Wain Street

Wain Street is Oxford's grain road. It runs in from the East Gate, where Warden Roger Tilbury counts every tithe wagon through and takes its toll, beside the little magazine, and it makes no attempt to look like anything else. There are no processions here and no canons' houses, only wide cart ruts, the barns of the Close, a few shops and the people who handle the corn. In harvest weeks the wagons queue head to tailboard all the way from the gate to the barn doors.

The street wakes before anyone else in the city. In the last dark the granary hands gather along it to walk to the hiring at the granary gate, where the rate is called and not bargained, and Widow Peedle's pie shop feeds them at a penny a pie, which half Oxford calls the best penny's worth inside the walls. The carters and granary hands drink at the Sheaf and Sickle under Licensee Will Tidmarsh. Beyond the gate at the street's outer end the Pied Bull, kept by Hostess Martha Gaskin, is where the tithe-road carriers lodge, and a complaint against a carrier is best taken there. Attorney Lucas Sherborne draws articles for hired companies in the street, and Bella Twining, a glover's daughter born here, now carries letters for half the closes.

Saint Edburga's is the street's church, served by Father Ambrose Pinfold. At the end of harvest the names of those who died at the work are read aloud at its door, and the street goes quiet to hear them. The granary hands field their own rugby fifteen, and each Candlemas they meet the college servants, a fixture the proctors always turn out for in suspicious strength.

Lately the street has been the subject of argument. In harvest-fair week the gate counted forty-one tithe wagons in and the barns booked thirty-six, and the Close and the carriers of the Four Roads have been blaming one another ever since; the council wants its own men counting at the barn doors through the winter, and the Close says its stores are none of the council's business. On the eve of the same fair the East Gate toll-box was broken and the day's takings carried off, and there is a reward posted at Tallow Hall for the men.