At Oxford there were at least two crosses, viz., the Jews' cross (Figs. 21-23), and also a noted wayside cross, which the city records show to have been in existence in 1331. It stood without the east gate of the city, in front of the door of St John's Hospital, on or near the site of the present entrance to Magdalen College. As to the monument called the Jews' cross, its origin is historic. In 1268, on Ascension Day, "as the usual procession of scholars and citizens returned from St Frideswide's," and was passing the Jewish synagogue in Fish Street (now St Aldate's), "a Jew suddenly burst from the group of his friends ... and, snatching the crucifix from its bearer, trod it underfoot." Part of the penalty exacted by the Crown was that the Jews of Oxford had to erect, at their own cost, a cross of marble on the spot where the outrage had been committed. The sentence, however, was eventually modified to the extent that, instead of having to endure a perpetual reminder of their humiliation and punishment opposite to the very door of the synagogue, the Jews were allowed to set up the expiatory cross in a less obnoxious position, an open plot by Merton College. Such is the site where it used to be believed that the cross stood. But a certain passage in the city records seems, as the late Herbert Hurst pointed out, to contradict any previously received identification of the site of the Jews' cross, and to locate it rather on some spot near the north side of St Frideswide's church. The passage in question is as follows: "In 1342, Adam Blaket was indicted before John Fitz Perys and William le Iremonger, bailiffs of Oxford, for that he, on the Thursday next before Palm Sunday, feloniously entered by night the enclosure of the cemetery of the Church of St Frideswyde, and there stole and carried off one arm," or other portion (_vana_) "of the great (_capitalis_) cross of the cemetery, of the value of half a mark, and afterwards broke it into four parts." The purloined fragments were subsequently "found and seized. He (Blaket) confessed to the taking, and pleaded that he was at the time a lunatic and not _compos mentis_."