The discipline to which pages were subjected in the houses of knights and noblemen, does not appear to have been at all of a severe character. Beyond listening to precept from the chaplain, heeding the behests of their master, and performing pleasant duties about their mistress, they seem to have been left pretty much to themselves, and to have had, altogether, a pleasant time of it. The poor scholars had by far a harder life than your “Sir page.” And this stern discipline held over the pale student continued down to a very recent, that is, a comparatively recent period. In Neville’s play of “The Poor Scholar,” written in 1662, but never acted, the character of student-life at college is well illustrated. The scene lies at the university, where Eugenes, jun., albeit he is called “the poor scholar,” is nephew of Eugenes, sen., who is president of a college. Nephew and uncle are at feud, and the man in authority imprisons his young kinsman, who contrives to escape from durance vile, and to marry a maiden called Morphe. The fun of the marriage is, that the young couple disguise themselves as country lad and lass, and the reverend Eugenes, sen., unconsciously couples a pair whom he would fain have kept apart. There are two other university marriages as waggishly contrived; and when the ceremonies are concluded, one of the newly-married students, bold as any page, impudently remarks to the duped president, “Our names are out of the butteries, and our persons out of your dominions.” The phrase shows that, in the olden time, an “ingenuus puer” at Oxford, if he were desirous of escaping censure, had only to take his name off the books. But there were worse penalties than mere censure. The author of “The Poor Scholar” makes frequent allusion to the whipping of undergraduates, stretched on a barrel, in the buttery. There was long an accredited tradition that Milton had been thus degraded. In Neville’s play, one of the young Benedicks, prematurely married, remarks, “Had I been once in the butteries, they’d have their rods about me.” To this remark Eugenes, jun., adds another in reference to his uncle the president, “He would have made thee ride on a barrel, and made you show your fat cheeks.” But it is clear that even this terrible penalty could be avoided by young gentlemen, if they had their wits about them; for the fearless Aphobos makes boast, “My name is cut out of the college butteries, and I have now no title to the mounting a barrel.”