, beyond the Mill Stream, for Leather and Parchment; a Brew house, Bake-house, and Slaughter house; divers tradesmen, as Bookbinders, Taylors, Luminours, Wax-Chandlers, with many other Professions. The Houses of these, like a little Town, were seated at the West End of the Abbey, on the other side of the old Water Gate, by the River Side, and formed a Parish, whose Inhabitants used to attend Divine Service, by leave of the Bishop of Lincoln, at St. Nicholas Church"; the original name of the present St. Thomas's; an undistinguished and gloomy church as I saw it once under a dull October sky. How strange and repulsive, entering with my heart full of the old centuries, looked that obese cherub on a tomb in the porch! The church was built, says Wood, in 1141, and dedicated to St. Nicholas,"when the Castle with Maude the Empresse therin was beseiged by King Stephen, and the parishioners of St. Georg [the church within the Castle] could not have free accesse to their parish church. " It seems a curious occasion for church building, during an adjacent siege, under flying arrows and stone missiles; and Wood has been attacked on the point. However, he justifies his statement by the "Oseney book"; and there seems only the obvious improbability against his date. It suffered a period of neglect and desertion after the siege; and was then re-opened by the abbey people, with the new dedication to St. Thomas (à Becket), for their servants and workpeople, so that these "might not trouble the conventuall church. "
[Fred, Additions and Corrections, added these next two paragraphs at the end of his book]
IT was in St. Thomas's, Osney, that Robert Burton, of the Anatomy of Melancholy, laboured from 1616 until his death in 1640; "with much ado," truly, for he held a second charge at Segrave in Leicestershire. He put out his book in 1621, and Henry Cripps, his publisher, made a fortune out of it, quite in the modern style. He lived "a silent, sedentary, solitary private life, mihi et musis," writing his book to chase away melancholy, but "did but improve it. " The truest relief he could get from black depression was when he strolled down to the "bridge-foot" at Oxford and heard the bargees swear; "at which he would set his hands to his sides and laugh most profusely. " He was buried in the north aisle of Christ Church Cathedral, beneath his own epitaph: Paucis notus, ignotus paucioribus, hic facet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia.
Where close here was it, precisely, that the good thing happened to Canon Liddon of which Canon Henry Scott Holland tells? "His courtesy to the poor was always beautiful. It was sorely tried on one occasion when, walking in the Hinksey meadow, he found a stout lady prostrated in a ditch. On being tenderly raised and lifted to her feet, she pronounced the cause to be sunstroke, and proposed to go home. Liddon was all pity, and offered his arm, and they started. But on nearing Osney, it appeared that the lady was widely known. Cries of 'Hullo, Duchess' arose. Porters looked over the railway bridge and called: 'I say, Duchess! who have you got hold of now? ' The lady moved along in triumph, on the arm of the bending clergyman, wreathed in smiles; and still Liddon never faltered until they reached her door in St. Thomas's, escorted by an admiring crowd. Never had the good lady had such a day. "
Oseney Abbey was the seat, for some short indefinite time, of the bishopric of Dorchester, removed later to Lincoln; hence the "leave" from this city. And as regards this River Eld, it was Thames water, not a tributary; but whether it was the stream that flows under Bulstake Bridge on the Botley road about five hundred yards west of the Thames, watering West Osney Mead, according to the map made for a modern edition of Wood, or the present navigation, which you cannot help thinking from Wood's own text, I am not able to determine.
"Wee see whatsoever heart could wish these monks did enjoy; and expended much in finishing of pleasant walks by the river's side and invironing them with elm-trees and also orchards, and arbours that were divided with cunning meanders; as also fishponds, dove-houses and what not. Besides this, a pleasant retirement to Medley. "
[Fred adds this at the end of his book:
Hearne prints in his Collections: In MS. vet. de Officiis Osney.
FINITO Agnus Dci cnollentur Douce, Clement & Austin, & post missam per non magnum spaciuni pulsentur. -Et notandum, quod semper post magnam missam pulsetur
*Hauctecter, ad completorium Gabriel ve1 Jon.
Douce, Clement, Austin, Hautecter, Gabriel, Job,
nomina campanarum Ofney.
