From: 162 Autumn 2025
Author: Peter Smith
The review of the Freemen archive in the Town Hall, by our new archivist Mark Hathaway, aided by our Chair, is going well. We have catalogued four of eight boxes and are aware of other items already in the county History Centre. Once the boxes have been fully catalogued some conservation activity will be undertaken and we envisage a review by a professional archivist before deciding on how we deal with it going forward. It is likely it will eventually reside in the Oxfordshire History Centre, allowing general public access to appropriate material.
In the archive is a collection of all our early journals. As we do today, they include some interesting historic items, often derived from the archive or local newspaper articles, and we plan to feature some of these here in due course. For now here are some short snippets from our old journals:
In late 1988, an Eynsham based document collector apparently offered the City a vellum document dated 23rd March 1643. It was an agreement signed by King Charles I, the Mayor of Oxford and 61 Freemen and Wolvercote Commoners. The Freemen and Commoners undertook to keep cattle off the meadow and common from March 25 to July 28 that year, so that the King could harvest a crop of hay for the horses of his army, then stationed in Oxford. There was a January 1989 display in the Museum of Oxford, including this document, entitled “The History of Port Meadow”. Can anyone recall visiting that?
1642 – Charles I, who had his troops garrisioned in Oxford during the Civil War, requested the first crop of hay off Port Meadow, to feed his horses. This was agreed by the Freemen but only if the citizens were not expected to make the hay or pay for it to be made.
July 6th 1560 – the Council ordered that all Freemen should contribute to the wages of the Port Meadow herdsman, whose wages were to be 4/- per week from “Hollytide day yn May until Hallowtyde” and for the rest of the year, 5/- quarterly. Pre local government reform in 1835 the City Council was run by Freemen.
1798 – the Duke of York reviewed 20,000 volunteers (militia – precursor to the Territorial Army) on Port Meadow. See article on another gathering later.
The Doomsday Book 1086 recorded the following “All the burgesses of Oxford have common of pasture without the wall which renders 6s.8d. to the King”. This was the common pasture of Port Meadow. “Port” by the way means town in old terminology. Burgesses is another term for Freemen pre-1835.
The Chair has suggested some topics featured in past journals and archive material that might warrant a refreshed look with a new article in a future journal. Topics such as the Medley boat station saga in the 1980s, the long gone allotments, the two council rubbish tips, day to day management challenges, the Nixon School founded in 1657/58 for the sons of Freemen (it used to be on the site of the Town Hall before the new building required it’s demolition after 1892), historic Freemen stories, past major legal challenges we’ve initiated or been involved in, the meadow’s botany etc.