Book Launch: The History and Pre-History of Hertford College, Oxford

22 October 2025

On Monday 20 October we celebrated the recent publication of The History and Pre-History of Hertford College, Oxford: Survival and Renewals by Christopher Tyerman, Professor of the History of the Crusades at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow at Hertford College.

A drinks reception in the Chapel was followed by a private dinner, with speeches by the author and by Fellow Librarian Professor Emma Smith, and thanks given by Interim Principal Pat Roche.

Professor Tyerman’s research and publications have revolved around the crusades, medieval England and France, and English educational institutions. His study of Hertford’s history ‘charts a story of repeated dislocation, precarity, ingenuity, and renewal, very different from the more familiar image of Oxford’s established grandeur and serene progress towards modernity’.

He writes:

‘The modern college’s chief claims to attention lie in the egalitarian reforms to the university admissions system it pioneered in the 1960s and in the way, including the early admission of women in 1974, it transformed itself from a poor, dilapidated, ill-favoured, obscure, and introspective conservative backwater to a well-regarded, open, outward-looking, financially secure, and academically sound partner in the collegiate university. Such deliberate transformations are rare. However, behind modern Hertford sits a history reaching back to the thirteenth century and the early days of the university itself. The residual legatee of two medieval halls, Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall, as well as a failed eighteenth-century college, Hertford and its precursors map on a small scale the history of the university and of wider English social and educational settings over seven centuries.…’

Copies of the book can be ordered direct from the publisher Oxford Academic, or from a wide range of other retailers.