For over 550 years, Oxford students had to swear an oath against a long-forgotten enemy: Henry Symeonis. A historical case study of symbolic order, institutional slights and the silent power of academic rituals.

The Oxford oath of hatred - when a university like Oxford comes close to Hogwarts

Introduction: How a criminal case became an academic myth

Oxford - the name conjures up images of solemn halls, scholars in black gowns, centuries of thought, research and debate. When you think of this traditional university, you think of excellence, not bitterness. And yet behind the neo-Gothic backdrop lies an astonishing chapter of institutionalised vindictiveness - a story that has more to do with collective grievance than academic honesty.

For over five hundred years, prospective Masters students at Oxford had to take an oath declaring that they despised a certain man: Henry Symeonis. Not a king, not a heretic, not an enemy of the Enlightenment - but an urban citizen who is said to have killed a student in 1242. The circumstances of the crime are as unclear as its political significance - but the university's reaction was clear. It did not forgive. Not after ten years, not after a hundred. Instead, it held on to a symbolic sanction that has been renewed for generations.

Why would an institution dedicated to reason cling to an act of collective repugnance for half a millennium? The answer lies not only in historical detail, but in the structure of institutional memory. What began as an individual act of violence became a cipher for the conflict between academic autonomy and royal power. The university resisted the royal pardon of the perpetrator - and turned its resentment into a ritual. This shifted the meaning of the oath: it no longer applied to the offender, but became a test of loyalty within the academic community. Those who took the oath declared their agreement with the conviction that the university should never give in - not even in the name of mercy.

This story is more than a curiosity. It reveals how deeply institutions can inscribe offences - not through arguments, but through rituals. The oath against Henry Symeonis was never just an act of remembrance; it was an identity-forming narrative, a performative repetition of a former injustice that was not let go. Precisely because no one knew who Symeonis actually was, he could become the perfect bogeyman: ahistorical, emotionally charged, harmless - and therefore all the more effective as a projection surface.

It is remarkable how long such a ritual can survive, even though its content has long since been emptied. This form of symbolic self-affirmation is not an exception, but a widespread pattern: where an institution was once wounded - whether through political pressure, external intervention or internal conflict - a symbolic scar often remains. The original offence is not erased, but encapsulated. The oath against Henry Symeonis became a kind of narcissistic scar: kept visible so as not to forget - and at the same time became so much a part of the system that it was no longer questioned.

And so a historical sideshow became a lesson about the long-term effects of offence in institutions. About rituals that are no longer understood but continue to be performed. About the paradoxical fact that places that feel committed to the Enlightenment can be particularly susceptible to unconscious repetition compulsions. And about the fine line between cultivating tradition and poisoning it.

Who was Henry Symeonis? And why did he become a symbol?

Henry Symeonis was not a prince, not a scholar, not a heretic - but a wealthy citizen of Oxford, embedded in the urban patriciate of the 13th century. In 1242, he was convicted of killing a student - an act that may seem like a tragic isolated incident from today's perspective, but at the time was thrown like a match into an already blazing field of tension. The fronts between the academic elite and the local population had long since hardened by this time.

University members, mostly clerics, were not subject to local law, but to ecclesiastical law. This meant that anyone who robbed or insulted a citizen could hardly expect any consequences - a situation that was perceived as a blatant injustice in the streets of Oxford. It was an asymmetrical power structure: The students were considered untouchable, the citizens a nuisance. In this atmosphere, a murder could become a beacon. The killing of the student - whether premeditated, emotional or through escalation - became a collective trauma. And Henry Symeonis became a cipher: no longer just a man, but the face of a collective offence that was met with legal harshness.

Royal pardon - and the university's symbolic demonstration of power

In 1264, two decades after the murder, King Henry III did what was in his power: he pardoned Henry Symeonis. From the monarch's point of view, the case was closed. Pardon was an instrument of political pacification - a final stroke in the name of order. The city of Oxford was instructed to readmit Symeonis and put the incident behind them. But the university defied the royal order - not loudly, but firmly. It did not forgive. And it did not forget.