*Potius, Hautcieri. ]
The original names of its bells, famous all over England and even to a Scots historian, were Haute-clere, Doucement (or Douce, Clement), Austyn, Marie, Gabriel, and John. In the course of additions, breakages, and recastings, they had become at the Suppression
"Mary and Jesus,
Meribus and Lucas,
New Bell and Thomas,
Conger and Godeston
(or Goldston; or was it Godestow? ). Now Thomas, recast in 1680, became the present Great Tom of Christ Church - "Mighty Tom" in a little essay of Mr. Froude's - weighing over seventeen thousand pounds; one of the largest bells in England, additional metal having been added in recasting. You may hear him now, not altogether faultless to expert ears, and all the other Osney ring, in Christ Church precincts. He tolls nightly one hundred and one strokes for the closing of the college gates. When in his original campanile he bore the inscription:
In Thomae laude resono Bim Bom sine fraude;
a legend which Edgar Allan Poe freakishly commended as a motto to the extremer admirers of Carlyle. His removal in 1546 to St. Frideswide's cost twenty shillings, equal perhaps to as many sovereigns today: "Paid to Willouby of Einsham for carriage of the great bell to Frydeswide's, 26 Sep. 20s."
There is an English translation of about 1460 of the Register of the abbey; a record of its endowments and its many disputes with Rewley and the "minchons" of Godstow about tithe and with Oxford town about quit rents and boundaries. One curious glimpse I found in pencil upon the fly leaf of some old volume, how that "in May, 1222, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, held a general council; at which Two wicked miscreants (one of which was Androgynus, an Hermaphrodite) were condemned for pretending to personate our Saviour Xt, and counterfeiting the wounds of his Body: who were executed at Adderbury some twenty miles distant soon after; and with them 2 Women who personated the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene."
It is a lovely tranquil haven, the millhead stream, looking far removed from the modern world of railways and stores that are actually so near. "Very quiet," I hazarded to the maid who led me round to the surviving stones. "Yes," said she,"but not too quiet. I like it so." And you will like it when you behold the little glassy reach of clear water, in which shine reflected the feathery arches of lofty overhanging willows. Usually the remains are correctly described as of Osney Abbey, yet not invariably. The occasional confusion with Rewley so close at hand arises, I think, from both abbeys having owned "locks" upon the ancient or the present navigation. Osney indeed grew to have four; great "neausances," the city complained; and Wood mentions the "lock " by "Rewley Garden. " But these "locks" were no more than stanches across the stream holding up the water which, when allowed to escape, flooded craft over the shallows below. "Pound locks," as the modern sort were at first called for distinction, were not invented until the fifteenth century in Italy, some say by Leonardo da Vinci in draining the plains of Lombardy; or possibly, as others say, a hundred years earlier in Holland. In monastic times Oxford suffered from no fewer than fourteen of these obstructions, and there were many consequent disputes, and stipulations in conveyances; and complaints too from the city about either flooded lands or drought. Thus: "dicunt quod:
they alledged that the Preceptor of Cowley raised Gurgitem, a lock upon the Thames, by which the River overflowed the Meadows of their Lord the King at Oxon. " One of Osney's was probably on or near the site of the present lock - in its English register you may read how Bernard St. Walery gave "to the church of god and of Seynte marie of Osney and to the chanons ther servyng god, my goter or locke [gurgitem meum] by themse with the course of water the which rennyth to the myllis of the Same chanons "; and still runs babbling beneath a mill. The existence of these "locks" at both abbeys has given rise to instances of confusion about the identity of the remains by the modern lock; but they are Augustinian; Rewley came no further south than Botley Causeway, which I think constituted the boundary between north and south Osney.
You will notice that in this ancient record the River is called "Thames" and "themse"; never Isis.
"Henry VIII gave it up to loot, and it was looted very thoroughly" onwards from November, 1539 though the campanile stood until 1644. Dr. Johnson viewed "with indignation" such remains as existed in his time; a phrase of meaning from his lips! And in mordant humour they have laid out a cemetery gay with flowers over the tomb of the ancient splendours, from which quiet outlook you will gather much the clearest comprehension of all this tiny theatre of ancient histories. As you stand amidst the grassy mounds the spires and domes of Oxford rise in the east, and in their foreground gleams silver grey the huge square ruin of the Castle, arrogant even in antiquity; whence Edith d' Oilli so often issued to hear the chattering of the pies along the track of Osney Lane. Westward is the little cluster of mill buildings with the modest chimney against the lock; and Rewley must have been quite clear to see in the northeast, just beyond the black railway sheds less than half a mile away. Southward the island narrows down to its extremity; the old ground left on a lower level than the raised terrace of the cemetery.
