The story
Standing here on New Road, you are looking at nearly a thousand years of grit and survival. Look up at that rugged, square stone structure known as St George’s Tower. It is one of the oldest buildings in Oxford, standing tall since the 1070s, shortly after the Norman Conquest.
While it later became a grim prison, I want you to look past the modern streets and the hotel walls and imagine this place in the brutal winter of 1142. Back then, England was torn apart by a civil war known as The Anarchy. On one side was King Stephen, and on the other was the formidable Empress Matilda, the daughter of Henry the First and the first woman to claim the English throne in her own right.
For three months, Stephen had Matilda pinned right here. He had surrounded the castle with his army, determined to starve her into submission. Inside these walls, the fuel was running out, the food was gone, and the cold was biting.
Matilda was trapped, likely within the very tower you see before you. She looked out at a landscape buried in deep, white snow, with the River Thames—which ran much closer to the walls back then—frozen solid. She knew that if she stayed, she would be captured.
But a woman of her rank and fire wasn't about to surrender. On a moonless night in December, Matilda executed one of the most daring escapes in British history. She and three or four of her most loyal knights dressed themselves entirely in white.
They lowered themselves down the castle walls using ropes, slipping quietly into the freezing night. The white cloaks were a stroke of genius; they acted as perfect camouflage against the thick snow. They crept right past King Stephen’s sentries, who were likely huddled by their fires, never dreaming that anyone would venture out into the blizzard.
They didn’t just walk away; they crossed the frozen river on foot, the ice creaking under their boots. They trekked six miles through the knee-deep snow all the way to Abingdon, eventually reaching the safety of Wallingford Castle. By the time Stephen’s men realized the Empress was missing the next morning, she was long gone, leaving behind nothing but a legend.
As you walk around the base of the Castle Mound, or the motte, think of the sheer iron will it took to descend those walls. Today, the castle is a place of tourism and heritage, but it remains a monument to that night in 1142—the night a queen became a ghost in the snow and walked right through the hands of her enemies.