Since 1581, nobody could enrol at Oxford without first swearing an oath to the monarch and the Church of England. That rule survived almost three centuries. Parliament finally struck it down on 16 June 1871, when the Universities Tests Act opened Oxford, Cambridge and Durham to students and staff of any faith, or none.
more
What the oath actually required
Under Elizabeth I, matriculating at Oxford meant swearing allegiance to the crown and formal assent to the Church. The same test applied to university jobs. A college fellowship or a professorship required it too, and Oxford’s version of the rule was stricter than the equivalents at Cambridge, or at universities in Ireland and Scotland. St John’s College, one of Oxford’s constituent colleges, describes the pre-1871 rules as the strictest of any university in England, built to protect the institution’s Protestant orthodoxy.
The barrier loosened only partly before 1871. In 1854, Oxford dropped the requirement to subscribe to the Church of England at matriculation and graduation, but kept it for students of Theology, and most college jobs stayed closed to non-Anglicans.
The act, and what it actually changed
The Universities Tests Act of 1871 abolished religious tests for any degree other than one in Divinity, and let students, professors and staff of any denomination enter Oxford, Cambridge and Durham. Parliament’s stated aim was that the benefits of a university education “should be rendered freely accessible to the nation.”
It was not a complete opening. Many colleges stayed only nominally accessible to non-Anglicans in the years that followed. Women were not admitted to the University of Oxford until 1920, and 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of that separate change. Anthony Reddie, who directs Oxford’s Centre for Religion and Culture, has called the act’s 150th anniversary “a critical juncture” at which to reflect on a longer march toward equality at the university.
New colleges, and new arrivals
The act led to a flurry of new colleges for students the old rule had shut out. Mansfield College took in Congregationalists, Harris Manchester took in Unitarians and Regent’s Park took in Baptists, alongside a succession of Roman Catholic foundations. Somerville College took in women without regard to religion, and it had no chapel.
The change reached beyond Christian denominations. In the decades after 1871, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu students arrived at Oxford, along with students of other world faiths who would previously have been barred. The first Jewish fellow at any Oxford or Cambridge college was elected in 1882. That opened the way for scholars including Ernst Chain, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, and Dorothy Hodgkin, who won hers for chemical crystallography.
Oxford’s own leadership today reflects how far the change has run. Its chancellor and vice-chancellor at the time of the act’s 150th anniversary, Lord Patten and Professor Louise Richardson, are both Roman Catholic, a fact Oxford’s own account of the anniversary calls unthinkable a century earlier.
What the university says still needs doing
Oxford marked the 150th anniversary of the act in 2021 with a research project examining what has changed since, and what has not. The project drew in academics from across the university, including contributors from the Faculty of Theology and Religion such as Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch. Professor Martin Williams, then pro-vice chancellor for education, said the university still had work to do to make Oxford “a truly inclusive community in which everyone feels welcome and respected.” St John’s College points to its Inspire programme, which runs events and workshops for state school pupils in west London, as part of that continuing effort to widen access.
The anniversary project’s stated aim was to use the act as a lens on Oxford’s transformation over a century and a half, and to ask which voices are still missing from the university today. That framing runs through how the university now tells the story: not as a single act that finished the job, but as the opening move in a process it says is still under way.
