Böcker av Alan Crossley

Records of the crimes committed in Oxford, and the punishment meted out, reveal much of life at the time.

This volume contains the histories of five ancient parishes in Oxfordshire, comprising the small town of Bampton and some 13 villages and hamlets. Full treatment is accorded to Bampton, centre of an Anglo-Saxon royal estate, site of a late Anglo-Saxon minster and formerly a market town.

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.

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, containsthe 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 thedevelopment 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.

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 yieldingto 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.

Oxford was an important town long before it acquired fame as the seat of a university. This volume traces the history of the city from its earliest origins to the rise of the 20th-century motor industry, and changing relationship between 'town and gown'. It also provides a chronological narrative of Oxford's development.