Medieval and Post-Medieval Tenements at the Ashmolean Museum Extension Site Specialist reports to accompany published report :Teague, S, and Ford, BM, 2020 Medieval and Post-Medieval Tenements at the Ashmolean Museum Extension Site, Oxford,in The Archaeology of Oxford in the 21st Century(eds A Dodd, S Mileson and L Webley), 325–400. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.

Excavations in advance of an extension to the Ashmolean Museum revealed evidence dating from the middle Anglo-Saxon period to the nineteenth century. A small group of middle Anglo-Saxon Ipswich ware pottery adds to growing evidence for occupation of this period in the vicinity, and is only the second group of such pottery recovered to date in Oxford. From the late twelfth century the area formed part of the developing northern suburb of the medieval town, and evidence was recovered for three tenements extending from St Giles’s Street through to the boundary of the royal palace of Beaumont to the west. Most of the excavated area fell within a tenement identifiable with a property documented from the early thirteenth century. Between 1240 and 1260 this was held by Master Ralph of Swalcliffe, one of the earliest medical doctors known from the university, and subsequently by his brother, John. A fragment of window tympanum recovered during the excavations is likely to have come from a stone house constructed at the site by c.1200. This might be identifiable with the documented houses of Andrew Rufus, the earliest known owner of the property, who was alive in the last decade of the twelfth century. Clear evidence for long-lived property boundaries was seen in the excavations, and this suggests some revision of Salter’s mapping of the area. Numerous thirteenth- to fifteenth-century features included wells, quarries and rubbish pits, and an unusually high number of medieval coins were recovered. There was some evidence for retrenchment in the later medieval period and for the subdivision of properties into the smaller holdings that are evident on early maps. Nevertheless, as on many sites of this period, the finds and environmental evidence from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries also point to a rising standard of living. Fishing is suggested by an unusually rich assemblage of bone from freshwater fish and eels and a group of fishing net weights. Other unusual finds include a coin weight for a James I gold half angel, and an assemblage of musket balls and a powder holder cover that are likely to date from the Civil War. In the eighteenth century, an assemblage of malting kiln tiles and glass drinking vessels suggests that an inn that brewed ale existed on the site.