Look for the rough pale-stone tower rising in a plain rectangle, topped with battlements and a clock face - the stubborn last piece of St Martin's Church.
This seventy-four-foot tower is all that remains of twelfth-century St Martin's, Oxford's official City Church from about eleven twenty-two until eighteen ninety-six, when the city demolished the main church to make more room for traffic. Even medieval buildings, it seems, could lose an argument with road planning.
On the evening of Tuesday the tenth of February, thirteen fifty-five, two students, Walter de Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield, drank in the Swindlestock Tavern at the south-west corner of Carfax. They complained about the wine. John of Barford, the landlord and also that year's mayor, answered with what a chronicler called stubborn and saucy language... so one student threw a quart pot at his head. St Martin's bell rang the alarm, and bakers, brewers, vintners, and merchants joined the fight. Around twenty townspeople died, and sixty-two scholars - perhaps sixty-three, depending on whose counting you prefer.
Every year after that, the mayor, bailiffs, and citizens processed to St Mary's to pay sixty-three pence, until the first of February, eighteen twenty-five. Take a glance at your screen for the tower surviving alone and St Mary's, where that ritual apology ended.
Yet this same church also served the poor. In fifteen forty-five, churchwardens set a bench against the east wall. By fifteen sixty-one people called it the Penniless Bench. Later, laborers waited there for hire, and on market days butter sellers spread their goods on the same stone. Hold onto that shared patch of Oxford life... then make your way to St Michael at the North Gate, about three minutes from here.
