This may seem like a singularly unimportant anniversary: 250 years ago (on November 4, 1761, to be precise) a New College undergraduate got drunk. He also lost a half-crown bet that he could not drink four pints of wine in three hours and then write five verses out of the Bible correctly.

I know this to be a fact because I read it last week in The Diary of a Country Parson by James Woodforde (1740-1803) — forbear of this paper’s art correspondent Giles Woodforde — who went up to New College as a scholar in 1759 and returned there in 1773 as sub-warden.

The joy of the diary, which records Woodforde’s daily life from 1758-1802, is that it supplies information about what it was really like to be alive in Oxford, and later as a parson in Norfolk, in the late 18th century; with small events that probably seemed of no importance at all to the writer very often proving the most interesting and entertaining to anyone happening on his musings these days.

Talk about serious drinking — of both the binge and regular varieties. I would wager that the average Oxford resident, whether from town or gown, at that time drank very much more than his or her modern successor. “I carried off my drinking exceedingly well,” Woodforde remarks in a typical diary entry. Indeed you have the impression that he spent most of his time (and much of his money) on wine — and prodigious quantities of good food too.

Of course, what he describes is the Oxford that existed before various Royal Commissions and suchlike came along to spoil the fun. Even writing in the early 19th century, journalist William Cobbett (1762-1835), commenting on Oxford academics in his Rural Rides, wrote: “Malignant as some are, the great and prevalent characteristic is folly, emptiness of head, want of talent; and one half of the fellows that are educated here are unfit to be clerks in a grocer’s or mercer’s shop.”

And Edward Gibbon, writing in his autobiography of about 1794, remarked: “I spent 14 months at Magdalen College: they proved the 14 months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.”

On top of all that, and despite stiff competition, New College was particularly good at drinking and eating. In the 17th century, historian Anthony Wood was already complaining that the fellows were “much given to drinking and gaming and much brutish pleasure”. He added: “They degenerate in learning.”

Yet Oxford University people were learned people all the same, with high living and high thinking the order of the day. For instance, punishments that Woodforde meted out to drunken undergraduates for, say, rioting, involved translating stupendously difficult Latin texts. Meat and drink were cheap, at least for the leisured classes, and a sort of underlying peacefulness and sense of well-being pervades the entire diary; and that despite wars abroad (notably Napoleon in Europe and the War of Independence in America) pushing up prices and causing taxes to be levied on more or less everything: dogs, windows, servants . . .

At Oxford, the winters were cold all right. In January 1763, Woodforde skated along the River Thames to Abingdon. Other entertainments included playing cricket on Port Meadow and, strangely enough, visiting prisoners in Oxford Castle. On February 28, 1763, he and a few other undergraduates drank a bottle of port with a young highwayman there. And talking of highwaymen he records that on March 23, 1761, the renowned Dumas was hanged at “about a quarter before eight, and after he was cut down he was carried by the Bargemen to St Thomas Church to be buried”. As for that bet about whether Woodforde’s friend, called Williams, could drink four bottles of wine and then copy out five verses from the Bible: he “drank all the Wine, but could not write right for his life. He was immensely drunk about five minutes afterwards.”