Illustrious personages, among others William, Duke of Aquitaine: Raymond, Count of Toulouse: Foulques, Count of Anjou, etc., submitted to this humiliating penitence. The last named had married the widow of Alain de Bretagne and had had her son, the heir to the estate, drowned in a bath. In reparation for this crime he went to Jerusalem, accompanied by two servants, one of whom led him by a rope which was fastened round his neck like a victim for the gallows, dragging him thus to the Holy Sepulchre, while the other continually flogged him with a bundle of rods.
A rarely consulted source of documentation is the collection of letters of remission. Among other prerogatives, the French kings enjoyed the right of pardon. They exercised this right by divers acts, known under different names: letters of grace, of remission, of abolition, of pardon, repeal of bans, and so on.
Among these letters of remission there are two which have particularly held our attention: one dates from the end of the fourteenth, and the other from the first half of the fifteenth centuries. The first concerns a man named Durand Tontif, a schoolmaster at Brienon. It was this teachers custom at the end of the class, to have his pupils recite, each in his turn, a De profundis and a Paternoster for the dead of the district. One day, one of the boys either wouldn’t or couldn’t recite the psalm and the master, from the height of his chair, struck the child several times on the head with his birch. In trying to escape, the poor boy was struck on his ears and face, and was soon drenched with blood. As he still persisted in not saying the lesson, the master sprang down from his seat, flung the boy on the floor and flogged him unmercifully. The wretched boy had been operated on a few days before for stone in the bladder and was not yet recovered. He struggled to his feet as best he could and dragged himself home to bed. He died a few days later from the blows he had received. The brutal teacher was arrested, but he obtained a letter of grace from the king wherein it was stated that he was ignorant of the boy’s condition, and that he had not flogged him from any feeling of hatred but simply with the object of discipline. Nevertheless he had to give up teaching and compensate the parents. That was in 1398.
The second story shows that in the fourteenth century masters had little more consideration for servants than the worst of savages had for their slaves, and this state of things lasted till the seventeenth century.
A groom’s daughter, aged eight, entered the service of a gentleman, governor of Langres. She was so ill-treated by her mistress that she hated her and only awaited an opportunity to get even. After seven different attempts, (she was now sixteen), she tried to blow the place up, having particularly in view her mistress’s bedroom. Caught in the act, she confessed.
The whip has this undeniable superiority—before its omnipotence both gentle and simple have bowed. That we have already demonstrated. Since Henry IV, there is a long list of kings and princes who have been flogged. No-one thought that strange: it was the custom of the times. It required free spirits such as Montaigne or Rabelais to protest. Most people remembered that they had been through the mill themselves and had come out little the worse: their children must go through the same. There is plenty of evidence in existence, both written and illustrated.
When evoking her memories of childhood, Madame de Maintenon relates that, when she was ten years old, she was brought up by her aunt Mme. de Villette. Little girls were not then punished for slander or lying, or even worse offences—no, the greatest crime in their governess’s eyes was to mess one’s apron or get it splashed with ink. For one thing, one was sure to be whipped, for the governess had to wash and iron the apron. Lie as much as you like, no notice was taken of that—there was nothing to wash and iron!
We must not lose sight of the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a quite different view was held of idle and intractable children than the present one. Our ideas would have seemed ridiculous to our fathers: they wouldn’t have understood them. Not that discipline was always as rigorous as it was, according to Rabelais, in the Montagu College, where the pupils were treated worse than Moorish slaves, condemned murderers, dogs even! Such excesses, however, were not allowed in other schools, and cases are reported where teachers were charged in the courts for having ill-treated their pupils; others were dismissed for punching the boys. Still, although cruelty was generally reproved, no one complained or was shocked at the use of the birch; in case of need, parents would ask the teachers not to spare their children, and these latter accepted the punishment with the resignation born of the knowledge that they were being treated as children always had been treated. They even went so far as to joke about it.
It was exceptional for them to protest in a body against a too severe punishment administered to a boy who had been unruly or had played truant. They generally accepted the punishment—even if they didn’t understand the motive.
Thus, in the little town of Die, only the pupils of the four highest classes were expected to speak Latin; but all are expressly forbidden to speak dialect; as for French, a boy would only be punished for speaking it if he were caught in the act, and after having been previously warned. And what is done at Die is done, more or less, everywhere.