I have already argued that in medieval colleges discipline must have varied according to the age of the offender, and I conjecture that adults were never regularly subject to corporal punishment, but that boys were always so, and that the use of the rod was regarded as needing no explicit statutable authority. Its employment was no strange thing, for adult offenders against the law, apprentices, and boys at school, were all flogged at times. And what else, it has been well asked, could the authorities do with a troublesome boy of fourteen? In general a fine was impossible for he had no pocket-money. Most of the colleges were designed for poor scholars, and in such foundations usually the allowance for commons was so small that without risk to health any reduction for more than a day or two was difficult; little leisure was allowed for recreation or exercise, and thus heavy impositions were impossible; and confinement to the precincts of the House was so common that gating was no punishment. A lad of seventeen or eighteen had more liberty and privileges, and in general on reaching that age was as safe from the chance of corporal punishment as was a boy of the same age at a public school fifty years ago. Somewhat similar arguments apply to the private hostels, and the regulations of an unendowed hall at Oxford, to which I have already referred, show that the use of the rod or birch was recognized there. If as I suppose is likely, Clement Paston was at a private hostel, we have a definite instance of the similar use of the rod at Cambridge, for among the Paston letters is one dated 28 January 1458 from Dame Agnes Paston, about her boy, Clement, in which she says "prey Grenefeld to send me feythfully word by wrytyn who (how) Clement Paston hathe do his dever i lerning. And if he hathe nought do well, nor wyll nought amend, prey him that he wyll trewly belassch (_i.e._ flog) him tyll he wyll amend, and so ded the last Maystur and ye best, that ev' he hadd at Cambrege." Clement was born in 1442, so he was then fifteen years old. I asserted above that school-boys in the middle ages were liable to the birch or cane. I suppose this will not be questioned, but by way of parenthesis I add that this liability seems to have been a well-established practice for centuries. It goes back to classical times for in the schools of Rome the less serious offences were punished by the cane applied to the hand, and graver faults by the birch applied to the back; and there is a curious fresco at Herculaneum of the application of the latter to a boy, horsed by one schoolfellow and with his feet held by another. The royal whipping boys in the courts of Western Europe remind us that, at least vicariously, princes were subject to this discipline as well as commoners.