The manner of oldtime children differed as much from the carriage of children to-day as the severe and arbitrary modes of discipline of colonial days differed from the persuasive explanations, the moral inculcations and exhortations by which modern youth are influenced to obedience. Parents, teachers, and ministers chanted in solemn and unceasing chorus, "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child," and they believed the only cure for that foolishness was in stern repression and sharp correction--above all in the rod. They found abundant support for this belief in the Bible, their constant guide. John Robinson, the Pilgrim preacher, said in his essay on _Children and Their Education_:-- "Surely there is in all children (though not alike) a stubbernes and stoutnes of minde arising from naturall pride which must in the first place be broken and beaten down that so the foundation of their education being layd in humilitie and tractablenes other virtues may in their time be built thereon. It is commendable in a horse that he be stout and stomackfull being never left to his own government, but always to have his rider on his back and his bit in his mouth, but who would have his child like his horse in his brutishnes?" The chief field of the "breaking and beating down" process was in school. English schoolmasters were proverbial for their severity, and from earliest days; though monks with their classes are never depicted with the rod. We find Agnes Paston, in 1457, writing to London for word to be delivered to the schoolmaster of her son Clement, who was then sixteen years old:-- "If he hath nought do well, nor wyll nought amend, pray hym that he wyll trewly belassch hym, tyll he wyll amend; and so did the last master, and the best that ever he had, at Cambridge. And say I wyll give hym X marks for hys labor, for I had lever he were beryed than lost for defaute." [Illustration: Katherine Ten Broeck, Three Years Old, 1719] She herself had "borne on hand" on her marriageable daughter; beating her every week, sometime twice a day, "and her head broken in two or three places." This seems to have been the usual custom of the British matron in high life. Lady Jane Grey, when she was fifteen years old, never came into the presence of her father and mother but she was "sharply taunted, cruelly threatened, yea, punished sometimes with pinches, nips, bobs, and other way." Elizabeth, Lady Falkland, as long as her mother lived, always spoke to that rigid lady while kneeling before her, "sometimes for more than an hour together, though she was but an ill kneeler, and worse riser." Poor Elizabeth! she was an only child, "an inheritrice"; but she could truthfully aver she never was spoiled. An early allusion to school discipline is in the _Boy Bishop's Sermon_ from the press of Wynkyn de Worde, who died in 1535. It runs thus:--