Continuing from our last post courtesy of volunteers at the Museum of Oxford, in this article Ben Kehoe, Peter Simpson and Prue Drew examine what life was like in Oxford during the Civil War.
The relocation of the royal court and government in Oxford led to the arrival of unprecedented numbers of newcomers in the city. Royal advisers, courtiers, government officials, household servants, as well as an array of royalist supporters and sympathisers, all accompanied the King to Oxford and all had to find temporary accommodation in the city. Overcrowding soon became a major problem.
While the King and his family were hosted by the various colleges of the University, the largest proportion of the King’s followers had to be lodged in the homes of ordinary Oxford residents. According to a survey conducted in January 1644, there were 408 ‘newcomers’ lodged in private residences in St Aldate’s parish alone. These included important household servants such as the King’s tailor and barber, as well as large numbers of royalist soldiers and even the royal coal carrier.[1] One such St Aldate’s resident, Abel Parne, who owned one of the larger houses in the parish, hosted multiple royalists throughout the first Civil War, including Henry Wood, treasurer of the Queen’s household, and two of the King’s bakers, Lawrence Ball and George Wild.[2] St Aldate’s was not the only parish to bear the burden of accommodating the many royalist newcomers. Royalist soldiers were also billeted in the parishes of St Michael’s and St Mary Magdalen, and accounts of the Easter offering in St Ebbe’s reveal a sum total of 625 people in the parish in 1644, of which only 368 were recorded as ‘communicant parishioners.’[3]
Living conditions for incoming royalists, and for the residents with whom they were lodged, were far from comfortable. The memoirs of Lady Ann Fanshawe – the daughter of a royalist merchant who fled to Oxford after parliament seized her family’s estate – provide an evocative description of the squalid conditions in a fiercely overcrowded city:
‘from as good houses of any gentleman of England had we came to a baker’s house in an obscure street, and from roomes well furnished to lye in a very bad bed in a garrett, to one dish of meat and that not the best ordered; no money, for we were poor as Job, nor clothes more than a man or two brought in their cloak bags. We had the perpetuall discourse of losing and gaining of towns and men; at the window the sad spectacle of war, sometimes plague, sometimes sickness of other kind, by reason of so many people being packt together.’[4]
Overpopulation put enormous pressure on Oxford’s already underdeveloped infrastructure. Few of the city’s streets were paved and most were inadequately drained at the outbreak of the Civil War, and sewage was already a major problem in Oxford even before the arrival of the royalists. Public dunghills were a common sites on many of the main streets and in prominent places such as near the Sheldonian Theatre and Clarendon Building. In 1640, the ditch near North Gate was being used by a nearby slaughterhouse as a dumping ground for offal, and in 1636 the Queen Street butchers were reported to be depositing their waste into the main street channels.[5]
The arrival of the Royalists exacerbated these problems, leading to the accumulation of even greater quantities of rubbish and waste in the streets. By March 1643, the problem of sewage in the streets had become so pressing that the Town Council appointed two men in each parish to clear away the rubbish.[6] These measures proved to be of little use in improving the poor state of sanitation in the city, and in the summer of 1643 insanitary conditions came to a head with an outbreak of ‘morbus campestris’, which is subsequently believed to have been a typhus epidemic. According to parliamentarian spies, deaths from this infectious disease were very high, with as many as 40 people dying each week in July 1643. Parish registers largely confirm this picture of high mortality. A total of 875 burials were recorded across seven parishes in 1643, with over 200 in the parishes of St Mary Magdalen and St Michael’s.[7] Though ‘Morbus campestris’ ceased to afflict Oxford after 1643, poor sanitation continued to be a problem and various other kinds of plagues were recorded in the years 1644 and 1645, though mortality from these diseases were not as high.[8]
Large concentrations of billeted soldiers in Oxford also constituted a fire risk, not least because the soldiers’ presence led to a sharp increase in the sale of tobacco in the city. In fact, tobacco sales increased to such an extent that in Shotover a bank of white clay was designated with the sole purpose making pipes.[9] It is largely believed that smoking, or more specifically the careless disposal of pipe embers by royalist soldiers, played a part in sparking the Great Fire of Oxford in October 1644. Some sources, however, suggest that the fire was caused by soldiers roasting a pig on a windy day.
The fire is believed to have started in a tavern outside the North Wall in Thames Street (present day George Street), before then spreading Cornmarket and New Inn Hall Street, and South to Queen Street, where it destroyed approximately 300 houses. It destroyed the wealthy area around Carfax as well the poorer parts of the city in St Peter’s-in-the-Bailey and St Ebbe’s. The fire did not die out until midnight when it had been burning for nearly eleven hours. In that time the flames had run for almost 1,000 yards and destroyed property in five parishes. The original number of victims was probably far higher than the estimated 175 and property losses were valued at £43,600. The reasons given for the extent of the damages at the time were the strength of the wind blowing which fanned the flames and carried the fire across features such as the town wall.[10]
Reconstruction of the destroyed area was a considerable task. The civil war restricted financial aid which the victims of the fire received and its impact on the town’s economy caused a considerable delay with the rebuilding. Some properties were rebuilt quickly within two or three years but other parts were still vacant for nearly ten years.
[1] Margaret Toynbee and Peter Young, Stangers in Oxford: A side light on the first Civil War, 1642-1646 (London: Phillmore, 1973), pp. 9-10.
[2] Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (London: Harper Press, 2007), p. 268.
[3] The Victoria History of the Counties of England. A History of the County of Oxford, Vol. IV, The City of Oxford ed. Alan Crossley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 82.
[4] The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, edited John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) p. 111.
[5] Victoria History of Counties of England, vol. IV, p. 86.
[6] Eric Gruber von Arni, Justice to the Maimed Soldier. Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare of Sick and Wounded Soldiers and their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1842-1660 (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2001), p. 22.
[7] Victoria History of Counties of England, vol. IV, p. 82.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Daniel MacCannell, Oxford: mapping the city (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2016), p. 24.
[10] For information on the fire and debates on its causes, see Ibid; John Barratt, Cavalier Capital. Oxford in the English Civil War (Solihul: Helion, 2015), pp. 144-5; Derek Honey, Oxford beyond the university (Witney: Affleck Press, 2003), p. 49.
