All Souls is a graduate college where Fellows are admitted after passing an exam. Any Oxford immediate post graduate is eligible to sit it once a year for 3 years. The exam, said to be the hardest in the world, consists of 3 days of examination, each being a 3 hour essay – two on the candidates subjects (all Classics) the third an essay on subjects such as “charity”, “error” and “mercy”. And, somewhat interestingly “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?” (That one might be worth 3 hours, not sure about the others.)

Two candidates succeed out of dozens who try every year. One of the failures was Hugh Trevor-Roper, who tried to teach me (briefly and unsuccessfully) to be interested in History.  One of the successes was Lawrence of Arabia.

The inmates are thought to be some of the finest minds in the country.

To prove it every hundred years, and generally on 14 January, there is a commemorative feast after which the Fellows parade around the College with flaming torches, singing the Mallard Song and led by a “Lord Mallard” who is carried in a chair, in search of a legendary mallard that supposedly flew out of the foundations of the college when it was being built in 1437. During the ‘hunt’ the Lord Mallard is preceded by a man bearing a pole to which a mallard is tied – originally a live bird, latterly either dead (1901) or carved from wood (2001). The last mallard ceremony was in 2001 and the next is due in 2101.

Oliver Cromwell in about 1600 said the fellows should sing  it ‘more loudly and in a bawdy manner’ at about 3am.  Which they did for a couple of hundred years, but have apparently toned it down a bit now.

After this bit of wassailing they go back to being brainy for another hundred years. 

Some fairly startling stop press: the present Master of the College (aka ‘Lord Mallard’) has written some new verses to the song.