Hertford College

Many Oxford colleges can trace an unbroken history back over the centuries. Hertford both is, and is not, part of this ancient tradition, and we like to think that its chequered history over the years has contributed to its refreshing and flexible character. At the end of the thirteenth century, Elias de Hertford founded Hart Hall on Catte Street, where the oldest parts of the current college, the Old Hall and the north east corner of the Old Quadrangle, are currently situated.

Hart Hall accommodated students as part of the medieval university, and continued to grow during the following centuries. Many of the buildings, including the main door embossed with coloured flowers, date from the seventeenth century, and the Old Library holds a fine collection of books dating from this period.

In the eighteenth century the ambitious scheme of the then Principal to incorporate Hart Hall as a full College of the University was defeated because of precarious finances, and the institution went into a decline. At this low point in the College’s history it was dissolved and the site and buildings taken over by Magdalen Hall. In 1874, however, thanks to a benefaction from the leading financier Sir Thomas Baring, the College was recreated as Hertford College by Act of Parliament.

Hertford marked its new status and identity with a programme of rebuilding, and many of our most striking architectural features date from the fifty years following Baring’s bequest. Sir Thomas Jackson designed our Hall, with its quirky spiral stone-work on the staircase. He also built a second quadrangle and provided Oxford with one of its most recognisable symbols by linking the two parts of the college with a flying arch casemented bridge over New College Lane, popularly, if inaccurately, known on the tourist trail as the ‘Bridge of Sighs’. Jackson was also responsible for transforming the old chapel into the Octagon, now the MCR common room, and for building a new chapel on the south side of the Old Quadrangle.   

The renaissance of Hertford has continued through the twentieth century. A further quadrangle, Holywell, was added to the main college site in 1975, and the next two decade saw the development of accommodation in Warnock and Abingdon Houses by the Thames at Folly Bridge. The College’s focus on investing in student housing means that it can provide accommodation for all undergraduates during their course. The twenty-first century looks likely to see Hertford’s progress continue, if the new Graduate Centre, opened by the Chancellor of the University in the year 2000, is anything to go by.

The history of Hertford, though, is not really located in its buildings but in the people who have lived and worked in them and made the college what it is. There is no such thing as a ‘Hertford type’: the turbulent religious politics of the sixteenth century, for example, saw one former student martyred for his Protestantism – William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English – and another, Alexander Briant, for his Catholicism.

Hertford students have achieved renown in many spheres: in government and public service, including Prime Ministers and politicians; in the arts, particularly letters and music; in science and discovery. The political theorist and philosopher Thomas Hobbes prepared his great work on society, Leviathan, while at Magdalen Hall, and we have a copy inscribed by him as a gift to the college in the Old Library. The poet John Donne was a student here, as was Jonathan Swift, author of satires including Gulliver’s Travels.

Literature and the arts have always been strong in the college.The college’s connections with Ireland are also longstanding, and the Carroll Professor of Irish History is a Fellow of the college. More recent graduates of Hertford have been broadcasters and journalists, writers, lawyers, scientists, leaders in business and commerce, and even spies. While it does not produce a particular type of person, therefore, Hertford provides for its members a relaxed yet stimulating environment in which to explore possibilities and gain skills so as to face the future with quiet confidence and flexibility, whatever it holds.