Music Room Extension Corpus Christi College Oxford

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.