A sure way of making a legend appear authentic is to carve an inscription, preferably in Latin, on a weathered stone. Such an inscription (cut in 1874 to commemorate a supposed happening in 727 AD) appears on a stone above a well in the churchyard of Binsey church:

ST MARGARET 'S WELL

(St Margaret's Well, originally given, so it is said, to St Frideswide in answer to her prayers, was cleaned, rebuilt and restored to use by The Reverend T. J. Prout, the vicar and a former member of Christ Church, in the year of our Saviour 1874)

St Frideswide, a Saxon princess, was the founder of a nunnery where Christ Church now stands. Legend has it that she was forced to flee from Oxford to avoid the unwelcome attentions of a suitor named Alfgar who was subsequently deprived of his sight as a punishment for his importunity. One version of the origin of St Margaret's Well, given by Headlam (1925), relates that St Frideswide caused a spring to break forth at Binsey in order to satisfy the thirst of some of her followers who had come from Oxford to greet her on her return. In another version, found pinned to the church door at Binsey, she prayed to St Margaret of Antioch who told her to strike the ground with her staff. Water gushed out, Alfgar's eyes were bathed in it, and his sight restored. On seeing the light again, he also saw the error of his ways and gave her no further trouble.

St Frideswide's shrine may be seen in the Lady Chapel of Christ Church Cathedral. In the Latin Chapel of the Cathedral is a fourteenth-century stained-glass window (the second window from the east end) of three female saints including 'S'ta Frideswida', and at the east end of the Chapel is a nineteenth-century 'St Frideswide's Window' designed by Edward Burne-Jones, in which the well at Binsey is depicted.

St Frideswide's Church, Osney, was dedicated to her name in 1872.

A stone set into the wall of Oxford Town Hall, St Aldate's bears the inscription:

This street known till 1300 as Great Jewry contained many houses of the Jews including the synagogue which lay to the north of Tom Tower.

The cemetery in which the medieval Jews buried their dead was on the site of what is now the Botanic Garden, and the path between Great Jewry and the cemetery, along which the dead were carried for burial, is still known as Dead Man's Walk.

Set into the wall at the side of the Dan by Gate leading to the Botanic Garden is a stone with an inscription in English and in Hebrew which reads:

The Hebrew inscription consists of two quotations from the Scriptures, 'He entereth into peace' (Isaiah 57.2) and 'Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake' (Daniel 12.2). Above some of the letters are small arrows which indicate letters used as numerals to represent dates, since Hebrew, having no numerals, uses letters of the alphabet instead. The marked letters in the quotation from Isaiah add up to 937 (the Jewish year 4937 being the equivalent of 1177 AD) and the quotation from Daniel yields the number 50 (the Jewish year 5050 being the equivalent of 1290 AD), and the dates are spelt out in full in brackets in the last line of the inscription.

The date 1290 can safely be regarded as the date when burials ceased in the cemetery, since it is the date of the expulsion of the Jews from England. However, as Daniel Roth points out in The Jews of Medieval Oxford, the cemetery is unlikely to have been in use until 1231, and the date of 1177 recorded on the inscription is therefore too early.

The Jews had come to England after the Norman Conquest at the invitation of William the Conqueror who needed to borrow money from them, since 'usury' was forbidden to Christians. While money-lending may have brought the Jewish community prosperity, it also brought them unpopularity, and throughout the thirteenth century, measures were taken to harass them. They had been driven out of France in 1253, and Edward I expelled them from England when he had found alternative sources of funds.

At a time when anti-Jewish feeling was at its height, a young Christian Deacon called Robert, a student of Hebrew at Oxford University, decided to become a Jew. He had himself circumcised, changed his name to Haggai, and married a Jewess. When asked by the Church authorities to account for his conduct, he is reported to have said: "I renounce the new-fangled Law and the comments of Jesus, the false prophet". His outspokenness cost him his life and he was burnt alive for heresy. His courageous stand and his suffering are commemorated on a plaque on the only surviving wall of Osney Abbey, which is to be found in the boat yard of Osney Marine Engineering Company at the end of Mill Street, euphemistically called Osney Marina:

Near this stone in Osney Abbey,Robert of Reading, otherwise Haggai of Oxford, suffered for his faith on Sunday 17 April 1222 AD, corresponding to 4 IYYAR 4982 AM.

