University of Oxford

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Oxford has been teaching students since at least 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest in continuous operation anywhere on earth. Yet for all its centuries of accumulated prestige, Oxford has no founding date anyone can point to. No papal bull declared it into existence. No single document marks the moment a university began. It simply grew, quietly and then rapidly, from a cluster of clerics lecturing on theology and canon law in a medieval English town.

  How does an institution become the oldest of its kind without anyone deciding to build it? Why did a dispute between a king and the church send scholars flooding into Oxford in 1167? What happened when those same scholars started fighting with the townspeople? And how did a place that once trained almost exclusively Anglican clergy become a university where, by 2016, nearly half of all undergraduates were women?

  Those are the questions this documentary will answer. Along the way, it will pass through the experimental scientists who helped found the Royal Society, the long struggle to open Oxford's doors to women, and a library so large it adds more than three miles of new shelving every single year.

• 2. A Kingdom's Quarrel, a University's Birth

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  King Henry II of England set Oxford on its path in 1167 without intending to build a university at all. Amid tensions with France and the Church, he banned his subjects from studying at the University of Paris, and the scholars who had been there came home looking for somewhere to learn. Oxford was already a place where teaching happened, and it became a magnet.

  The historian Gerald of Wales lectured to those returning scholars in 1188. Two years later, in 1190, the first known foreign scholar, Emo of Friesland, arrived. By 1214 the institution had a chancellor, and by 1231 the masters had been formally recognised as a corporation. King Henry III granted a royal charter in 1248.

  But the town itself was not always welcoming. After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled the violence northeastward to Cambridge, where they eventually established the University of Cambridge. The two institutions have been intertwined ever since, jointly called Oxbridge, and for centuries they held a legal duopoly over English university education. When a group of dissatisfied Oxford scholars attempted to found a rival university at Stamford in Lincolnshire in 1333-1334, Oxford and Cambridge successfully petitioned King Edward III to block it. No new universities were permitted in England until the 1820s.

  The students who filled medieval Oxford organised themselves by where they came from: a northern "nation" of English people from above the River Trent plus Scots, and a southern nation of those from below the Trent along with the Irish and Welsh. Religious orders including Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Augustinians settled in the town from the mid-13th century onward. Private benefactors began establishing colleges as self-contained scholarly communities. William of Durham endowed University College in 1249. John Balliol, father of a future King of Scots, gave his name to Balliol College. Walter de Merton, a Lord Chancellor of England who later became Bishop of Rochester, wrote a set of regulations for college life that made Merton College the template for all colleges that followed, at Oxford and at Cambridge alike.

• 3. Reformation, Revival, and Civil War

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  William Grocyn, a scholar at Oxford in the late 15th century, helped revive the study of the Greek language at the university, and his colleague John Colet brought new energy to biblical scholarship. The Renaissance was reshaping what it meant to be educated, and Oxford was being reshaped with it.

  The English Reformation broke that momentum in a different direction. When England severed ties with the Roman Catholic Church, recusant scholars fled Oxford for continental Europe, many of them settling at the University of Douai. Teaching methods shifted from medieval scholasticism toward Renaissance education, but the university lost land and revenues, and by the Age of Enlightenment its reputation had declined, with enrolments falling and teaching becoming neglected.

  In 1636, William Laud, who held the posts of chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury simultaneously, codified the university's statutes. Those rules governed Oxford largely unchanged until the mid-19th century. Laud also secured a charter of privileges for Oxford University Press and made substantial contributions to the Bodleian Library.

  When civil war came to England between 1642 and 1651, Oxford and its town split along opposing lines: the university backed the Royalist party, while the townspeople favoured the Parliamentarians. The university buildings became hospitals, cadet schools, and military training camps.

  Wadham College, founded in 1610, was the undergraduate college of Christopher Wren. In the 1650s Wren belonged to a group of experimental scientists at Oxford called the Oxford Philosophical Club, which also included Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. Their regular meetings at Wadham were guided by the college's warden, John Wilkins. That group became the nucleus of what would go on to found the Royal Society.

• 4. Reforms and the Narrowing Curriculum

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  In 1827 the university reviewed statutes some of which were more than 500 years old. Among the more striking items removed was a requirement that students swear an oath of enmity toward an Oxford townsman named Henry Symeonis, who had been found guilty of murdering an Oxford student in the mid-13th century.

  The curriculum at Oxford in the early 19th century was, as the historian Sir Spencer Walpole described it, notoriously narrow and impractical. Walpole quoted the Oxford University Commissioners of 1852 who concluded that Oxford's education served mainly those headed for ministry. Yet Walpole also noted what the university gave students despite its deficiencies: exposure to peers who would rise to the highest places in parliament, the church, and the law, along with qualities of loyalty, independence, and self-control.

  Two parliamentary commissions in 1852 proposed sweeping changes. One key figure was Archibald Campbell Tait, a former headmaster of Rugby School, who served on the Oxford Commission and pushed for Oxford to adopt the German and Scottish model in which the professorship held central importance. The commission called for stronger research, better-paid staff, open entry for poorer students, expansion of the curriculum, and fellowships released from the requirement of ordination.

  Mathematics and Literae Humaniores had been the first separate honour schools in 1802. Natural Sciences and Law and Modern History were added in 1853. Theology joined as the sixth honour school. All students regardless of their discipline were required to spend at least their first year on classical languages; an 1880 proposal to substitute a modern language for the classical requirement was rejected. It was not until 1886 that a natural science preliminary was recognised as qualifying for the first-year examination.

  Postgraduate degrees of Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Letters were introduced in 1895, and doctorates for research followed in 1900. Oxford became the first British university to offer a Doctor of Philosophy degree, abbreviated DPhil, in 1917; the first person to receive it, in 1919, was Lakshman Sarup of Balliol College.