What followed was not a legal dispute, but an act of ritual self-empowerment: The university created a symbolic counterweight to royal authority. It declared that it valued its own memory more highly than the mercy of the ruler. This memory took the form of an oath - an oath in which every prospective master had to promise never to reconcile with Henry Symeonis.

In this way, the university established more than just a ritual. It constructed a lasting memory of the unforgivable - and made it a condition of academic affiliation. Year after year, ceremony after ceremony, the oath was renewed. It was not questioned, not historicised, not relativised. The oath acted like a seal on the collective identity - a silent echo of institutional offence.

You could say that while the king tried to pacify, the university decided to remember. But it was not mere remembrance - it was the ritual staging of irreconcilability. An act of institutional power that also served as a touchstone: Only those who took the oath proved their loyalty to the order of the university - not to the order of the empire.

The oath as a ritual - loyalty through repetition

From then on, an idiosyncratic condition applied to all those seeking a Master's degree at Oxford University: they had to swear an oath as part of their graduation ceremony - not to knowledge, truth or academic virtues, but to hatred. To be more precise: they had to promise never to make up with Henry Symeonis.

The oath formula was in Latin - like all official acts in the medieval university world. "Magister, tu jurabis quod nunquam consenties in reconciliationem Henrici Simeonis, nec statum Baccalaurei iterum tibi assumes." ("Magister, you will swear that you will never consent to reconciliation with Henry Symeonis, nor will you again assume the status of baccalaureate.") The wording comes from the Corpus Statutorum of Oxford University and sounds like a magic formula from Hogwarts. In a sense, it was. The semantics of this sentence have faded over the centuries. What was once meant to be concrete and confrontational became a formulaic act, just as Dadaist as "Wingardium leviosa". Nobody knew the exact circumstances any more. The words were spoken, but their meaning was no longer understood. And yet the ritual remained - across generations, across social upheavals.

You might think that such a ritual would have been questioned or abolished at some point - but it was precisely its emptying of content that made it unassailable. As with many traditional gestures, the purpose remained obscure, but the gesture itself continued to have an effect. The oath became a kind of ritual signature under the collective memory of the institution. Those who spoke it were - consciously or unconsciously - committing themselves to the emotional grammar of the university.

This phenomenon is comparable to ritual acts in families, churches or armies: the emptier the formula, the deeper its binding force. For where the content is forgotten, the action itself comes to the fore - as identity insurance against forgetting, but also against change. The oath against Henry Symeonis thus became a prime example of a cultural repetition that no longer reminds, but only has an effect.

A sign of academic autonomy - or: the university against the sovereign

What seems like a strange anachronism in retrospect - a medieval oath with a long-forgotten name - was a deliberate act of power in the context of its creation. The University of Oxford set an example: it withdrew from the king's control and claimed to determine its own memory. At a time when academic institutions still had no secure privileges, this was nothing less than an act of institutional resistance.

In legal terms, Henry III had exercised his authority. He had forgiven - so he should be forgiven. But Oxford refused. And this refusal was more than just defiance: it marked the beginning of a symbolic programme of self-assertion. The university declared itself a moral authority that countered the royal forgiveness with its own truth - a truth that was not bound to legal logic, but to memory, resentment and identity.

The oath thus became a performative demarcation between two orders: the political power of the monarch and the symbolic power of the institution. While the king dispensed justice, the university enacted duration. The oath was not a legal act, but a ritual of repetition that secured the autonomy of the academic sphere - through repetition, not argument.

In a way, Oxford thus posed a question early on that still resonates in every university today: Who has the last word on meaning, on guilt, on history? The state, which can forgive - or the institution, which refuses to forget?

The oath without memory - how rituals preserve forgetting

Over the centuries, the oath against Henry Symeonis was passed down like a sacred relic - long after its origins had disappeared into the mists of history. For countless generations of students, it was nothing more than a compulsory line in the solemn graduation protocol. A sentence in Latin, spoken with devotion or indifference, but almost always without understanding.

