St Hugh's was founded in 1886 by Elizabeth Wordsworth (great-niece of the famous poet William Wordsworth) to help the growing number of women "who find the charges of the present Halls at Oxford and Cambridge (even the most moderate) beyond their means". Using money left to her by her father, who had been Bishop of Lincoln, she established the college at 25 Norham Road in North Oxford. She named the college after one of her father's 13th-century predecessors, Hugh of Avalon, who was canonised in 1220, and in whose diocese Oxford had been.