I felt interested to see for myself what modern development has made of the old route from the Castle to the Abbey: "The Footway or Passage led over Bookbinders' Bridge through the Hamel, a broad paved way. " Just against the old mill, the lower part of whose walls looks as ancient as its grim neighbour, Quaking or Quaken Bridge joins Fisher Row to the Castle. Across Fisher Row and a few steps along High Street St. Thomas's is another watercrossing, hardly worth calling a bridge, but it is Bookbinders' Bridge across the ancient navigation, around which clustered the dwellings of the binders who worked for the colleges. I found a Bookbinders' Court but whether it will stand much longer I know not, for Fisher Row with all its picturesque insanitation is under sentence of demolition. This little stream was the eastern boundary of the abbey property; and Fisher Row was known as Warham Bank. Just beyond is the Hamel (there were two or three thoroughfares of this queer name in old Oxford), a short broad way leading into Osney Lane, paved still, though perhaps not with the same stones as Wood saw. A cross stood in it in his time, or at least was remembered there. And so along Osney Lane, across the railway to the cemetery and the mill. The way is still bordered near the Castle with the ancient cottages; but westward with model dwellings and the immemorial meadows of the Thames
Just above Osney lock are the city electric works. A group of willows used to hang over the opposite bank, and it was evil passing if a barge or two wished to share the channel, as often happened. But I found the trees cut down, and the scene all the more bare and thirsty, in the spring of 1906. A little higher an iron bridge of one span crosses the narrow stream, leading eastward to the railway station and westward to Botley and so to Wytham. It was built in 1888, succeeding the original stone bridge of three arches built probably by the Osney monks. Just above, at Four Streams, up a little side water on the right bank, is the local bathing place, where the ferryman is often busy with his regulation load of a dozen small boys; and here, too, a bystream on the left bank leads to the little lock by which the Oxford and Coventry Canal enters the River.
Just as Osney Abbey obtained the southern half of the island from d'Oilli and part of the northern half from Roger d'lvry, so the remainder of the northern end was bestowed upon Rewley (or North Osney) Abbey by Richard, Earl of Cornwall. The name is corrupted from regalis locus, or its Norman French equivalent roy lieu, which it deserved by virtue of its lord being King of the Romans. He had no very great design in whatever foundation he intended to make - merely an establishment of secular priests to pray for his soul; but his son Edmund established a regular Cistercian monastery,"having most confidence in them," which was dedicated to St. Mary and inaugurated in December, 1281, the first monks being drawn from Thame. From Edmund it received (against ancient canon law, but in conformity with a growing practice) the manor of Yarnton, much to the disgust of Eynsham Abbey, who had hitherto held some mills at Cassington; and tenements at Great St. Thomas Apostle in London; amongst other endowments. This abbey bordered upon the old, not like Osney upon the present, navigation; a mere stone's-throw northeast from the L. N. W. R. station; and if you will go to the Hythe Bridge, and walk northwards along the curious narrow peninsula between the old stream and the canal, you will see on your left hand, just past some cottages, a length of the old wall, in which is still the fine doorway of Hall's cut. I was ferried over in a leaky punt, and saw the pigstye built for stability against the sturdy old rampart, and a gnarled wooden pinnacle that once crowned a summerhouse the monks had close by. This doorway, carved by the Cistercians who cultivated Gothic so splendidly, is more beautiful than that at Osney mill.
A well known feature were the twenty one elms in two rows between the outer and inner gates, representing the monks, and one by itself at the far end for the abbot. The abbey almost wholly disappeared about 1536: " Mr. Robert Parret, organist of Magdalen (one that enriched himself by the spoil of religious houses) seems to have bought the church of Ruly, for at its dissolution he sold much stone. "
WHERE THAMES SMOOTH WATERS GLIDE - Oxford Footbridge, Osney Footbridge, Weir Stream, Osney Railway Bridge, Bullstake Stream, Osney Marina, Osney Lock.