History
The name of this street was recorded as Kattestreete in the early 13th century, as Mousecatchers' Lane (Vicus Murilegorum) in 1442, and as Cat Street in the 18th century. In the mid-19th century it became Catherine Street. However, there was another street of this name in east Oxford and in 1930 the City Council changed the name to Catte Street, using a 15th-century spelling.
Originally this street road used to lead northwards as far as New College Lane, where the city wall blocked its way. The road north from here has become part of Catte Street, although the Modern History Faculty still gives its address as Broad Street nearby.
In the mid-13th century the illuminator William de Brailes owned property, and presumably had his workshop, next to St Mary's.
The street was pedestrianised as a pavement at the south by the junction with the High Street in 1973.
Read more about this topic: Catte Street
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)