Nobody knew who this oath referred to, let alone why it had once been introduced. The murder case that had triggered it had been erased from the collective memory - but the ritual remained. And therein lies the paradoxical power of such symbolic acts: They do not remind, they repeat. What once began as an expression of concrete indignation became an act of pure form - and thus effective.

In this way, the original meaning was reversed: it was not what was remembered that structured the ritual, but the ritual that replaced the remembering. The oath functioned like an empty gesture with an authoritative echo - an example of what sociologists call "mechanical memory". It was less an expression of a conscious will to hostility than an automated reflex of collective affiliation.

You could say that the university had forgotten why it did not want to reconcile - but it remembered exactly that it was not allowed to. So the oath became not a sign of clarity, but the seal of blind insistence.

Reginald Lane Poole rediscovers history - and brings back what has been forgotten

It took more than half a millennium and an astute historian to shed light on the shadows of this ritual. It was not until 1912, when Reginald Lane Poole, Professor of History at Oxford University, was looking through old matriculation records and ceremonial registers, that he came across a trace of an oath that was still spoken, but whose origins no one could explain.

Poole followed the ritual formula like a detective following a cryptic note - and finally stumbled upon the original scene: the murder case of 1242, the royal pardon of 1264 and the university's stubborn refusal to forgive. At a time when archiving itself was still a young science, Poole did pioneering work. He showed how long-lasting symbolic practices can be - and how easily they evade conscious reflection once they have been institutionalised.

What makes his research so remarkable is less the rediscovery of a ritual than the unmasking of its void: Poole showed that the supposedly traditional behaviour of the university was based on a repressed affect. An oath that nobody understood anymore was spoken for centuries - not because of, but despite its content. Poole thus formulated not only a historical diagnosis, but also an epistemological point: institutions remember not only through words, but through repetition. And sometimes they remember most strongly when nobody knows what they are remembering.

His work is still considered a milestone in the understanding of pre-modern academic rites - not because it glorifies the past, but because it shows how close the power of form is to the blind spot of history.

Abolition of an outdated practice - the quiet end of a loud symbol

Ironically, the oath against Henry Symeonis was not ended in a dramatic gesture, but in an administrative act - quietly, without comment, casually. In 1827, it was officially cancelled from the university's graduation rituals. No solemn declaration, no symbolic disposal, no critical reappraisal. The oath, which had marked the moral front line between the university and the crown for five centuries, simply disappeared.

Why at this particular time? The university was in the midst of profound upheavals. Civic educational reforms, the rise of a modern understanding of science and new demands for transparency and publicity were taking their toll on traditional symbols. The oath no longer fitted into the new self-image - and even less into an age that no longer derived legitimacy from ritual repetition, but from argumentative comprehensibility.

And yet the fact that this oath disappeared so quietly is itself a telling sign: It had long since lost its function. What was once intended as a conscious act of institutional self-assertion had become a formulaic, residual movement - inconspicuous, empty, without consequences. The death of this ritual was not a rupture, but a fading away.

It is precisely this quiet end that reveals a lot about how symbolic legacies are dealt with. Rituals whose meaning has long since been decoupled do not dissolve through resistance, but through disinterest. It was not the Enlightenment that broke the oath - but the collective shrug of the shoulders of a generation that was no longer interested in it. Thus ended one of the strangest practices of remembrance in Western educational history - not with a thunderclap, but with a memorandum.

What rituals reveal about institutions - and what they conceal

Rituals are not just social habits; they function like identity anchors: they hold institutions together where words no longer work and ensure belonging through repetition rather than conviction.

But rituals do even more. They not only preserve - they select. They decide what is remembered and what is allowed to disappear. They consolidate power relations, transform old grievances into new loyalties and draw boundaries between "us" and "them". The Symeonis case makes it clear that institutions do not deal with conflicts by resolving them, but by transforming them into a symbolic order. The hostility remains - only refined by form.

What at first glance appears to be a harmless custom turns out to be part of a deeper strategy of collective self-stabilisation. Rituals are not secondary to the institution - they are its nervous centre.

Memory without origin

Rituals whose origins hardly anyone knows continue to have an effect in the present. They can be found in universities and ministries as well as in conference hotels, family celebrations or admission ceremonies of professional organisations. They structure belonging - and often reproduce unnoticed hierarchies, exclusions or myths that should have been questioned long ago.

