At Oxford there were at least two crosses, viz., the Jews' cross (Figs. 21-23), and also a noted wayside cross, which the city records show to have been in existence in 1331. It stood without the east gate of the city, in front of the door of St John's Hospital, on or near the site of the present entrance to Magdalen College. As to the monument called the Jews' cross, its origin is historic. In 1268, on Ascension Day, "as the usual procession of scholars and citizens returned from St Frideswide's," and was passing the Jewish synagogue in Fish Street (now St Aldate's), "a Jew suddenly burst from the group of his friends ... and, snatching the crucifix from its bearer, trod it underfoot." Part of the penalty exacted by the Crown was that the Jews of Oxford had to erect, at their own cost, a cross of marble on the spot where the outrage had been committed. The sentence, however, was eventually modified to the extent that, instead of having to endure a perpetual reminder of their humiliation and punishment opposite to the very door of the synagogue, the Jews were allowed to set up the expiatory cross in a less obnoxious position, an open plot by Merton College. Such is the site where it used to be believed that the cross stood. But a certain passage in the city records seems, as the late Herbert Hurst pointed out, to contradict any previously received identification of the site of the Jews' cross, and to locate it rather on some spot near the north side of St Frideswide's church. The passage in question is as follows: "In 1342, Adam Blaket was indicted before John Fitz Perys and William le Iremonger, bailiffs of Oxford, for that he, on the Thursday next before Palm Sunday, feloniously entered by night the enclosure of the cemetery of the Church of St Frideswyde, and there stole and carried off one arm," or other portion (_vana_) "of the great (_capitalis_) cross of the cemetery, of the value of half a mark, and afterwards broke it into four parts." The purloined fragments were subsequently "found and seized. He (Blaket) confessed to the taking, and pleaded that he was at the time a lunatic and not _compos mentis_."
Anyhow, if the precise site remains uncertain, there is extant a sculptured socket, which, though it is only of stone, not marble, Mr Hurst pronounced to be "an undoubted part" of the original Jews' cross. This socket was described by Dr James Ingram in 1837 as having been then "recently discovered, on the removal of a quantity of rubbish from the foundation of the walls" of St Frideswide's, embedded in the base of the diagonal buttress at the south-east angle of St Lucy's chapel in the south transept. It is now preserved in the gallery at the south end of the same transept. The four sides are sculptured with what appear to be Old Testament subjects, although only two are now identifiable. The first is the temptation of Adam and Eve, with the serpent coiling round a tree between them; and the second is the sacrifice of Isaac. The third appears to be the sacrifice of an ox or calf; but the whole is much mutilated. Nothing remains of it but the lower part of a human being on the left, and the headless body of a cloven-footed quadruped, the forelegs of which are in a kneeling posture. Above, a hand, issuing from a cloud, lets down a pair of small tablets, or an open book. The subject of the fourth side is a puzzle which has hitherto defied elucidation. It represents three figures, the middle one seated between two upright figures turning away, both having grotesque heads like apes. Below the right foot of one of the figures is what appears to be a dragon or demon, with its leg on the ground. At each angle of the stone is a winged dragon, head downward, the tail terminating in characteristic thirteenth-century foliage. The stone is 1 ft. 11 in. high, by 2 ft. 3 in. square at the bottom, decreasing to 1 ft. 9 in. square at the top. The greatest dimension, inclusive of the figures, is 2 ft. 6 in. in width.