By Tudor times, the monarchy was able to rely on the City of London as a source of funds, and the Reformation led to a further rise in native capital enterprise. When the Jews eventually returned to England under Cromwell, they found the English in control of their own money market. But if the Jews no longer had the monopoly of lending money, they had not lost their flair for making it. A plaque on the wall inside 84 High Street (Frank Cooper) records the activities of one of the first Jews to set up in business in Oxford since the expulsion in 1290. It reads:

Here stood the Angel Inn where one JACOB opened the first coffee house in England in the year 1650.

The event is recorded by Anthony Wood, writing in 1651: This yeare [1650 ]Jacob a Jew ]opened a coffey house at the Angel in the parish of St Peter, in the East Oxon; and there it was by some, who delighted in noveltie drank.

The sentence of death by burning passed on the Jew Haggai was cited three hundred years later as a precedent in the case of Oxford's more celebrated martyrs, Bishops Latimer and Ridley and Archbishop Cranmer. A cross set into the road in the centre of Broad Street, opposite the Master's Lodgings of Balliol College, marks the supposed spot of their execution which, in the sixteenth century, was a ditch outside the city wall. A stone set into the wall of Balliol College bears the legend:

Opposite this point near the cross in the .middle of Broad Street, Hugh Latimer, one time Bishop of Worcester, Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury were burnt alive for their faith in 1555 and 1556.

The three Protestant martyrs are more prominently commemorated on one of Oxford' best known landmarks, the Martyrs' Memorial, situated at the south end of St Giles and next to the church of St Mary Magdalen. The date of the memorial's erection (1841) provides a clue to its origin. During the 1830s the congregations of the evangelical churches of Oxford became increasingly concerned at the drift towards Rome shown by the so- called Oxford Movement, led by such figures as J. H. Newman (who was vicar of St Mary the Virgin Church, Oxford, from 1828 to 1843), E. B. Pusey, Professor of Hebrew at the University, and John Keble, whose Assize Sermon at St Mary the Virgin in 1833 is said to have initiated the Oxford Movement. The importance of St Mary the Virgin Church as the cradle of the Oxford Movement is recalled on a framed notice near the pulpit in that church. The concern of the townsfolk was sufficient to ensure a good response to an appeal for funds to build a memorial to the Protestant martyrs, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, with statues of the three martyrs sculpted by H. Weekes.  Cranmer faces north holding his Bible, Ridley faces east (towards Balliol), and Latimer, shown as an old man with arms crossed in resignation, faces west. The strongly Protestant origins of the Memorial are reflected in its inscription:

The martyrs are also commemorated in St Mary the Virgin Church where their trial took place. A framed notice on 'Cranmer's Pillar' recalls that a portion of the moulding was cut away for a platform on which Cranmer was condemned.

While waiting for the sentences of death to be carried out, the Bishops were held in Bocardo Prison which adjoined the west side of the tower of the church of St Michael at the North Gate. The door of the cell which they occupied is preserved in the tower and bears a brass plate with an inscription in copper-plate:

Cranmer and Ridley give their names to roads off Hollow Way, but Latimer Road in Headington has no connection with the martyr-bishop.

Another manifestation of religious intolerance in Oxford is recorded on a metal plaque on the parapet of Pacey's Bridge over the millstream at the east end of Park End Street:

Near this place the Baptists of Oxford worshipped from 1661 to 1715 in the house of Richard Tidmarsh (Minister 1661-1691). Baptisms took place in the stream below. The meeting house was destroyed by rioters in 1715. Erected by members of the New Road Baptist Chapel to mark 300 years of Baptist witness in Oxford. 1953.

Richard Tidmarsh gives his name to nearby Tidmarsh Lane.

Reminders of the life and work of John Wesley (1703-91), founder of Methodism, are visible today in many corners of Oxford.

In New Inn Hall Street, adjacent to the entrance to Frewin Hall, is a stone set into the wall with the inscription:

On 14 July 1783 and on several subsequent occasions John Wesley preached in this building, the first Methodist meeting house in Oxford.

John Wesley was a well-known figure in Oxford long before he preached in New Inn Hall Street. He first came in 1720 as an undergraduate at Christ Church. He took his degree in 1724, and a year later he was ordained deacon in the Cathedral. Three years after that, he was ordained there as a priest too. By that time his younger brother, Charles, was at Christ Church and today the pair of them are commemorated in stained glass in the Hall (the second window on the right of the entrance). Also in the Hall is a portrait of John at the age of 85 by George Romney (on the back wall to the left of the entrance).

In 1726 John was elected to a Fellowship at Lincoln College where one of his first duties was to preach at St Michael at the North Gate, whose living was in the gift of the college. His preaching there is recalled on a small framed notice near the fifteenth-century pulpit in the church. He was away from Lincoln College for three years from 1735 as a missionary chaplain in Georgia, but on his return to England he resumed his Fellowship and remained as a Fellow of Lincoln College until his marriage at the age of 48 in 1751.

