[Sidenote: Printing-presses and private libraries.] At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were thirty-four counties without a printer. The only press in England north of the Trent was at York. As to private libraries, there were none deserving the name. "An esquire passed for a great scholar if 'Hudibras,' 'Baker's Chronicle,' 'Tarleton's Jests,' and the 'Seven Champions of Christendom' lay in his hall-window." It might be expected that the women were ignorant enough when very few men knew how to write correctly or even intelligibly, and it had become unnecessary for clergymen to read the Scriptures in the original tongues. [Sidenote: Social discipline; its barbarity.] Social discipline was very far from being of that kind which we call moral. The master whipped his apprentice, the pedagogue his scholar, the husband his wife. Public punishments partook of the general brutality. It was a day for the rabble when a culprit was set in the pillory to be pelted with brickbats, rotten eggs, and dead cats; when women were fastened by the legs in the stocks at the market-place, or a pilferer flogged through the town at the cart-tail, a clamour not unfrequently arising unless the lash were laid on hard enough "to make him howl." In punishments of higher offenders these whippings were perfectly horrible; thus Titus Oates, after standing twice in the pillory, was whipped, and, after an interval of two days, whipped again. A virtuoso in these matters gives us the incredible information that he counted as many as seventeen hundred stripes administered. So far from the community being shocked at such an exhibition, they appeared to agree in the sentiment that, "since his face could not be made to blush, it was well enough to try what could be done with his back." Such a hardening of heart was in no little degree promoted by the atrocious punishments of state offenders; thus, after the decapitation of Montrose and Argyle, their heads decorated the top of the Tolbooth; and gentlemen, after the rising of Monmouth, were admonished to be careful of their ways, by hanging in chains to their park gate the corpse of a rebel to rot in the air.