Corpus Christi College Music Room

In February 2007, Oxford Archaeology (OA) carried out a field
evaluation at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The work was
commissioned by Rick Mather Associates on behalf of the college in
advance of the submission of a planning application for the construction
of a new music room. The new facilities would replace the existing music
room (currently within a bastion of the medieval city wall) with a larger
building extending northwards into the college gardens.
The evaluation revealed a west-east aligned inhumation, potentially
associated with an early phase of St Frideswide’s Priory.
A mortared stone structure, possibly representing the defensive line of the
late-Saxon burh was also revealed, along with evidence for later
development of the defensive circuit, including a localised re-build of the
City wall in the early 17th century.
Evidence for the partial re-construction of the boundary wall between
Christ Church and Corpus Christi colleges was also revealed. The date of
this re-build is unclear.
Some evidence for 13th-14th century occupation was recovered from a
possible refuse pit which may have been associated with properties
fronting onto the former Shidyerd Street. No evidence for the street itself
was encountered within the trenches, although this may have been as a
result of later truncation, particularly by two post-medieval cess pits
which had been excavated up against the boundary wall between Christ
Church and Corpus Christi. One of these was stone-lined and may date to
the 18th century, although the final phase of backfilling occurred in the
mid-late 19th century. The second cess pit showed no evidence of stone
lining, and the artefactual evidence suggested that it pre-dated the stone
lined feature and originated in the 16th-17th century.
The remainder of the archaeological data recovered appeared to relate to
the various configurations of the college gardens from the 16th century
onwards. This included a substantial robber trench which corresponds
with a wall shown on a number of cartographic sources, and a number of
landscaping deposits which probably originate from later phases of
construction of college buildings.