A framed notice near the pulpit of the church of St Mary the Virgin recalls that in 1738 he preached his famous sermon there on Salvation by Faith, which he prefixed to his published collection of sermons. With the notice is a reproduction of the portrait by Nathaniel Hone (from the National Portrait Gallery showing him preaching in the open air.

He is remembered at Lincoln College by the Wesley Room in the front quadrangle, which was restored by American Methodists in 1926 and which is marked by a bronze bust on the outside wall. Both here and in the Hall are portraits of Wesley, including one of him as a young man by John Williams and a replica of the Romney portrait; and in the Chapel is yet another pulpit from which he preached some more of the 40,000 sermons he is reported to have delivered during his lifetime.

Although it was the University that nurtured him, it was to the townsfolk that he made his greatest appeal. On 29th October 1789 at the age of 86 he made his last appearance at the meeting-house in New Inn Hall Street. Oxford's first proper Methodist Chapel, with seating for 800, was built in 1817/18 on the site now occupied by St Peter's College and this served as the centre of Methodism in Oxford until the present Wesley Memorial Church replaced it sixty years later.

Wesley Close in Blackbird Leys was named after him in 1959.

Vanished churches

A small stone set into the ground at the entrance to the 'island' of St Clement's roundabout, facing the Victoria Fountain, records that this was the

Both church and churchyard of St Clement's once stood on the site, but the church was demolished in 1830 when the present one was built in the Marston Road. Part of the churchyard remained, but it was eventually reduced to the size of the present roundabout in order to make more room for traffic at the approach to Magdalen Bridge.

St Clement's was only one of a number of Oxford's churches to have been either demolished or adapted for other uses. Carfax Tower is now all that remains of the former church of St Martin which was taken down in 1896 in order to make more room in the centre of Oxford.

More recently, other churches have been brought into secular use. St Peter in the East has already been referred to on page 2; All Saints, High Street (built in 1707-18 to replace a medieval church whose spire had collapsed in 1700) became the library of Lincoln College in 1972-75;

and the church of SS Philip & James in Woodstock Road (formerly affectionately known as 'Phil and Jim') is now the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies.

The last Abbot of Osney became the first Bishop of Oxford when the diocese was created in 1542, and for a few years the bishop's seat remained in Osney Abbey. But under Henry VIII's reorganisation of Wolsey's 'Cardinal College', it was Christ Church which became the cathedral of the diocese, and thereafter Osney Abbey was allowed to fall into ruins.

Apart from the wall at the end of Mill Street, referred to on pages 8 & 9 above, the most tangible remains of the Abbey are some of its bells which were transferred to Christ Church where they were originally hung in the cathedral tower. Osney's largest bell, Great Tom, named after St Thomas of Canterbury, was over seven feet in diameter, weighed over six tons, and bore the inscription:

After spending over a century in the cathedral tower, Great Tom needed recasting (not for the first time) and was removed to its present position in the specially constructed Gateway Tower -'Tom Tower'- built over Wolsey's original gateway to the design of Sir Christopher Wren. The bell now bears the inscription:

Since 1684, Great Tom has been heard striking every hour, and at five past nine at night when it strikes 101 times - once for every one of the original number of members of Christ Church.

The smaller bells from Osney remained in the cathedral tower until the nineteenth century when it was noticed that the walls were cracking under their weight. They were consequently removed in 1879 to a new bell-tower built over the hall staircase, which still contains some of Osney's bells.

The bells are remembered in two well-known rounds. The first, composed by 'White' (probably Matthew White) was published in Playford's Collection of 1667:

The second round was composed by Henry Aldrich, theologian, architect and musician, who was Dean of Christ Church from 1689 to 1710:

They sound so wondrous great, so charming sweet

That every day at four and ten

Tingle-tingle-ting goes the s.mall bell at nine

But the de'il a man will leave his can

A door at the foot of the Hall stairway in Christ Church has been defaced with the words:

which have been burnt into the wood. The graffiti date from 1829 when undergraduates protested against the reappointment of Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary, to a University post after the passage of the bill for the emancipation of Catholics.

Opposite the Three Horse Shoes and The White Hart in Oxford Road, Old Marston, is a small memorial garden in whose wall is a stone with the inscription:

The Reverend J. H. Mortimer (1872-1959) also gives his name to Mortimer Drive and to the village hall, Mortimer Hall. His memory is further kept alive by the clock which he presented to his old parish church of St Nicholas, Old Marston.