Hertford College, Oxford

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Hertford College, Oxford

College name

Hertford College

Named after

Elias de Hertford

Established

1282 as Hart Hall, 1740 as Hertford College

Sister College

None

Principal

Dr John Landers

JCR President

Thomas Lowe

Undergraduates

376

MCR President

Stephen Forrest

Graduates

224

Homepage

Hertford College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is located in Catte Street, directly opposite the main entrance of the original Bodleian Library.

1 History
2 The College site
3 Fellows of the College
4 Emeritus Fellows
5 Honorary Fellows
6 Notable former students
7 External links
8 Notes

[edit] History

The college was originally founded as Hart Hall in 1282 by Elias de Hertford. In medieval Oxford, halls were primarily lodging houses for students and resident tutors, and thus did not have the same status as fully fledged colleges. Many of the great minds of the English Renaissance studied at what would eventually become Hertford College including the metaphysical poet John Donne, satirist Jonathan Swift, the political theorist Thomas Hobbes, and the first translator of the Bible into English, William Tyndale. The Hall became Hertford College in 1740. Due to funding problems, the College's buildings were taken over as Magdalen Hall (not related to the similarly named Magdalen College whose separate Hall had been incorporated into the University as a college years before)¹ in 1822. In 1874, the combined Hertford College/Magdalen Hall was finally re-established once again as a full college, largely due to the sponsorship of Sir Thomas Baring. Within only seven years, the college came Head of the River in the annual college boat races.

Hertford was one of the first five co-educational colleges in the university. It has an almost equal gender balance with a slightly higher proportion of women to men. Traditionally seen as a progressive college, in the 1960s Hertford was one of the first colleges to encourage applicants from state schools, and has a higher proportion of students from state schools relative to private schools.

More recently the college has benefited from its firm financial footing. With an aggressive buying policy, its library collection has become one of the largest amongst the colleges and contains over 40,000 volumes. Among these are many rare seventeenth century manuscripts and an original edition of Hobbes' Leviathan given as a personal gift to the college where he prepared his best-known work. Students are accommodated for the full three years either on the main site or on college-owned property primarily in North Oxford and the Folly Bridge area. A new Hertford Graduate Centre fronting the Thames has also been built near Folly Bridge and was opened in 2000. The college playing fields include a pavilion with facilities for most major team sports; its shared boathouse has been recently rebuilt, and the college has a new student gym. Despite its reputation for a relaxed atmosphere Hertford has featured well in exam results, often finishing among the top five university-wide. Hertford is home to a 'college cat' named Simpkins, who lives in the College Lodge and is reputedly the third cat in his lineage to bear the name.

[edit] The College site

Entrance to Hertford College

The main college consists of three quadrangles: Old Quadrangle, New Quadrangle, and Holywell Quadrangle.

The Old Quadrangle (Old quad or OB (old building) quad for short), as the name suggests, is the oldest and the original quadrangle. It incorporates the lodge, library, chapel, hall, bursary and other administrative buildings. It is also home to many of the studies of senior fellows and tutors. Old quad is the only Hertford quadrangle to have a lawn in the centre, in the traditional college style, and its flower embossed gate dates from the sixteenth century. The lawn is off-limits during Michaelmas and Hilary terms but freely traversable during Trinity term. Senior fellows of the college are granted the privilege of being able to walk across the lawn all year round.

The New Quadrangle (New Quad or NB quad for short) is connected to the Old Quadrangle via the famous Hertford Bridge, also known as the Bridge of Sighs, which was designed by Thomas Graham Jackson. New quad is primarily composed of undergraduate housing and associated facilities. With views of the Sheldonian Theatre the MCR (Middle Common Room) 'Octagon' incorporates part of a sixteenth century chapel built into the old city wall. It is also situated in New quad and is off limits to all undergraduates except those enrolled as mature students or in their fourth year as an undergraduate.

Holywell Quadrangle backs directly onto New quad, and the two are connected by an arched corridor that also contains the steps down to Hertford's subterranean bar, the only fully student-run bar left in Oxford. Holywell is almost exclusively first-year undergraduate housing and therefore contains the JCR (Junior Common Room). The Baring Room occupies the highest level of one of five staircases in Holywell and is named after the benefactor whose funding aided Hertford's classificatory transition from a hall of residence to a fully fledged college.