History
The Old Black Horse Hotel lies on the corner of St. Clements Street to the
north, at its entrance, & Dawson Street to the east, and it is very much a
survivor of ancient St. Clements, which was originally so-called after the
mediaeval church and churchyard of the same name, standing in the middle of what
is now known as 'The Plain'.
In the Middle Ages St. Edmunds Well was beside the church, and miracles were
believed to occur there. Nevertheless, the Bishop of Lincoln forbid the
veneration of the Well both in 1240 and again in 1304. St. Clements Old Church,
its “little whitened tower, adorned with pinnacles,” was taken down in 1829,
having been replaced by a new St. Clements Church further to the east, and so
the area literally became “a plain”, that is an open space surrounded by
buildings.
Most of St. Clements formed part of land granted by King Ethelred’s Charter
to St. Frideswide’s, (which means Bond of Peace), Priory in 1004. St. Clements
chapel was not given to St. Frideswide’s until 1122, but was probably in
existence much earlier.
At this time the district was known as Bruggeset (Bridset or Bridgeset), or
Bolshipton (with alternative spellings – a shippon being a cattle-byre), and the
name of St. Clements did not come into use until the seventeenth century.
The Bolshipton House stood opposite the Old Black Horse Inn, and the Bolles
family, whose house it was, were farmers in the locality in the thirteenth
century when St. Clements was largely rural. In 1643, at the time of The Civil
War, the house was pulled down to make way for the erection of fortifications
between the Royalist Defenders and the opposing Parliamentarians during their
siege of Oxford; in fact St. Clements suffered very greatly because not only was
a whole street destroyed, but many other houses on the fringes were also
levelled to prevent the enemy from using them for cover. As a consequence the
early seventeenth century Black Horse Inn, now a Hotel, built originally on the
site of Green Croft (No. 102 St. Clements) is almost the only local building to
have survived the ravages of the Civil War.
Dawson Street is named after Thomas Dawson of Reading, the son of an Oxford
Alderman, who left land in trust to the church in 1521. Similar by Boulter
Street, close by, is so-called after Edward Boulter, the heir of his great-uncle
Sir John Cutler, who gave a sum of money in 1736 to build Armhouses in St.
Clements for “six poor neat, honest men”. In 1786 a house was added to the
Cutler-Boulter Armhouses for the use of an apothecary. It was to be the
earliest dispensary in Oxford, and served this purpose for over fifty years,
until 1844.
St. Clements lay, of course, on the main road to London. And was therefore
also much used for the carriage of stone from Headington Quarry and wood from
the Shotover Royal Forest (where, indeed, the people of St. Clements had forest
rights until the early nineteenth century), but the cost of maintaining the road
fell heavily upon the parishioners, amongst whom there was considerable
poverty. Although some money was given for improvement, notably by Cardinal
Wolsey when materials were being carried by way of the road for the building of
his Cardinal’s College (now Christchurch College), poverty was such in St.
Clements that many did not go to church, because they could not afford decent
clothes. Moreover, increasing numbers of poor people were moving into the area,
as their homes were demolished to make way for college building development. In
the circumstances it is no surprise that the cholera epidemic of 1832 spread
very quickly here.
Despite the depradations of the Civil War, by 1675 there were more houses in
St. Clements than before, largely because tradesmen then found it a convenient
place from which to conduct trade with the city market, while avoiding the
regulations and fees imposed by the city freemen.
John Knibb (1650-1722), a legendary English clockmaker, began his business
here and by the eighteenth century a whole variety of shopkeepers and tradesmen
were all trading around the surviving seventeenth century Black Horse Inn, and
many college servants were living in the vicinity also.
In 1746 Jackson first published his “Oxford Flying Weekly Journal” (which
preceded “Jackson’s Oxford Journal”) in St. Clements, and Parkers Bookshop
started up at about the same time as an open-air stall, also close beside the
Old Inn.
The Court of the lords of the Manor of Headington was convened at the Inn in
earlier times and there were then, conveniently, stocks on the cobbles outside,
which did not go unused.
From the seventeenth century onwards there was bull and bear baiting,
frequently attended by Members of the University, and it is recorded that in
1871 a man was gored by a bull. A fair, too, was held just in front of the Black
Horse for toys and trinkets each Thursday before Michaelmas in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, and this continued annually as a Michaelmas Pleasure
Fair until the 1930’s.
Over the centuries the fortunes of St. Clements have varied very
considerably, but the one surviving constant seems to be the Old Black Horse
Hotel itself, which is still serving its patrons as well as it ever has done for
nearly 400 years. |
