Mesolithic public transport in Cowley was frankly inadequate. The initial novelty of canoeing soon wore off when it became apparent that you could only go where the Thames went. Day trips to Abingdon remained popular, but Wheatley was out of the question. The inhabitants of Cowley would have to wait patiently for the Neolithic era in another 4,000 years for the wheel to be invented. Today, by contrast, you rarely have to wait more than five minutes for a bus.
Cowley kept very quiet during the Roman occupation. True, the Romans built the imaginatively-named "Roman Way" from Dorchester to Bicester, but the inhabitants of Cowley largely stayed indoors. This may be because of the noise of construction traffic or because they were worried about the adverse effect the increased traffic would have on the value of their property.
It was the Anglo-Saxons who gave Cowley its name, which can mean either 'Cow-Meadow' or 'Cuffa's Meadow'. Cuffa also crops up in "Cuffa's Wood" so it's reasonable to assume that Cuffa was a local and therefore Cowley's first named inhabitant. (Not that the others didn't have names, you understand, that would have been highly impractical.) The word cuffa comes from the Old French coife, meaning 'hat', so it's reasonable also to assume that our Cuffa either had a conspicuous hat or possibly even owned a hat-making concern in Cowley. Either way, it paints a vivid picture of a sophisticated, colourful and fashion-conscious society living in Cowley twelve hundred years ago.
La Résidence - THE French Property People
No comments:
Post a Comment