Oxford topography : an essay / by Herbert Hurst.

  • Hurst, Herbert, 1833-1913.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Oxford topography : an essay / by Herbert Hurst. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the angle of the churchyard; and houses are represented there, in Natte’s drawings, as late as 1808. The interest attaching to the name mainly arises from the fact that, in Domesday, three Segrims are registered as owners of mansions, but none of them held a mural mansion, though above two hundred persons held their mansions free because they were bound to repair the wall. Hutten quotes Speed as his authority for the account he gives of Aldate or Eldad; but Speed took it from that most impure source, Geoffrey of Monmouth, as to whom one cannot do better than consult Mr. Parker’s Early Oxford, p. 8. As to the name Saint Aldate—Olave, Told, Tole, Old, and Hold are other corrupted forms—the existence of any saint named Eldad has at all times been much questioned, and most people join Mr. Parker (Early Oxford, p. 293) in putting down the name and the legend as an invention of the twelfth century. The hagiology even of British saints is not so defective as to have omitted the name for hundreds of years. The position near an old gate of Oxford, perhaps called The old gate when, as we have seen, that across the main stream of the Thames was built; the fact that Aldgate is the name of a street in London, that Aldgate is known to be convertible into Aldyate and Aldate, and that the only other church dedicated to such a Saint (that at Gloucester) is near an old gate, all cast a suspicion on the name. We have already (p. 43) met, in the parish just south of this, with one member of the family ‘ Att yate,’ probably taking its name from the South gate hard by. We know that the various Broadgate halls had each a second spelling Broadyate. Besides this, when we remember that four other churches of ours have, as is customary in other towns, a second name to point out locality, as St. Peter in the Bailey, St. Michael’s at North Gate; and that Carfax Church, i.e. the church at Carfax, was and is more frequently so called than St. Martin’s; then it becomes by no means improbable that here, the church of some saint ‘at old gate,’ ‘Aid-gate,’ or ‘Aldate,’ has, like others, lost its dedication name and retained its position name only. We happen to know, from a kalendar of the fifteenth century (Tw. 23, p. 133), that the dedication day was the same day as that of St. Edmund the King, i.e. November 20; it wants but the name of the church put out in full, say, as St. Edmund:s (or St. Olave’s) church at the Ald-yate, in some well authenticated document, and the question will be settled. Besides its fringe of houses along the north, and along most of the east side, the
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