‘Hertford’, observes Christopher Tyerman on the opening page of his new book, ‘is one of Oxford’s least distinguished colleges.’ Given the competition, that is a bold claim – and one that invites all manner of questions about how such a ranking might be compiled. More importantly, it is an undeniably unusual start to an institutional history. At a time when all such places are experiencing a general crisis of authority, their official chronicles have become ever more unlikely to acknowledge any such thing. Tyerman’s study is the exact opposite of all those glossy, celebratory volumes intended to attract donors or uplift alumni. It is a proper work of serious history and one that is unremitting in its refusal to surrender to any sentimentality or self-promotion.

He has form for this sort of thing. Indeed, it seems hard to imagine that recruitment can ever have recovered from Tyerman’s official history of Harrow School. What the Daily Telegraph termed its ‘frank account of bullying, snobbery, and sexual misadventures’ provoked a brief flurry of outrage. Now retired as a longstanding fellow of Hertford, Tyerman is equally free about the college’s flaws in this account. One key 19th-century benefactor is noted for his ‘sociopathic tendencies’, with his gifts singled out as having ‘cushioned Hertford with an increasingly corrosive institutional comfort at the price of constriction and stagnation’. By 1959, Tyerman writes, the college was ‘a near destitute slum’; several decades later, he goes on, Hertford was still ‘dirty and unhygienic, its lavatories unclean, with the food of junior members veering from controversial to deplorable to unsafe’. There is more student vomit in the last few pages of the book than can ever have been seen in any similar study. 

There are also plums aplenty for those who enjoy college quirks: the principal reprimanded for illegal hunting and the principal killed in a student riot between northerners and southerners; their successor ‘who acted more as hotelier than pedagogue’, and another whom a contemporary described as ‘a person of more beard than learning’. Tyerman goes further, pronouncing Principal Wilkinson’s management of the place as ‘devious, secretive, mercenary, and corrupt’. Principal Hyde had a ‘tenure unmarked with signs of accomplishment’. Principal Ford ‘left no mark to disturb even the scholarly’. Principal Michell saw ‘his youthful renown curdled, a not uncommon Oxford fate’. Even Principal Boyd, who was in many ways the maker of modern Hertford, is brought down to size. With ‘a voice like a cream bun’, he had one great ambition for the college: ‘that it became conventional’. It was, notes Tyerman, ‘a hope largely fulfilled’. As Hertford was the alma mater for one student he identifies as the 18th century’s ‘most notorious necrophiliac’, perhaps that was just as well (though again, it would be interesting to understand the ranking system better).

This corrosive iconoclasm is not just a pose – even if it does make Tyerman’s text an almost uniquely entertaining college history. It also signals seriousness: a determination not to fall victim to the perennial problems of such accounts, whether a Whiggish desire to trace the inevitable ascent of the institution or a still more ahistorical story of some collegiate quiddity that somehow transcends time. In Hertford’s case, both would be particularly problematic, for this is really the history of four foundations: Hart Hall and the first (failed) Hertford College; Magdalen Hall and the present Hertford College itself. ‘What they had in common’, the author concludes, ‘was that none was grand, rich, or powerful.’ As a consequence, ‘they bent to fashion and bore the marks of change.’ 

Opened in around 1280, Hart Hall was one of dozens of similar foundations that grew up in the lee of the medieval university. Unlike the colleges, these academic halls were not endowed and remained the property of their principals. But they served a function, providing a home and – at least in theory – discipline for students who lacked a place elsewhere. By the 18th century, Hart Hall was one of few survivors of this dispensation and in 1740 it was established and endowed anew as Hertford College. The name, Tyerman explains, was a piece of ‘spurious antiquarianism’ and the driving force of the project, Principal Newton, was unduly optimistic in his plans. Within two generations Hertford was bankrupt: a building collapsed, half of its books were stolen, other parts of the site were occupied by squatters. In 1816, it closed. ‘The stain of failure is indelible,’ observes Tyerman in his mordant way.

Magdalen Hall was somewhat grander: an offshoot of Magdalen College, it was an antechamber for its upmarket neighbour and indeed at times outclassed it. William Tyndale was a tutor and Thomas Hobbes a student, though he noted that many parents simply sent their sons ‘to save themselves the trouble of governing them at home during that time wherein children are least governable’. Eventually, however, the Hall was evicted by Magdalen College. Seizing the abandoned, derelict remains of Hertford, Magdalen Hall reopened there in 1822. A few decades later, it stole the name as well. This new Hertford College had almost nothing to do with the abortive 18th-century foundation and still less with Hart Hall. But the collegiate status secured its future, while the name brought with it an alluring sense of continuity. For years, Hertford claimed a foundation date of 1280 rather than 1874.  

Recounting this unheroic, episodic narrative, filled as it is with failed plans, dubious expedients and debatable legal proceedings, Tyerman enjoys himself enormously. He also makes a major contribution to the history of Oxford. The academic halls have been ill-served by historians, who have preferred to focus on the colleges, which are typically richer in archival holdings as well as in wealth. Hertford helps restore the balance. Still more, it illustrates a precept outlined by the great university historian Sheldon Rothblatt, who observed that educational institutions always survive ‘chameleon-fashion’, adapting to their environment. Hertford is in that sense especially illuminating. However undistinguished its past, it now possesses a most distinguished History.