e The Round Tower of Henry III. (?) f Square Tower to protect the entrance. 9 g Bridge from the city. hil Towers. k Staircase to the Keep. m The Great Hall. In The Kitchen. o p q The Castle ditch. Hayes." Here again there is more broken ground, probably part of the outworks of the Castle towards Beaumont Palace. There is a tradition that when the Empress Maud was besieged in the Castle, King Stephen was lodged in the Palace of the Norman kings at Beaumont; if so, he was in remarkably close quarters with the enemy; and if we may judge by the experiments lately tried in France, under the direction of the Emperor, respecting the force of the catapult, and of arrows and javelins in trained hands, he could hardly have been at a safe distance. Some mounds of earth are said to have been thrown up between the Castle and Beaumont Palace to protect it; these were afterwards called Jews' Mount, and Mount Pelham: there are now but faint traces of them. rr The Mill Stream. S D'Oily's Tower, 1074. t The Mill-dam. w The Well. y Entrance to the Staircase. The old tower which remains of the Castle built by Robert D'Oily in the time of the Conqueror, appears by Agas's map to have been one of the towers in the wall of the inner bailey, and not the keep, as was formerly supposed. It is certainly small for a Norman keep to a castle of this importance, and the circumstance that there was originally no entrance on the ground floor would rather seem to indicate the prison tower. The entrance was on the first floor from the top of the wall; the archway cut through the wall for the treadmill is entirely modern; there was a solid wall in that part. Others suppose this to have been the belfry tower of St. George's Church, and it has this appearance on Agas's map. We have no distinct record of the keep, but a round tower was erected in the 19th Henry III., which may have been used as a keep. Wood says that within the walls of the Castle there were "Mansions for the king in time of war, besides the convent and church of St. George; as also the strong prison in which the Chancellor of the University had peculiar jurisdiction, to imprison his rebellious clerks, granted to him by Henry III., in the fifteenth year of his reign; and in the twenty-third year it was also made the common gaol of the county, which edifice remained with St. George's convent and the chapel, which is now the common prison, to the time of the Civil Wars, when it was again put into a position of better defence by King Charles I. "The stately towers, which were great ornaments to this end of the city, were standing till Colonel Ingoldsby the Governor's time, in 1649, when the Castle being designed by the Parliament for a garrison, (after the city works were slighted and decayed,) they were all (being four in number, beside that on the gate,) pulled down, and bulwarks on the Mount erected in their place, which greatly strengthened the works; yet notwithstanding afterwards, though the said works with other edifices were above a year finishing, and cost many hundred pounds, in the month of August, 1651, when King Charles came from Worcester here, they were in four days' space, in a whim, quite pulled down and demolished, and the garrison at that time translated to New College, to the great detriment of that place and its students and places adjoining b." A mound is a common appendage to a Norman castle, formed of the earth dug out in making the ditch, thrown up in the outer bailey, because if thrown outside the ditch it would have been of assistance to the enemy. The summit of the mound served as a look-out place. This was commonly protected by a wooden palisade, and sometimes had a building upon it, but a considerable period must have elapsed before the earth of a mound was solid enough to bear a heavy building. there is a deep well, and over this a small walled chamber of the time of Henry II., called the Well-room. The king's brief In the centre of the Oxford mound C.JEWITT & So. 7 There was a small church with a college of priests attached to it, called St. George's College, within the Castle, founded by Robert D'Oily in 1070, and transferred to Osney in 1141, when St. Thomas's Church was built, and served for the parishioners of St. George's. The crypt of it is still shewn: the pillars of the crypt are early Norman, and the capitals are rude and curious; the vault is modern, the crypt having been rebuilt by Mr. Harris about 1800. It had long been forgotten, and was discovered by him when the Castle was partly rebuilt for the county prison, and a considerable part of the present buildings were erected. The old crypt came in the way of the new buildings, and was moved. Mr. Harris carefully measured all the parts, and replaced the old pillars and capitals as closely as possible in their original position: but the vault is entirely modern, of ashlar masonry, though very deceptive; so