Back in the 1950s and 1960s, you were required to have a knowledge of Latin and one other foreign language before you could even be considered for admission to read History at Oxford. The special entrance examination set by the History Faculty included passages for translation, and if you got in, you spent your first term – a mere eight weeks – studying not only Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Macaulay's History of England as contrasting examples of British historiography, but also (in my case) Alexis de Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution and the Venerable Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, whose medieval Latin came as something of a shock to anyone brought up on Cicero and Caesar. At the end of the term, in order to be allowed to proceed to take the rest of the three-year degree in Modern History, you had to pass the Preliminary Examination, which included passages from these, or other, similar works chosen from a brief list of approved texts, set for translation into English and commentary on their historical meaning and significance.

Document-based Special Subjects, which provided a final-year stepping-stone to research, required intensive study of extracts, or ‘gobbets’, from original texts in French, Latin, German, Italian or whatever language they had been written in, depending on what the subject was; in order to take the Special Subject on the Third Reich, for instance, introduced in the 1970s, Oxford undergraduates had to have a good working knowledge of German. Even in non-document-based subjects, knowledge of a foreign language was often required.