Oxford is a unique city.  There is no place like it in the world.  Scholars of Cambridge, of course, will tell me that I am wrong, and that the town on the Cam is a far superior place, and then point triumphantly to “the backs.”  Yes, they are very beautiful, but as a loyal son of Oxford I may be allowed to prefer that stately city with its towers and spires, its wealth of college buildings, its exquisite architecture unrivalled in the world.  Nor is the new unworthy of the old.  The buildings at Magdalen, at Brazenose, and even the New Schools harmonize not unseemly with the ancient structures.  Happily Keble is far removed from the heart of the city, so that that somewhat unsatisfactory, unsuccessful pile of brickwork interferes not with its joy.  In the streets and lanes of modern Oxford we can search for and discover many types of old-fashioned, humble specimens of domestic art, and we give as an illustration some houses which date back to Tudor times, but have, alas! been recently demolished.

[Illustration:  Tudor Tenements, New Inn Hall St, Oxford.  Now demolished]

Many conjectures have been made as to the reason why our forefathers preferred to rear their houses with the upper storeys projecting out into the streets.  We can understand that in towns where space was limited it would be an advantage to increase the size of the upper rooms, if one did not object to the lack of air in the narrow street and the absence of sunlight.  But we find these same projecting storeys in the depth of the country, where there could have been no restriction as to the ground to be occupied by the house.  Possibly the fashion was first established of necessity in towns, and the traditional mode of building was continued in the country.  Some say that by this means our ancestors tried to protect the lower part of the house, the foundations, from the influence of the weather; others with some ingenuity suggest that these projecting storeys were intended to form a covered walk for passengers in the streets, and to protect them from the showers of slops which the careless housewife of Elizabethan times cast recklessly from the upstairs windows.  Architects tell us that it was purely a matter of construction.  Our forefathers used to place four strong corner-posts, framed from the trunks of oak trees, firmly sunk into the ground with their roots left on and placed upward, the roots curving outwards so as to form supports for the upper storeys.  These curved parts, and often the posts also, were often elaborately carved and ornamented, as in the example which our artist gives us of a corner-post of a house in Ipswich.

In The Charm of the English Village I have tried to describe the methods of the construction of these timber-framed houses,[11] and it is perhaps unnecessary for me to repeat what is there recorded.  In fact, there were three types of these dwelling-places, to which have been given the names Post and Pan, Transom Framed, and Intertie Work.  In judging of the age of a house it will be remembered that the nearer together the upright posts are placed the older the house is.  The builders as time went on obtained greater confidence, set their posts wider apart, and held them together by transoms.