• 5. Women at the Gates

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  In June 1878, the Association for the Education of Women was formed in Oxford with the aim of eventually establishing a college for women. Prominent members included George Granville Bradley, T. H. Green, and Edward Stuart Talbot. Talbot insisted on a specifically Anglican institution. Most of the others disagreed, the association split, and the result was two separate colleges: Talbot's group founded Lady Margaret Hall in 1878, and T. H. Green founded the non-denominational Somerville College in 1879.

  Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville opened their doors to their first 21 students combined, 12 at Somerville and 9 at Lady Margaret Hall, in 1879. Those students attended lectures in rooms above an Oxford baker's shop. Another 25 women were living at home or with friends that same year, a group that evolved into the Society of Oxford Home-Students and, by 1952, into St Anne's College. St Hugh's followed in 1886 and St Hilda's in 1893.

  In 1916, during the First World War, women were admitted as medical students on equal terms with men. On the 7th of October 1920, women became eligible for full membership of the university and gained the right to take degrees. But the university's dons created a quota in 1927 limiting female students to a quarter of the number of men; that quota was not abolished until 1957. The women's colleges did not receive full collegiate status until 1959.

  In 1974, Brasenose, Jesus, Wadham, Hertford, and St Catherine's became the first formerly all-male colleges to admit women. Most men's colleges followed in 1979, with Christ Church joining in 1980. Oriel was the last men's college to admit women, doing so in 1985. By 1988-40% of undergraduates at Oxford were female. By 2016, women made up 45% of the total student population and 47% of undergraduates.

  Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the first women to earn an academic degree from Oxford, set her detective novel Gaudy Night largely in an all-female college modelled on her own Somerville, making the question of women's education central to the plot.

• 6. Oxford at War

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  At the start of 1914, Oxford housed about 3,000 undergraduates and around 100 postgraduate students. When the First World War began, many undergraduates and fellows enlisted. By 1918 nearly all fellows were serving in uniform, and the student population in residence had fallen to just 12% of the pre-war total.

  The University Roll of Service records that 14,792 members of the university served in the war. Of those, 2,716 were killed, a proportion of 18.36%. University buildings that had once been lecture halls and dining rooms became hospitals, cadet schools, and military training camps.

  Not all Oxford members who served fought on the Allied side. New College maintains a memorial to its members who served in the German armed forces, bearing the inscription: "In memory of the men of this college who coming from a foreign land entered into the inheritance of this place and returning fought and died for their country in the war 1914-1918."

• 7. Institutions, Endowments, and Controversies

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  The Ashmolean Museum, founded in 1683, is the oldest museum in the UK and the oldest university museum in the world. Its collections include works by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Turner, and Picasso, along with a pristine Stradivarius violin known as "The Messiah," regarded by some as one of the finest examples in existence.

  Oxford University Press publishes more than 6,000 new books annually and is the largest university press in the world by number of publications. The Bodleian Library holds over 11 million volumes on 120 miles of shelving, making it the second-largest library in the UK after the British Library. Because the Bodleian is a legal deposit library, it is entitled to request a free copy of every book published in the UK, and its collection grows at more than three miles of new shelving every year. The original Bodleian was founded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598 and opened in 1602.

  The university's combined endowment, including colleges, stands at £8.708 billion, making it the largest university endowment in the UK. In the fiscal year ending the 31st of July 2025, total consolidated income reached £3.02 billion, of which £801.3 million came from research grants and contracts.

  That wealth has not shielded Oxford from scrutiny over its sources. All Souls College received £10,000 from the slave trader Christopher Codrington in 1710. Oriel College received £100,000 from the will of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes in 1902. In 1996, a £20 million donation arrived from Wafic Saïd, who was involved in the Al-Yammah arms deal. In 2021, Oxford accepted £6 million from The Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust; Max Mosley stated that he set up the trust to house the fortune he inherited from his father, Oswald Mosley, who founded two far-right organisations, the Union Movement and the British Union of Fascists. The university has said it takes legal, ethical, and reputational issues into consideration when accepting donations.

  In April 2020, Oxford committed to divest from direct investments in fossil fuel companies. The Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in 1884, currently holds over 500,000 archaeological and anthropological items, and its connection to anthropology teaching at Oxford dates to its foundation, when General Augustus Pitt Rivers stipulated as part of his donation that the university establish a lectureship in anthropology.

• 8. Reputation and Reach

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  Oxford has educated 31 prime ministers of the United Kingdom. Seventy-six Nobel Prize laureates have matriculated, worked, or held visiting fellowships there, with prizes across all six categories. Four Fields Medalists and six Turing Award winners also count Oxford among their academic homes. Oxford alumni have won 160 Olympic medals.

  The Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest international graduate scholarship programmes in the world, is based at Oxford. The Clarendon Scholarship, principally funded by Oxford University Press, is open to graduate applicants of all nationalities. Oxford Opportunity Bursaries, introduced in 2006, offer means-based support to any British undergraduate, with a total possible grant of £10,235 over a three-year degree.

  The university has faced persistent criticism over access. The Sutton Trust found that Oxford and Cambridge together recruited disproportionately from just eight schools, which accounted for 1,310 Oxbridge places over three years compared with 1,220 places from 2,900 other schools. In 2018, Oxford's own admissions report revealed that eight of its colleges had accepted fewer than three black applicants in the past three years. By 2020, the number of Black undergraduates accepted had risen to 106, representing 3.7% of the UK intake. Oxford spends over £6 million a year on outreach programmes aimed at underrepresented demographics.

  Chaucer mentioned Oxford in The Canterbury Tales as early as 1400. By 1989, scholars had identified 533 novels set in Oxford, from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, with the count continuing to rise.