Pint Passport

4 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026

The oldest pub in Oxfordshire

The short answer

Oldest claim

The Bear Inn

Says 1242. The first record is 1774.

Grade C · Tradition

Oldest proof

The Chequers

On record from 1605.

Grade C · Tradition

By claim, the oldest pub in Oxfordshire is the Bear on Alfred Street in Oxford, which advertises 1242 — a date inherited from a larger medieval inn on the High Street that closed in 1801. By evidence it is the Chequers, down a passage off that same High Street, traceable to 1605. The one building in the county as old as its pub claims is out of the city: the thatched Barley Mow at Clifton Hampden, whose timber frame is usually dated to 1352.

Oxfordshire is the county where the record-keeping is best and the pub claims consequently fare worst. Three of the four pubs here are in Oxford, and Oxford has H. E. Salter, who spent the 1920s working through the deeds of the city and the colleges. The result is a property record dense enough to say which house a name belonged to and when, which is why the Bear's 1242 can be assigned to a demolished building on the High Street, and why the Turf Tavern turns out to be first recorded as a public house called the Spotted Cow towards the end of the eighteenth century. Follow the Thames downstream out of the city and the position inverts. The Barley Mow at Clifton Hampden has a timber frame under thatch dated to the middle of the fourteenth century and no early record of drinking at all; what it has instead is literary fame, arriving in 1889 when Jerome K. Jerome called it the quaintest, most old-world inn up the river, thirteen years after Henry Taunt photographed it. So the county offers genuinely old rooms with young records in the city, and an old frame with a Victorian reputation beyond it.

The city and its deeds

The Oxford three are covered in full on the oldest pubs in Oxford page, and the short version is that a name can outlive a building. The Bear is a tiny early-seventeenth-century corner house between Christ Church and Oriel that traded as the Jolly Trooper from 1774 and later took the name — and the date — of a substantial inn on the High Street that had gone by other signs since the fifteenth century. The Turf is reached by twisting passages under New College’s walls and backs onto the medieval city wall, and its 1381 is the figure here with least behind it: Salter found the house first recorded as an alehouse, the Spotted Cow, around 1790. The Chequers has the earliest date anyone can check, 1605, in a medieval tenement its owners say was rebuilt as a tavern in the 1500s.

Down the Thames to Clifton Hampden

The Barley Mow is the county’s outlier in every sense: low, thatched, timber-framed and out in the fields south of the bridge, and the only pub here whose building is of roughly the age its claim requires. It has been the best known of all Thames pubs for well over a century, which is a literary fact rather than a historical one, and a reminder that nineteenth-century tourism did as much as medieval charters to fix which old pubs people have heard of. For more buildings of the same kind see thatched pubs and riverside pubs; the county comparison is at the oldest pubs in England.

Map of 4 old pubs in Oxfordshire

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Oxfordshire

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The contenders, oldest claim first

Order the contenders

  1. The Bear Inn

    Grade C

    Oxford, Oxfordshire

    A 1241 property bequest and the medieval Bear Inn on the High Street (known as Le Tabard by 1432 and the Bear by 1457, closed 1801) underpin the claim, but that was a different building. The present early-17th-century house traded as the Jolly Trooper from 1774 and later took the Bear name.

    Claims 1242; first recorded 1774.

  2. The Barley Mow

    Grade B

    Clifton Hampden, Oxfordshire

    The 1352 is carved on the building: the listing records a panel dated 1352 to the right of centre on the front, so the date is the house's own assertion rather than Historic England's dating of the cruck frame, which the listing leaves undated apart from C19 and C20 alterations. The thatched timber-framed building is read as mid-14th century, but its use as an inn is only documented much later, notably in Victorian

    Claims 1352; no early record found; building c.1352.

  3. Turf Tavern

    Grade C

    Oxford, Oxfordshire

    The 1381 date used by the operator is not supported by published records; the historian H. E. Salter, working through Oxford’s deeds in 1926, found it first recorded as a public house around the end of the eighteenth century, under the name the Spotted Cow. That is the earliest record here, and it is six centuries after the date on the sign.

    Claims 1381; first recorded 1790.

  4. The Chequers

    Grade C

    Oxford, Oxfordshire

    The operator says a moneylender's tenement was rebuilt as a tavern in the 1500s and that much of the interior is sixteenth-century, and CAMRA notes that the name Chequers is first recorded in 1605, which is the earliest cited record of drink sold here. A second account, the Oxford History survey of the High Street, fills in the century between them from the property records. It has the house standing in the

    Claims 1500; first recorded 1605.

The photographs above are other people's work, used under open licences. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits.

Common questions

Which is the oldest pub in Oxfordshire?
The Bear in Oxford claims 1242 and the date belongs to a lost inn nearby. The earliest verifiable record among the four pubs here is the Chequers, from 1605. The oldest fabric is the Barley Mow at Clifton Hampden, whose thatched timber frame is dated to 1352.
Is the Barley Mow at Clifton Hampden really from 1352?
The building is, on the dating usually given for its timber frame. Its use as an inn is documented only much later, in Victorian guides to the Thames and then in Three Men in a Boat in 1889. That gap between an old building and a recorded pub is the commonest pattern on this site.
How many of Oxfordshire's old pubs are in Oxford?
Three of the four: the Bear, the Turf Tavern and the Chequers, all within a few minutes of the High Street and all small. They have their own page, which goes further into Salter's deeds and into how an Oxford pub name can outlive the building it belonged to.
Why do Oxford's pub dates keep collapsing?
Because they can be tested. Most English towns have no equivalent of Salter's survey of Oxford's medieval properties, so most claims are neither proved nor disproved. In Oxford the deeds exist, and where a confident date meets a good archive the date usually loses.
Which Oxfordshire pub is best for a river walk?
The Barley Mow stands just south of the Thames bridge at Clifton Hampden and is a dining pub now, popular with walkers along the river. The three Oxford pubs are city-centre houses reached through alleys, with courtyards rather than views, and none of them is large.