The little lads who thronged the streets of Cambridge in the xiii century were under little or no discipline. They ran up debts with the Jews, who had established themselves there in the opening years of the previous century, fought the townsmen, and had few duties to society beyond making their own beds, a work certainly performed by university scholars in the xiii and xiv centuries and enjoined on the boys of the famous schools founded in the xvth. It was this custom of doing your own work, at least until you became an advanced student when the little boys did it for you, which was the origin of “fagging” in our two most ancient schools connected respectively with our two universities--Eton and Winchester.[344] Even this amount of work, however, was not expected of fellow-commoners in the xvi century, who frequently got out of hand, though few of them have left us so delightful a reminder of their misdeeds as the young Earl of Rutland has done in a letter to his mother who had complained of his behaviour: “I do aseure your Ladyship that the cariage of myselfe both towardes God and my booke, my comeliness in diet and gesture, shall be such as your Ladyship shall hear and like well of.” With the great era of college building in the succeeding century, the founders’ statutes make their appearance; and in days when monks were birched and nuns were slapped the college stocks held in durance vile the fellow who had presumed to bathe in any stream or pool of Cambridgeshire, while the college hall resounded to the strokes of the birch which visited the scholar for the same offence. College discipline was supplemented by university discipline, and the academic authorities shared legal powers with the town authorities until recently. The jurisdiction of the university extended not only to matters affecting its members, but to a _conusance_ in actions which affected the townsmen.[345] The last attempt to exercise the right of imprisoning undesirable characters in the “Spinning House” was made by the vice-chancellor in 1893; but the incarceration of a young woman on this occasion caused so much indignation in the town that it led to the final disallowance of all the vice-chancellor’s powers, in this direction, which were waived by the university in 1894. [Sidenote: Present discipline--proctors, fines, “hall,” “chapels.”]