This coming Saturday the newest student members of the Trinity community will be undertaking a key rite of passage in their university careers – Matriculation. Our ‘sub fusc’ clad freshers (no bare ankles on pain of death) will gather bright and early in Durham Quad where our Dean of Degrees Gail Trimble will take a roll call before walking them over the road to the Sheldonian Theatre for a brief ceremony. 

We will be first out of the traps, alongside Balliol, Merton, Exeter, Magdalen and Campion Hall. Balliol’s Dean of Degrees will introduce the students to the Vice Chancellor Irene Tracey (in effect the University’s Chief Executive) with the words: “Insignissima Vice-Cancellaria, praesentamus tibi hos nostros scholares ut referantur in Matriculam Universitatis. [Most distinguished Vice-Chancellor, we present to you these our scholars that they may be entered into the Roll of the University.]” 

And she will reply: “Scitote vos in Matriculam Universitatis hodie relatos esse, et ad observandum omnia Statuta istius Universitatis, quantum ad vos spectent, teneri. [Know that you are today added to the Roll of the University and bound to obey all the statutes of this University so far as they apply to you.]” And that is pretty much it.

In an era when undergraduates were still something of a sideline for the University, Matriculation was introduced to regulate growth in their numbers in 1565. The Matriculation statutes were then amended in the early 1580s to require undergraduates over 16 to subscribe to the Church of England’s Articles of Religion and the Act of Supremacy declaring the monarch (rather than the Pope) head of the Church. Some Catholic families sidestepped this restriction by sending their sons to Oxford when they were as young as 12 or 13, but the University was in effect an Anglican institution. 

In due course, demands from Nonconformist Protestants (such as Baptists and Methodists) and Roman Catholics to remove the religious tests became increasingly vocal. Pressure for reform intensified following the creation of the secular University of London in 1826. The rapid success and intellectual growth of this open institution put immense pressure on Oxford to modernise or risk losing its dominant position. 

The religious tests on entry and membership at Matriculation were eventually removed for undergraduates in the Oxford University Act of 1854 and then for other students and staff in the Universities Tests Act of 1871. Trinity admitted its first Jewish student in the first year it was permissible to do so. The Matriculation ceremony remained but its focus returned to reminding students that they had to abide by the Statutes.

In the modern era, the Matriculation ceremony also gives us the opportunity to take a Freshers’ photo while everyone is smartly begowned. Below you can see the earliest example we have in the archive from 1905, taken in the corner of Garden Quad. Fans of ‘The Crown’ may be interested to know that one of the freshers pictured is Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, later a highly influential and dedicated Private Secretary to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II who was played in the TV show by Pip Torrens.

Other rites of passage for new Trinitarians (including Fellows as well as students) include the signing of the College Admissions Register, which was introduced by President Ralph Bathurst in 1664. The photographs below show the first page of the original register (with John Fishbourne as the first signatory) and me signing the current version after I arrived last year. 

In the time of President Arthur Norrington (1954-70), Freshers’ Collections with the President took place when they signed the Register. Georghios Georghallides, a Cypriot alumnus who wrote about his time here as an undergraduate in the early 1960s, recalled that Norrington had “a First World War wound which meant that his eager and vigorous handshake immediately conveyed to one a sense of amazement and slight horror”. I look forward to my Collections with the new undergraduate freshers in a few days’ time, without I hope conveying either amazement or horror.