Short answers, pulled from the story.
The University of Oxford has no official founding date. Teaching existed there in some form as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world. The university grew rapidly from 1167 when King Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris.
76 Nobel Prize laureates have matriculated, worked, or held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, with prizes won across all six categories. Oxford alumni have also won 160 Olympic medals and the university has produced 31 prime ministers of the United Kingdom.
Women became eligible for full membership of the University of Oxford and gained the right to take degrees on the 7th of October 1920. The first women's colleges, Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College, had opened in 1879, but with significant restrictions on access to degrees and university membership.
The Bodleian Library is the University of Oxford's main research library, founded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598 and opened in 1602. It holds over 11 million volumes on 120 miles of shelving, making it the second-largest library in the UK after the British Library, and it adds more than three miles of new shelving every year as a legal deposit library.
The University of Oxford is made up of 43 colleges and halls, including 36 chartered independent colleges, four permanent private halls owned by religious organisations, and three societies controlled by the university. All students must be members of a college, which controls its own membership, arranges undergraduate tutorial teaching, and provides residential, social, and cultural facilities.
Oxford holds the largest university endowment in the UK, with a combined figure of £8.708 billion including colleges. In the fiscal year ending the 31st of July 2025, the university's total consolidated income was £3.02 billion, of which £801.3 million came from research grants and contracts.