Oxford’s oldest pubs / an Above Guide story
The pubs that outlasted everyone.
Dated from the archives rather than from the sign above the door—which is not always the same number.
The sign says 1242. The archive disagrees.
Pub ages are the most heavily marketed dates in Oxford, and two quite different things get run together: how long there has been a licensed house on a plot, and how long the building in front of you has actually been a pub.
The Bear advertises 1242. A bequest concerning that site really is dated 1241—but the inn it refers to stood on the High Street and closed in 1801, and the room you drink in was its stableman’s house. The Turf claims 1381 and opened around 1790 as the Spotted Cow. Neither pub is less interesting for it.
3 of the nine advertise a date the record does not support. Each is flagged on its own card with what the sources actually show.
A bequest, not a bar
The Medieval Inn
1200–1499The earliest dates are property records, not opening nights. What survives from medieval Oxford is a plot, a name and a line in a priory’s accounts — rarely the building you can drink in.
01 pubsThe tavern takes shape
Tudor Oxford
1500–1599Private tenements are rebuilt as taverns and the city starts issuing licences to named men, which is the first point at which a pub’s age becomes a matter of record rather than of legend.
03 pubsA city that drinks through a war
Stuart Oxford
1600–1699Oxford spends the 1640s as a royalist capital, and the seventeenth century leaves more surviving pub fabric than any other — including the thatch and stone of the houses out along the river.
04 pubsBeyond the colleges’ reach
Georgian Oxford
1700–todayThe last of the nine opens where the university’s authority stopped — hard against the old city wall, down an alley, deliberately out of jurisdiction. Which is precisely why it filled up.
01 pubsNine houses, and what is provable.
Dates checked against Historic England listings, the Oxford History local archive, Lincoln College’s archive, and cited Wikipedia entries. Verified 26 July 2026.
The Mitre was here—an inn from about 1310—but it trades as a restaurant now, not a pub, so it is left out rather than listed as something it no longer is. That is why this is nine and not ten.