It is exactly 1,100 years since Oxford was first written about. In 911, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle referred to a settlement, which had grown up around the Saxon Priory of St Frideswide (now Christ Church), as Oxanaforda.

A gallop through that invaluable tome, The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles (published in 1977 and edited by Dorothy Eagle and Hilary Carnell), tends to confirm what I suppose many of us suspected already: that the place plays a more significant role in the nation’s literary development than anywhere else, except perhaps London. The guide devotes no fewer than 16 pages to Oxford (twice as many, incidentally, as to Cambridge).

All the same, you have to wait another couple of hundred years, after 911, before the first real writer turns up in the shape of Geoffrey of Monmouth (1100-1155). He studied in Oxford in 1129 and kicked off the whole business of turning King Arthur into a Romantic hero. Another century goes whizzing past before Robert Grosseteste (c1175-1253) appears on the scene as the first rector of the Franciscans in Oxford and then as one of the first chancellors of the university. He composed the long poem, Le Chasteau d’Amour, in Oxford, about the creation of the world and Christian redemption, and was described by Matthew Paris (1200-1259) as “the blamer of prelates, the corrector of monks, the director of priests, the instructor of clerks, the support of scholars, the preacher to the people . . .”

Chancellors were originally nominated by the Bishop of Lincoln, in whose diocese the city lay until the creation of the Oxford bishopric in 1542, though from earliest times this was a bone of contention with the university authorities — who in the 14th century at last succeeded in obtaining the right to vote in their own boss.

Walking around Oxford these days, armed with the Literary Guide, you realise how the place has been constantly changing over the centuries, with buildings cropping up and disappearing like mushrooms — leaving even the most (apparently) uninteresting of places with a tale to tell. For instance, Grosseteste’s successor as head Franciscan — no less a figure than Roger Bacon (c1214-1294) — lived in the Franciscan house that once stood on what is now a car park in Paradise Square. He studied the stars from the vantage point of what became known as Friar Bacon’s Study, a folly-like building which stood half way across Folly Bridge (or Grandpont) until it was demolished in 1779.

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) visited Oxford in 1668 and wrote in his diary that he climbed up to Bacon’s Study. It had by that time become a house — known as The Folly — above the city gate on the bridge and had a heavily ornamented second storey.

Moving quickly on through time I gathered from The Guide that Jane Austen (1775-1817) and her elder sister, Cassandra, were educated briefly in Oxford. They were taught by the widow of a Principal of Brasenose College. I never knew that; such small facts catch the eye in a gallop like this.

By the early 19th century, tales of Oxford seem to become more whimsical, less dependent on dreary old facts. Charles Lamb’s Oxford in the Vacation, for instance, was written in Cambridge and seems to be a sort of conflation of the two places (and none the worse for it either).

By the late 19th century, one of Oxford’s greatest fans of all time arrived: Henry James (1843-1916). He pronounced Oxford dons to be the luckiest people in the world. He wrote: “Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.”

W. B. Yeats (1865-1913) lived for some years with his wife and child in Broad Street, before moving to Shillingford; Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) lived for about a year in a summerhouse in the garden of A.J.P. Taylor’s house off St Cross Street. I could go on . . . but what is clear is that the very air of Oxford is thick with the thoughts of writers.