A Thames crossing that became a fortified West Saxon burh, a Norman castle town and royal residence where Richard the Lionheart was born, and from the twelfth century the home of England's first university.
Oxford grew up where the Thames could be forded near its meeting with the Cherwell, on a gravel spur between the two rivers: the ford for oxen that gave the place its Old English name, Oxnaforda. It was a fortified town of the West Saxon kings by the early tenth century, a meeting place for royal assemblies in the eleventh, a Norman castle town, and a favourite residence of the Angevin kings.
From the late twelfth century it was also something no other English town was: the home of a university. By 1300 its masters and students had made a middling cloth town the intellectual capital of England, and the enmity between university and townspeople, which more than once ended in killing, shaped the city for the rest of the Middle Ages.
The oldest tradition attaches Oxford to Frideswide, an eighth-century noblewoman said to have founded a minster there; her legend was not written down until the twelfth century, but the minster church, later St Frideswide's Priory, stood at the heart of the town. Oxford first appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 911, when Edward the Elder took control of London and Oxford and the lands that belonged to them, and it was laid out as a fortified burh with a regular grid of streets meeting at the Carfax crossroads.
Oxford lay on the frontier between Wessex and the Danelaw, and the wars with the Danes marked it. On St Brice's Day, 13 November 1002, when Æthelred the Unready ordered the killing of the Danes living in England, the Danes of Oxford fled into St Frideswide's church and were burned inside it, as a royal charter of 1004 recounts. A Danish army burned the town in 1009, and in 1013 Oxford submitted to Sweyn Forkbeard. Under Cnut the Great an assembly at Oxford in 1018 agreed that Danes and English would live under the laws of King Edgar, and after Cnut's death an assembly there in 1035 made Harold Harefoot regent; he died at Oxford in 1040 as king.
The Norman Conquest hit Oxford hard. Domesday Book records a large share of its houses as waste in 1086, and Robert d'Oyly, the Conqueror's sheriff, began a motte-and-bailey castle on the western edge of the town in 1071, clearing houses to make room; its stone St George's Tower still stands. The late Saxon tower of St Michael at the Northgate is the other great survivor of early Oxford.
In the civil war between Stephen of England and the Empress Matilda, Oxford was the empress's headquarters. Stephen besieged her in the castle through the autumn of 1142, and in December, with food running out, she escaped by night across the frozen Thames, dressed in white against the snow. Henry I had built a royal residence just outside the north gate, Beaumont Palace, and there Eleanor of Aquitaine gave birth to Richard the Lionheart in 1157 and to the future John of England in 1166.
The town prospered on cloth and trade. Its weavers paid for a guild recorded in 1130, one of the earliest in England, and a Jewish community settled in the streets south of Carfax, where Jewish landlords let houses to students until Edward I expelled the Jews of England in 1290.
No one founded the university. Masters were teaching in Oxford by the 1090s, and a ban on English clerks studying in Paris in 1167, during Henry II's quarrel with Thomas Becket, may have helped the schools grow; around 1188 Gerald of Wales read his description of Ireland aloud to Oxford's assembled doctors over three days. By about 1200 the masters were acting together as a corporate body.
Its privileges were won through violence. In 1209, after a woman was killed in a scholar's lodgings, the townsmen hanged two or three clerks and the masters scattered, some of them to Cambridge, where a second university grew from the exodus. They returned only after a papal legate's settlement of 1214 made the town pay a yearly sum to the scholars and placed them under a chancellor; Robert Grosseteste, later bishop of Lincoln, is traditionally counted the first. Endowed colleges followed: University College from a bequest of 1249, Balliol around 1263, Merton in 1264, and New College, founded by William of Wykeham, in 1379.
Oxford's scholars were among the most original in Europe. Grosseteste lectured to the Franciscans who arrived in 1224 and wrote on light and optics; the Franciscan Roger Bacon argued for experimental knowledge; John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham taught there in the decades around 1300. In the 1370s John Wycliffe, once Master of Balliol, attacked the wealth and authority of the Church, and in 1382 Archbishop William Courtenay forced the university to silence his followers, the Lollards.
Oxford's place in the middle of England made it a meeting ground for kings and barons. At the parliament held there in June 1258, the barons, with Simon de Montfort among their leaders, forced Henry III of England to accept the Provisions of Oxford, which placed royal government under a council of fifteen and opened the reform movement that ended in civil war.
Town and gown fought on for a century. On St Scholastica's Day, 10 February 1355, a quarrel over wine at the Swindlestock Tavern at Carfax turned into three days of fighting in which dozens of scholars were killed. Edward III punished the town by handing the university control of its bread and ale prices and its weights and measures, and the mayor and burgesses were made to attend a mass of penance every year on the anniversary, a humiliation that lasted until 1825.
Medieval Oxford was a small walled town whose four main streets met at Carfax, with the castle on the west, St Frideswide's Priory on the south, and the Cherwell and the branches of the Thames around it. A long stretch of the thirteenth-century wall survives inside New College, whose founder undertook to maintain it. The fifteenth century added the university's first great buildings: the Divinity School, begun in 1427 and vaulted by the 1480s, and above it the library built to house the manuscripts given by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester.