A multi-phase programme of archaeological works near Banbury revealed evidence of human occupation from the Middle / Late Bronze Age and a significant Anglo-Saxon cemetery with the remains of at least 52 individuals, 23,000 counted finds and fragments and items classified as Treasure Trove. This lecture provides an overview of the excavations and a summary of results and their significance.

Border Archaeology, founded in 1997, is a leading provider of archaeological and built heritage consultancy and contracting, working throughout the UK with a diverse portfolio of clients.
Examples of our work include 2 million sq.m excavations in Milton Keynes, Project Pilgrim for Gloucester Cathedral and excavations for Winchester College.

9th Oct 2025

Warwick Castle was an important stronghold for Parliament during the English Civil Wars. It was the seat of the Greville family, headed by the parliamentarian Robert Greville, 2nd Lord Brooke. The castle withstood a siege by royalist forces at the outbreak of civil war in 1642, but Brooke was killed soon after while besieging Lichfield Cathedral Close in March 1643. This lecture will utilize the recently published Brooke Household Accounts (Camden Society, vol. 68, 2024) to examine what life was like in Warwick Castle, and how his widow, family and household adapted to his loss. We will also consider the significant role that Warwick went on to play in the parliamentarian war effort and how the physical structure of the castle survived the slighting inflicted on other Midland castles after the second civil war of 1648. 

Andrew Hopper is Professor of Local and Social History in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Black Tom: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007), and Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil Wars (Oxford University Press, 2012).

13th Nov 2025

In a stunning find, researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham have uncovered a huge expanse of quarry floor filled with hundreds of different dinosaur footprints, creating multiple enormous trackways. Dating back to the Middle Jurassic Period (around 166 million years ago), the trackways form part of a huge ‘dinosaur highway’ and include footprints from the 9 metre ferocious predator Megalosaurus, and herbivorous dinosaurs up to twice that size.

Dr. Murdock is a Collections Manager in Earth Collections at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. He is responsible for the day-to-day management of the Museum’s mineralogy and petrology collections, and parts of the invertebrate palaeontology collections. He also has a significant role in developing new exhibitions and displays from temporary exhibitions.

11th Dec
2025

The first Indian students to attend the University of Oxford arrived in 1871, and the bridge between Oxford and India has grown stronger ever since. But why did Indian students begin to attend British universities from the middle of the 19th century?

This presentation examines the close relationship between Britain and the Subcontinent, aiming to explain briefly the background in Indian politics, the views of families and the students themselves. It also looks at the Oxford Indian Institute, the growth of Balliol College and those dons at the heart of the developments.

The talk focuses on the stories of four students who attended Oxford before the First World War: the first woman to study Law at the university; a Sikh princess, a nationalist revolutionary and a Bengali poet.

Stephen delivers presentations and tours related to the First World War and British Civil Wars. He works on behalf of the ‘Museum Memories’ project in India and the ‘Little History of the Sikhs’ project in the UK. He is the author of two books, the latest being: 'The Flying Sikh: Hardit Singh Malik in the First World War'.

8th Jan
2026

During the seventeenth century Oxfordshire was home to a series of impressive water gardens that had important links to the development of scientific thought at Oxford. These gardens have become ‘lost’ and their true nature has only been recently revealed through a programme of archaeological and historical research.

Stephen works as a commercial archaeologist specialising in historic gardens. Current projects involve work at Stowe Landscape Gardens and Broughton Castle. He recently completed a programme of doctoral research at the university of Oxford on which this talk is based.

12th Feb
2026

It has long been thought, and with good reason, that medieval women had very little control over their own affairs (or anyone else’s). After all, the laws of inheritance disfavoured them; when a woman married, control over her property passed to her husband; women are rarely encountered in public office. But that is not the full story. This lecture will explore the spheres, public and private, in which women did make decisions, had agency, and exercised  authority. A question is how they used those powers…

Elizabeth’s research is in later medieval British economic and social history. You can read more about her work here: https://www.kellogg.ox.ac.uk/our-people/elizabeth-gemmill/

Elizabeth has given many lectures to local history societies and is committed to public engagement in history. She contributes to the History Faculty’s Community History project and is a Trustee of the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire. 

12th Mar
2026

Where do MPs get their money from? Since 1911, they have received a regular salary, like many people today. But MPs are different: most of them have long enjoyed other sources of income from second (or more!) jobs or investments. This talk provides an historical overview of these other sources of income – some of which have been, and remain, very questionable!   

Reader in Modern British history at Oxford Brookes University and has published widely on matters of British statecraft, public policy and politics. Recent publications have looked at the history of non-voting and the magazine Private Eye, and he is currently working on the history of the corruption of public life in modern Britain - from where this current talk derives

16th  Apr
2026

This lecture will take an overview of the Vikings in the Thames Valley, from the estuary upstream to Oxfordshire. It will look at raids, battles and massacres, winter camps, burials, hoards, urban settlements, and consider the long-term presence of the Vikings in the area.

David Griffiths is Professor of Archaeology at Oxford University, Director of Studies in Archaeology at the Department for Continuing Education. Member of Board of Governors of the Ashmolean Museum. He has taught at Oxford since 1999, and was previously a professional archaeologist in the UK and Norway. He has directed research fieldwork projects in Orkney, Oxford, and NW England.

13 Oct 2022

This talk will outline the three-year research project on the history and experience of Rights of Way, funded with a £1m grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and planned to run from 2021 to 2024. The project asks such pressing and profound questions as: what can the history of mapping Rights of Way in post-war England and Wales tell us about voluntary action, landscape decision-making and the barriers faced by both government action and walking activism? How can a greater awareness of historical pathmaking – and understanding of their cultural context as ‘heritage’ or otherwise – be utilised in order to facilitate much broader access to, and deeper engagement with, open spaces? How has the use and experience (or not) of Rights of Way affected the health and wellbeing of socially and physically diverse groups of people? How can focusing on the process of making and remaking Rights of Way help us to understand the links between citizenship, movement in the landscape, and wellbeing?

Glen O’Hara is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of a series of books about modern Britain, including most recently The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain (2017). He is currently writing a history of the Blair governments of 1997-2007.

10 Nov 2022

This lecture is based on research done for the latest volume of the British Historic Towns Atlas, which covers the city of Oxford. The atlas presents in mapped form the history of its topographical development.

Julian Munby has recently retired as Head of Buildings Archaeology at Oxford Archaeology and has been researching the history of Oxford for many years, with a special interest in its buildings and in drawn views of the city. He has always loved maps.

18 Dec
2022

By the early nineteenth century common lodging-houses had become a well-established form of working-class accommodation in English market towns and cities. They had an evil reputation, certainly amongst middle-class commentators, and by the 1830s they were considered to be a serious social problem. They were seen as overcrowded, unsanitary dens of iniquity where delinquency and dishonesty were encouraged, stolen goods were exchanged and incendiary political views might be shared. They were known as centres of sexual depravity and dreaded by many as sources of infection and contagious disease.

Using examples from Oxfordshire, this talk investigates the truth of these claims and tries to cast common lodging-houses in a more positive light by looking at the economic and social functions that they fulfilled in relation to the supply of industrial and agricultural labour, to patterns of migration, to retailing, to the treatment of the poor and to the provision of popular entertainment. Their role in prompting reform in the provision of working-class housing and in improvements in public sanitation is also examined.

Liz Woolley lives in Oxford and has a Diploma and an MSc in English Local History from the University’s Department for Continuing Education. Her MSc dissertation was a study of common lodging-houses in St Thomas’ in Oxford.

12 Jan
2023

The building of HS2 has enabled an unprecedented amount of archaeological investigation to be undertaken with the result that many amazing discoveries have been made along the scheme’s route.  Work in Northamptonshire is no exception and James West from MOLA will speak about the large-scale archaeological excavation he directed at Blackgrounds Farm near Chipping Warden. At Blackgrounds, archaeologists have been able to trace the history of a settlement that started in the Early Iron Age (6th century BC) and eventually became a small Roman town or villa complex, continuing until the 5th Century AD when it was abandoned. With a thousand years of intensive occupation, the excavation has given us a wealth of archaeological finds and discoveries which illuminate all aspects of life - and death – throughout a period of great cultural changes.

James West is an Assistant Project Manager with MOLA Northampton and was the Site Manager for the Blackgrounds Excavations as well as many other sites along the route of HS2.

9 Feb
2023

The Oxfordshire volume of Pevsner’s Buildings of England series was among the last to appear, in 1974. It is being revised, updated and expanded in two volumes, of which Alan Brooks’s Oxfordshire: North and West appeared in 2017. Simon Bradley’s companion volume on Oxford and the south east, to be published in 2023, includes much fresh research and addresses half a century of change.

Dr Bradley is the series editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides (Yale University Press), and author or co-author of five revised volumes, including Cambridgeshire and Berkshire. 

9 Mar
2023

The talk will discuss images in late medieval parish churches: how they were chosen and funded, how they functioned within the liturgy and community, and how ultimately they were almost all destroyed. The talk will cover not only sculpted and painted images, but also those in stained glass, wall painting, textiles and other media, supported by local examples where possible.

After the Courtauld Institute of Art, Eleanor spent 20 years at the V&A specialising in medieval art, co-curating the Medieval Galleries and the major exhibition, Gothic: Art for England 1400-1547. She is currently completing a doctorate at the University of Oxford, focusing on a stone reredos in St Cuthbert’s, Wells.

Compton Verney: past, present and future

A grand aristocratic 18th-century country house with a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape around it; now a cutting-edge gallery hosting top-quality art exhibitions in the middle.

Professor Steven Parissien

Professor Parissien is the Director of Compton Verney museum and gallery in Warwickshire. He studied at Oxford and has a D.Phil. in 18th century architectural history. He has worked for the Georgian Group, English Heritage, Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and was Dean of Arts and Professor of Architectural History at the University of Plymouth. He joined Compton Verney in January 2009. Steven has written extensively on architectural, transport and cultural history and is now Visiting Professor of Architectural History and Visual Culture at Coventry University, and a Visiting Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford University. 

Westgate Oxford: initial results from Oxford’s largest excavation

A prehistoric floodplain, a medieval Friary, civil war defences and Victorian terraces.
A richly illustrated talk on the archaeological results from the largest excavations to have been conducted in the City of Oxford. Ben Ford will discuss the changing landscape on the southern edge of the Oxford promontory, where the city meets the Thames Floodplain and how it was used and changed by human action over the last 3000 years. The talk will touch on possible prehistoric and Saxon activity, deal in depth with the extensive structural and artefactual remains of the Greyfriars complex (1244 – 1538), before revealing evidence from the Civil War, and more recent Victorian terraces of St Ebbes.

Ben Ford

Ben Ford is the Director of the Westgate Oxford Excavations and a Senior Project Manager at Oxford Archaeology, who, for the last 20 years, has specialised in the excavation of urban environments, a passion that was first ignited at an early age in his home town of Dorchester in Dorset. Since then Ben, who graduated from Reading University in 1990, has led many of the largest excavations to have taken place in some of Southern England’s most significant towns and cities including Bristol, Reading, Winchester and Oxford, as well as undertaking large scale investigations at Hampton Court Palace and the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich.

The Edge Hill Light Railway

This is probably one of the most remarkable railways that has ever been built in this country. But the cost of the engineering works necessary to transport ironstone wagons down the Edge Hill escarpment made it uneconomic and it was abandoned nearly 100 years ago. 

Andrew Baxter

Andrew Baxter is a consulting engineer who lives in Edge Hill, and with his engineering background has been able to interpret the ruins of the complicated and extensive engineering works of The Edge Hill Light Railway that can be seen on site to this day.

Wychwood was one of the great royal forests of England. Drawing on recent VCH research, this illustrated talk will look at its origins and organization, its use as a deer reserve and source of timber, and its clearance in the 1850s, as well as at the neighbouring Cornbury Park.

Dr Simon Townley

Dr Townley is Editor of the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, for which he has researched and written the histories of over 25 towns and villages including Witney and Henley-on-Thames. He is currently working on Wychwood Forest and the surrounding area for a volume to be published in 2019. 

The Oxford DNB, comprising entries on over 60,000 figures from the British past, is a record of noteworthiness in a national or even global context. Readers can also explore its subjects’ local or regional connexions. This talk will look at the Dictionary’s entries on people associated with Banbury and its wider region. 

Dr Mark Curthoys

Dr Curthoys is the Research Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, mainly working on entries on people active in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. He was joint editor (with Michael Brock) of the volumes of the History of the University of Oxford covering 1800-1914 (OUP 1997, 2000). 

Obadiah Walker was an undergraduate, Fellow and Master of University College from the 1630s to the 1680s. A much-loved tutor, he was devoted to his College. He therefore caused upset and amazement when, under James II, he converted to Roman Catholicism. This lecture tells the remarkable story of Walker’s journey.

Dr Robin Darwall-Smith (FSA, FRHistS)

Dr Darwall-Smith is now the Archivist of University and Jesus Colleges, Oxford. Until 2016 he was also Archivist of Magdalen College. He has written a history of University College, and is currently helping to write a new history of All Souls College. He has published extensively on the history of Oxford.

Medieval farms, farming, and the rural economy

Studying medieval farms and farming can give us an interesting ‘bottom-up’ perspective on some ‘top-down’ accounts of changes in the rural economy.

Dr Rosamond Faith

Dr Faith studied history at Oxford and did her PhD at the new Department for English Local History at Leicester under HPR Finberg. She has written much about peasant farmers in England and Provence, (The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship in 1997, and, with Debby Banham, Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming in 2014,) with many articles in between. She has taught at the universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge, and was a tutor for OUDCE for many years.

Workshop session: how to use your sources to find out about your community in the past

Details to be confirmed

Provision for the poor:  the crisis in the parishes in the 18th century

During the 17th century the Old Poor Law had seemed to manage to cope with those who were unable to support themselves, and local communities looked after their own poor.  However in the 18th century numbers and problems escalated till many parishes were overwhelmed by the demands made upon them

Deborah Hayter

Deborah Hayter is a Tutor in Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education, and has taught many courses in local and landscape history. How the poor were looked after in the past is a particular interest and she has taught courses on this subject, ranging from medieval charity to the modern benefit system. The 18th century proved to be a crisis point as the Old Poor Law and the parish system it set up could no longer cope with the growing numbers of unemployed. This crisis is what led to the draconian reforms of the New Poor Law and the Union Workhouses in the 1830s. 

The Battle of Edgcote 1469:  re-evaluating the evidence

2019 sees the 550th anniversary of the Battle of Edgcote. Often overlooked or misunderstood, the battle had a major impact in both England and Wales. Graham will examine the sources in depth to explain what we actually do and do not know about this apparently obscure piece of medieval history.

Graham Evans

Graham Evans studied Modern & Medieval History at the University of Sheffield. He is the Secretary of the Northamptonshire Battlefields Society, and edits the Society's quarterly newsletter, "The Wild Rat". A regular writer and blogger on military history, his book on the Battle of Edgcote is his first full length publication. 

Lost Prophets: the unfinished dream of the nineteenth century

In this lecture, Ewan Fernie will explore the efforts of various nineteenth-century thinkers, artists and activists to imagine and create a morally and politically better world which remains ahead of us even today.

Professor Ewan Fernie

Professor Fernie is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and Director of the ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project, a collaboration with Birmingham City Council which aims to unlock the first great Shakespeare Library in the world for people and communities across Birmingham today. His latest book is Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter.

Peter the Great: architect of a superpower

Russia’s evolution into a superpower was far from inevitable. To create it involved superhuman energy, ambition, and imagination. It also required a brutal indifference to opponents who stood in the way. It is the product of ruthless tyrants whom fascinatingly Russians remember with adulation and love. None was more important in this process than Tsar Peter I.

Chris Danziger

Christopher Danziger is a long service tutor in the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education where he teaches European History, specialising in Napoleonic France and Romanov Russia, on both of which he has written extensively.

“I shall expect you sister”: the lives and letters of frontier households in the Imperial Roman Army

Successful men from Rome’s provinces could command military units on the frontiers. With them went their households, their wives, children, freed and enslaved men and women. These people wrote to each other, using ink pens on thin slips of wood. Extraordinarily, some letters survive and offer a glimpse of household life at Roman forts.

Claire Millington

Born and bred in the Midlands, a posting to Rome as a diplomat sparked Claire’s interest in Rome’s empire. Once back in the UK she embarked on an MA, thanks to the OU, and is finishing a Classics PhD at King’s College, London.

What is Common Land? Background history and why work is going on to re-register it

Formerly an integral part of the farming landscape, much common land was enclosed, with surviving land preserved and registered under the Commons Act 1965. Re-registration involves correcting mistakes made under the 1965 Act.

Dr Frances Kerner, Open Spaces Society

Frances Kerner undertook her PhD at the University of Lancaster, researching the enclosure and survival of common land in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns. She works with the Open Spaces Society to re-register common land under the Commons Act 2006.