Oxmantown was a suburb on the opposite bank of the
Liffey from
Dublin
Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...
, in what is now the city's
Northside
Northside or North Side may refer to:
Music
* Northside (band), a musical group from Manchester, England
* NorthSide, an American record label
* NorthSide Festival (Denmark), a music festival in Aarhus, Denmark
* "Norf Norf", a 2015 song by Vinc ...
. It was founded in the 12th century by Vikings or "
Ostmen" who had migrated out of Dublin after the arrival of the English, and was originally known as Ostmanby or Ostmantown. The removal of the Ostmen from Dublin is often characterised as a mass expulsion, but evidence of this is lacking. The settlement was bounded on the east by the lands of
St Mary's Abbey and on the west by Oxmantown Green, an extensive
common that in time was curtailed to form
Smithfield Market. Oxmantown lay within the parish of
St Michan's, which was the only church on the Northside until the parishes of
St Mary's and
St Paul's were formed in 1697 to cater to the district's burgeoning population.
The residential centre of Oxmantown was present day Church Street. In the seventeenth century there were several impressive houses here, one of them owned by Sir
Robert Booth, the
Lord Chief Justice of Ireland
The Court of King's Bench (or Court of Queen's Bench during the reign of a Queen) was one of the senior courts of common law in Ireland. It was a mirror of the Court of King's Bench in England. The Lord Chief Justice was the most senior judge ...
. His house abutted the garden of the
King's Inns, and in 1664 he petitioned for the creation of a
right of way
Right of way is the legal right, established by grant from a landowner or long usage (i.e. by prescription), to pass along a specific route through property belonging to another.
A similar ''right of access'' also exists on land held by a gov ...
through the garden, so that he might more conveniently enter the Inns by a private way.
[Kenny, Colum ''"King's Inns and the Kingdom of Ireland"'' Dublin Irish Academic Press 1992 p.141]
In modern times the term is still occasionally used to refer to the broader area around Smithfield, while local places such as Oxmantown Road, Oxmantown Lane and various local businesses nominally reference the place name.
See also
*
List of towns and villages in Ireland
References
{{Dublin residential areas
History of Dublin (city)
Abbey Street