▸Official Name: Ashworth University of the Severn Valley
▸Nickname: The Saddle, The Duchy (referencing its historical ties to local aristocratic landholdings)
▸Motto: Virtus in sella – Virtue in the saddle.
▸Founded: 1857
▸Founder: Lord Percival Ashworth, a railway magnate and obsessive horseman who made his fortune during the expansion of the Great Western Railway and poured his wealth into establishing an institution that would combine rigorous business training with what he called "the civilising influence of equestrian discipline." He died three years after the university opened, thrown from a horse on the very grounds he had donated.
▸Colors and Insignia: Navy blue and gold, with the gold representing the wheat fields of the Severn Valley and the navy referencing the river itself.
▸Symbol: A rearing horse with a broken halter, representing freedom tempered by training – one of Ashworth's more debated symbols, as some alumni have argued it suggests an animal that has escaped its handler.
▸Coat of Arms: Quartered shield. Upper left, a gold horse rampant on a navy field. Upper right, three gold wheatsheaves bound together. Lower left, an open book with a quill laid across it. Lower right, a set of scales balanced. Above the shield, a helm, beneath, a ribbon bearing the motto.
▸University Newspaper: The Post and Rail, a pun on both fencing and the newspaper trade, published weekly with a print run that has declined steadily since the turn of the century but persists out of tradition and a small subscription base among older alumni. Recently started an online version on the Ashworth website.
▸Reputation: Ashworth is considered a solid second-tier institution by national rankings, strong but not elite, with the kind of reputation that makes employers in certain industries – insurance, equine law, heritage management, agricultural finance – actively recruit from its graduates. It is not Oxbridge, and it does not pretend to be. It produces competent, well-mannered professionals who understand the value of a firm handshake and a clean pair of boots.
▸Known For: Its polo programme, which competes at the national university level and has produced several professional and dozens of semi-professional players over the decades. Its equine sciences department, which runs one of the few university-affiliated horse rehabilitation programmes in the country. Its business school, which offers a specialised track in agricultural and rural enterprise that draws students from farming families across the southwest. Its law programme, which has a niche reputation in equine and property law. And its eccentric naming traditions, which will be detailed below.
▸Stereotypes: Ashworth students are rumoured to smell faintly of hay and stable liniment, to be either wealthy horse girls with more money than sense or scholarship students with more competence than social grace, and to possess an almost pathological inability to discuss anything that does not involve a riding route or a balance sheet. The university is sometimes mockingly referred to as "the nursery for failed aristocrats" by rival institutions, and its students are joked to have entered university already knowing exactly which fork to use for oysters but not which bus to take to the nearest city.