Membership of a college was a privilege confined, in general, to scholars specially nominated, and no doubt the standards of work and discipline there were higher than in the private hostels. Naturally we know less of life in these hostels, but it is likely that disciplinary rules were originally made by or with the approval of the elder residents, and that the normal discipline in them was of the same general character as that exercised in colleges, though, as the members paid for themselves, money fines were possible and usual penalties, especially in the case of the older members. There must have been more variety in the discipline of hostels than of colleges, and we may safely say that some hostels were well conducted, others not so. It is possible that finally the University claimed the right to examine and supervise the internal regulations of the hostels. A set of rules, thus enforced on an unendowed hall at Oxford in the fifteenth century, has been discovered and printed by Rashdall: they do not differ much from those usual at a college, except that some of the penalties specified are pecuniary, and that the principal was given explicit permission, if he wished, to flog a student, even though the lad's own master (_i.e._ the master to whom he had been apprenticed) had certified that he had already corrected him or was willing to do so. Was corporal punishment commonly used in medieval times? Until recently it was accepted without argument that this was the case; and certainly in the fifteenth century and later when we get detailed information on the subject, the younger students were subject to it. Rashdall, however, has argued that the absence of its mention in earlier times implies that the birch was unknown in the ordinary university regulations till towards the end of the sixteenth century or later, though he admits in various places that glomerels were liable to it: his authority is accepted by Rait. It is true that in the statutes given in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, birching is not mentioned explicitly, but, since the punishments for petty offences are rarely specified in detail, this proves nothing. In the fifteenth century corporal punishment is mentioned as a recognized penalty. For instance, the statutes given by Henry VI to King's College, Cambridge, prescribed that scholars and young fellows might be punished by stripes, and a year or two later, the statutes of Magdalen College, Oxford, directed that the demies should be subject to flogging. In later regulations of various colleges, to some of which I refer below, whipping is mentioned as a recognized punishment, but often as one to which only the younger students were liable.