A 1209 quarrel in Oxford sent scholars off to found Cambridge
Oxford takes its name from a river crossing for oxen, and its university grew from teaching that began in the 11th century. Relations with the townspeople were often ugly: in 1209, after two scholars were hanged, a group of academics left and founded Cambridge. The feud peaked in the St Scholastica Day Riot of 1355.
The Old English Oxenaforda described a shallow ford where oxen waded across the Thames, and the spot mattered because it controlled the upper river where the Cherwell joins it. Locally the Thames here is called the Isis. After the Conquest, the Norman lord Robert D'Oyly raised Oxford Castle in 1071, the town was besieged during the Anarchy in 1142, and a significant medieval Jewish community included David of Oxford and Licoricia of Winchester. The St Scholastica Day Riot dragged on for days, and roughly 93 people from both town and university died.
The Reformation hit this church-heavy town hard, closing its monasteries in the 1530s. When the Diocese of Oxford was created in 1542, the chapel of Christ Church became a cathedral and the town became a city. Under Mary I, Bishops Latimer and Ridley were burned there in October 1555 and Thomas Cranmer was executed in March 1556, events recalled by the Victorian Martyrs' Memorial in St Giles'. From 1642 to 1646 Charles I ran his wartime court from Oxford after losing London.
Industry came later. The Oxford Canal arrived in 1790 with cheap Midlands coal, the Great Western line to Paddington opened in 1844, and Oxford University Press became a major employer. In 1910 William Morris, later Lord Nuffield, started building cars at Cowley, where Minis are made today under BMW, owner of the plant since 2000. The last Morris-badged car left the line in 1982.
The weather has been watched unusually closely. The Radcliffe Meteorological Station holds Britain's longest continuous temperature and rainfall record for one site, unbroken since January 1815. Its extremes run from −17.8 °C on 24 December 1860 to 38.1 °C on 19 July 2022, and the wettest year was 2012. The city had 166,034 residents in 2024, and its green belt has been blamed for making it the least affordable UK city outside London.
Source: Oxford
