A rude song about a duck, a Latin-named celebration - it must be an Oxford college, writes CHRIS KOENIG

All Souls Day, the 1,000-year-old festival to commemorate the dead, falls on Thursday. By coincidence the fellows of All Souls College will sing their extraordinary Mallard song during the college's Gaudy reunion celebrations later in the same month.

The particular dead after which the Oxford college is named were those who fell in the opening battles of the Hundred Years War, a war which started in 1338 with Edward lll of England trying to enforce his claim to the French throne, and ended in 1453 with England losing all her continental territory except Calais (not finally lost until 1558).

The Mallard song is sung these days not only at the beginning of each new century but also every year at the Gaudy in November and at the Bursar's Dinner in March. It commemorates the fable that when the foundations for the college, founded in 1438 by Henry Vl and Archbishop Henry Chichele, were being dug an enormous mallard duck flew out of a drain where it had been trapped for years.

First mention of the song seems to date from no earlier than 1658 when it was apparently sung in a loud and rude manner, disturbing the Puritan peace of Cromwell's interegnum.

The song is mentioned by Oxford historians Anthony Wood and Thomas Baskerville. Both claim it was sung at processions held annually during the 17th century. However, the first claims it was sung as an initiation rite for new Fellows on January 14, the start of Hillary term, and the second that it was sung at a candle-lit procession every All Souls Day.

Whatever the truth, the procession lapsed into disuse in the bad old corrupt days of 18th-century Oxford, though a group of Fellows calling themselves the Mallardians formed a rowdy club. By all accounts, they got more than usually drunk every January 14, a date they dubbed Mallard Night.

The procession was revived in 1801, repeated in 1901 and again in 2001, with someone named Lord Mallard for the night being carried about the quad shoulder high by Fellows roaring out the song.

In recent years, Lord Mallard has been required to make up a verse in place of an original deemed indecent for mentioning, among other things, a "tool of generation".

Nowadays, when the university is striving ever harder to attract more undergraduates from state schools and being asked to examine its finances and business methods, some might look askance at such tales as the Mallard. Along with the beautiful buildings, which, according to recent research by one college, actually put some state school pupils off applying, such quaint goings-on might be seen as clubby and somehow exclusive.

But it is only in comparatively recent times that Oxford in any way became a stronghold of the privileged.

Almost to a man or woman, the college founders tried to attract people on merit, often describing them as "poor scholars". The fact that they offered beautiful buildings in which to study was seen as a come-on.

The rot set in during the 18th century. Take All Souls again. Corruption of all sorts could be found. Indeed, the system of granting fellowships by examination dates only from the Royal Commission of 1877.

But All Souls is perhaps a rule unto itself. Why, for example, does it benefit from charity status as an educational establishment when it has no students?

I well remember watching a visiting Fellow of All Souls, who was from Padua, being told the Mallard story. He said: "Padua is a much older university than Oxford but we don't do things like that."

All the same, I still hope that in the year 2101 the Fellows march about and sing that song.