Burford main street, busy day with traffic, overcast
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 years. Records and Charters dating from these early years are now housed in the Tolsey Museum on the High Street.
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Keywords: burford, busy, cotwolds, day, main, overcast, street, tourism, traffic, windrush
