Author: James Parker

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2018-03-20

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780365121534

Excerpt from The Early History of Oxford: 727-1100, Preceded by a Sketch of the Mythical Origin of the City and University Throughout the treatise I have attempted to deal fairly with the facts before me. I have not thought it my duty to magnify the importance of Oxford - a duty which the majority of local historians seem to consider as devolving upon them. If in places I have dismissed popular and interesting traditions as untenable, I trust by bringing together a fuller summary than has yet been done of records which exist, I have built up, so to speak, as much as I have pulled down; and if I have not surrounded Oxford with a mysterious halo of glory, and contended for an antiquity which there is no reason to suppose it possessed, I still hope I may have done something to show the posi tion which Oxford really occupied in the early history of the country. A tolerably full alphabetical index of places and persons named in the course of the book has been given. An alphabetical index of subjects I have, as a rule, found to be practically useless, since on the one hand it is impossible to know for certain under what word the subject should be indexed, and on the other hand, there cannot be many historical subjects, if indeed there be any, which are not associated with some known place or person, and which cannot therefore be far more readily found in the index under such a reference; consequently but a few technical words, and others under which it has been thought useful to group several references have been introduced. Moreover the somewhat full 'table of Contents' will, it is anticipated, supply a ready means of reference to the various subjects treated in the work. But I have kept distinct an index to the books and mss. From which the data given in my work have been extracted, or which for various reasons may have been quoted; and my reason for doing this is because I have laid so great a stress upon the importance of knowing whence we derive the facts on which we depend for our history. Scattered throughout the pages of a somewhat long index of names and places, the list of authorities would scarcely fulfil its purpose; but arranged as it is, besides exhibiting the sources whence that which has been stated is deduced, it exhibits also in a measure what'has not been explored or made use of. By turning to this index the student or any historian of Oxford who may make use of the material here brought together, can see at once what new ground he will have to explore or how far the ground already explored has been properly dealt with. I am aware that this conspectus may expose my short comings, just as the printing of the originals exposes my errors in translation; but if it advances in any way the true study of the history of Oxford I shall be only too pleased that both are exposed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.