“From Paul’s I went to Eton, sent To learn straightways the Latin phrase; Where fifty-three stripes given to me At once I had,
For fault but small, or none at all, It came to pass thus beat I was. See, Udall, see the mercy of thee To me, poor lad!”
Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, singles the schoolmasters out as “a race of men the most miserable, who grow old in penury and filth in their schools—_schools_ did I say? _prisons! dungeons!_ I should have said—among their boys, deafened with din, poisoned by a fetid atmosphere; but thanks to their folly perfectly self-satisfied so long as they can bawl and shout to their terrified boys, and box and beat and flog them, and so indulge in all kinds of ways their cruel disposition.” One such master he tells of who to crush boys’ unruly spirits, and to subdue the wantonness of their age, never took a meal with his flock without making the comedy end in a tragedy. “So at the end of the meal one or another boy was dragged out to be flogged.” Boase’s Oxford, 76-77.
[44] The Commonweal (ed. E. Lamond), 21-23, 30.
[45] Manners and Meals, xxiv. Cf. ibid. xxvi. xlv.
[46] See Crossthwaite. Rep. Royal Com. on Markets, 25.
[47] “Feria” or Saint’s day. The place originally held by the fair is illustrated by the ancient custom in Leicester, that when merchants went to the great fairs, when the “fairs were up no plea was holden no more of them that were at home, than of them that were at the fairs;” this was altered by Crouchback’s charter of 1277, so that those who stayed at home might be tried in case of complaint. Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 423-4.
[48] The Fair of Wycombe was held on the Day of S. Thomas the Martyr from time out of mind. It had begun to decline by 1527, and the Mayor and Bailiffs bitterly complained that now scarcely any one came to keep up the fair and that the shopkeepers kept their shops and stalls at home in the town as usual. A strict order was made by the Council in 1527 that “no manner of man nor woman” should keep open shop in the town on that day or show their goods in the street, but should “resort unto the Fair there as it is wont to be kept.” Parker’s Hist. of Wycombe, 29.
[49] Rep. Royal Com. on Markets, 1, 7, 9.
[51] The grants of fairs and markets in the thirteenth century were about 3,300; in the fourteenth century about 1,560; in the fifteenth century to 1482 about 100; Report on Markets, 108-131.