much so, that so good an antiquary as Mr. Hartshorne persists in considering it as ancient, in the teeth of the most direct evidence. Mr. Harris' drawings for the alterations and new buildings are extant, and at the time when Mr. Hartshorne read his paper here in 1851 before the Archæological Institute, Miss Harris, the daughter of the builder who erected it, was living, and distinctly remembered it, and one of the workmen employed upon it was also living; but Mr. Hartshorne refused to listen to this evidence, which he called "vague authority," "hearsay testimony," and "current tradition." Dr. Ingram, who also makes this statement in his "Memorials," was living, and probably in Oxford at the time it was rebuilt on a new site, and he was well acquainted with Mr. Harris. Mr. Hartshorne also in the same paper ignores the existence of the Palace of Beaumont, and applies to the Castle all the passages in the public records which mention the Royal Palace at Oxford. But the Castle ceased to be the royal residence from the time of Henry I., who built the Palace of Beaumont, and several of his successors resided in it, especially Henry II., who greatly enlarged it; and Richard Cœur de Lion was born in it. At It is true that the Empress Maud took refuge in the Castle for security, but even during the siege King Stephen is said to have resided in Beaumont Palace, and the historical evidence of its existence is as clear as that of other royal palaces now destroyed. It continued to be a frequent royal residence until Edward II. gave it to the Carmelite Friars, and it shared the fate of other monasteries. the dissolution it was sold to Edmund Powell, of Sandford, who pulled down the greater part of it, and the ruins were afterwards used by Archbishop Laud as a stone quarry for building his new quadrangle at St. John's College. A small fragment was left standing, with a doorway in it, until Beaumont-street was built about thirty years ago.. The most memorable event in the early history of Oxford is the siege of the Castle by Stephen when the Empress Maud had taken refuge there, and as the legends as to the mode of her escape are of questionable authority, it may be useful to quote the account of it given by William of Malmesbury, who was living at the time. He says: "Not content with having burned the town and seized the Castle of Wareham, as the king saw fortune inclined to favour him, be came to Oxford, and the garrison having sallied out against him, he suddenly passed a ford which was not gene rally known, and repelling the enemy, entered the town with them, and having burned the city laid siege to the castle, in which was the Empress with her domestic guards. This he did with such determined resolution, that he declared no hope of advantage or fear of loss should induce him to depart till the castle was delivered up, and the Empress delivered to his power. Shortly after, all the nobility of the Empress' party, ashamed of being absent from their sovereign in violation of their compact, assembled in large bodies at Wallingford, with the determination of attacking the king, if he would risk a battle in the open plain; but they had no intention of assailing him within the city, as Robert, Earl of Gloucester, had so fortified it with ditches, that it appeared impregnable unless by fire. "I would very willingly subjoin the manner of the Empress' liberation, did I know it to a certainty, for it is undoubtedly one of God's manifest miracles. This, however, is sufficiently notorious, that through fear of the Earl's approach, many of the besiegers of Oxford stole away wherever they were able, and the rest remitted their vigilance, and kept not so good a look-out as before, more anxious for their own safety in case it came to a battle than bent on the destruction of others. This circumstance being remarked by the townsmen, the Empress with only four soldiers made her escape through a postern and passed the river. Afterwards, as necessity sometimes, and indeed almost always, discovers means and ministers courage, she went to Abingdon on foot, and thence reached Wallingford scribing more fully, if by God's permission on horseback. But this I purpose de I shall ever learn the truth of it from those who were present." These are the last words of Malmesbury's Chronicle, and the intention there expressed was never fulfilled. From this we gather that the chief defence of Oxford was then, as afterwards, the water by which it was nearly surrounded: the trenches, not the walls, are specially mentioned. From the manner in which the burning of the city is spoken of, it is evident that the houses were of wood only, as indeed to a great extent they still are. The brief account given in the Continuation of the Saxon Chronicle differs slightly from that given by Malmesbury; it is there said that "they let her down from the tower by ropes, and she stole |