Burford, Cotswolds, UK. Stone carved lion beneath local window in the town.
Burford is a small town on the River Windrush in the Cotswold hills in west Oxfordshire, England, about 20 miles west of Oxford, 22 miles southeast of Cheltenham and only about 2 miles from the Gloucestershire boundary. The toponym derives from the Old English words burh meaning fortified town or hilltown and ford, the crossing of a river. The first certain reference to Burford is in the Domesday Book of 1086. Around 1090, during the reign of William Rufus, Burford was granted a Charter by the forward-thinking Robert Fitzhamon. This was one of the earliest Charters in the country and gave the men of Burford various rights - to hold a market, rent out their property and sell or bequeath leases as suited them; and it removed them from the ancient feudal system. Run by a merchant guild and presided over by an Alderman, the town honoured its founder by taking as its seal Fitzhamon’s coat of arms and, despite its modest size, Burford has remained a town for over nine hundred and Charters dating from these early years are now housed in the Tolsey Museum on the High Street.
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Photo credit: © Scenics & Science / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: arms, beneath, burford, carved, coat, cotswolds, fitzhamon’, lion, local, oxfordshire, stone, town., uk., window