Especially in a time that adorns itself with historical responsibility, the survival of such practices becomes a challenge: Which forms of remembrance are sustainable - and which merely perpetuate old discord in new packaging? Which rituals serve understanding, and which prevent it?

The case of Henry Symeonis forces us to take a closer look. It invites us to break through the surface of solemnity and ask ourselves: where do we still perform gestures today that we no longer understand - and who benefits from them? In a world that demands reappraisal, the seemingly inconspicuous often remains the most effective.

Social-psychological and psychodynamic perspectives - rituals as affect management

From a socio-psychological perspective, rituals such as the oath against Henry Symeonis can be understood as a means of institutionalised affect regulation. They not only serve integration, but also fulfil several simultaneous functions: They establish group cohesion, create symbolic stability and structure belonging through demarcation. By regularly repeating the oath over the centuries, it created a collective "we" that was not defined in terms of content, but was marked affectively by its opposite - the "not-we", embodied by Symeonis.

The ritualised hostility outlasted all political, social and ideational processes of change - precisely because it was conveyed affectively rather than argumentatively. The oath functioned like a social glue that remained effective not through understanding, but through shared indignation and symbolic loyalty.

From a psychodynamic perspective, the phenomenon can be interpreted as a collectively organised defence. The murder, experienced as a deep narcissistic affront to the academic order, was not dealt with through mourning, reconciliation or coping, but was banished into a stable enemy image through externalisation. The perpetrator disappeared - the symbolic figure remained. From then on, the oath served to seal the institutional self-definition against inner ambivalences: Who we are is determined by who we are not allowed to forgive.

Through repetition, the event did not pass away, but was kept present - not in its historical reality, however, but in an emotionally charged projection. The oath became a stage for the repetition of an unresolved conflict, on which each new generation of students had to join in - whether they wanted to or not. The ritual thus acted like a psychological seal: it contained the pain and at the same time kept it alive.

The function of the oath was therefore not to remember the murder, but to stabilise a self-image that simultaneously asserted moral superiority and vulnerable integrity . A contradictory narrative - held in place by a formulaic ritual that no one understood but everyone had to follow.

Between offence and continuity - the long shadow of a conflict

The fact that a local outbreak of violence turned into an oath that lasted five hundred years is an impressive illustration of how deeply offences can be rooted in the structures of institutional memory. The murder of a student was undoubtedly a shock - but it was not treated as an isolated incident, but interpreted as an attack on the academic whole. The symbolic reaction was correspondingly comprehensive.

A collective myth emerged from the specific act: Symeonis was no longer remembered as a person, but as a cipher for betrayal, a threat to elitist identity and the marginalisation of the guilty. The oath, originally intended as a moral gesture, was transformed over the centuries into a kind of boundary marker - a performative speech act that created loyalty and affiliation.

In this way, the function of the ritual shifted: it was less a reminder of a historical event than a constantly new line drawn between the familiar and the foreign. Between university and city, between order and threat, between the "we" of the academic world and the "others" of the profane environment. In this symbolic logic, no event was preserved - but rather a sense of identity.

Conclusion: Institutions remember differently

The University of Oxford is one of the oldest educational institutions in Europe - and like any long-lived institution, it carries with it not only knowledge, but also contradictions. The oath against Henry Symeonis shows that the memory of institutions is not structured by facts, but by rituals, affects and symbolic orders.

The abolition of the oath in 1827 was more than just a bureaucratic act - it marked a profound change in the university's self-image. What had for centuries been regarded as the foundation of identity was now recognised as a blind habit - and dismissed. However, the real lesson is not in the disappearance of the ritual, but in its long existence. It is a reminder that institutions do not forget because they do not remember - but because they do not reflect.

Memory, seen in this light, is not an archiving problem, but a question of attitude: which stories we continue to write, which we let go of, and which we - silently or publicly - say goodbye to. Sooner or later, every institution has to ask itself whether it still needs its rituals - or whether they only serve to ward off change.

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