who has just healed him, and the confessor who has just heard his confession, for they also must be entertained "pingui refectione." But this confessor can only define the penance, he cannot give absolution, a right which belongs to the masters. Joannes is then taken to his master for the Deposition proper. Dr Rashdall describes the scene, from a rare sixteenth-century tract, which contains an illustration of a Deposition, and a defence of it by Luther, who justified his taking part in one of these ceremonies by giving it a moral and symbolical meaning. The bajan lies upon a table, undergoing the planing of his tusks, "while a saw lies upon the ground, suggestive of the actual de-horning of the beast. The work itself and later apologies for the institution mention among the instruments of torture a comb and scissors for cutting the victim's hair, an _auriscalpium_ for his ears, a knife for cutting his nails; while the ceremony further appears to include the adornment of the youth's chin with a beard by means of burned cork or other pigment, and the administration, (p. 120) internal or external, of salt and wine." In the English universities we have no trace of the "jocund advent" during the medieval period, but it is impossible to doubt that this kind of horseplay existed at Oxford and Cambridge. The statutes of New College refer to "that most vile and horrid sport of shaving beards"; it was "wont to be practised on the night preceding the Inception of a Master of Arts," but the freshmen may have been the victims, as they were in similar ceremonies at the Feast of Fools in France. Antony a Wood, writing of his own undergraduate days in the middle of the seventeenth century, tells that charcoal fires were made in the Hall at Merton on Holy Days, from All Saints' Eve to Candlemas, and that "at all these fires every night, which began to be made a little after five of the clock, the senior undergraduates would bring into the hall the juniors or freshmen between that time and six of the clock, there make them sit downe on a forme in the middle of the hall, joyning to the declaiming desk; which done, every one in order was to speake some pretty apothegme, or make a jest or bull, or speake some eloquent nonsense, to make the company laugh. But if any of the freshmen came off dull, or not cleverly, some of the forward or pragmatised seniors would "tuck" them, that is, set the nail of their thumb to their chin, just (p. 121) under the lower lipp, and by the help of their other fingers under the chin, they would give him a mark, which sometimes would produce blood." On Shrove Tuesday, 1648, Merton freshmen entertained the other undergraduates to a brass pot "full of cawdel." Wood, who was a freshman, describes how