[1.] Compare “Better vnfedde then vntaughte” in Seager’s Schoole of Vertue, above, p. 236, l. 725.
[2.] thee
[3.] Cp. Lydgate’s Tricks at School, Forewords, p. xliv.
[4.] ? meaning. Skathie, a fence. Jamieson. Skaith, hurt, harm. Halliwell.
[5.] A mychare seems to denote properly a sneaking thief. Way. Prompt., p. 336. Mychare, a covetous, sordid fellow. Jamieson. Fr. pleure-pain: m. A niggardlie wretch; a puling micher or miser. Cotgrave.
OF ABOUT 1500 A.D.
(From the Balliol MS. 354, ffl ij C xxx.)
[As old Symon talks of the rod (p. 383-4, ll. 62, 90), as Caxton in his Book of Curtesye promises his ‘lytyl John’ a breechless feast, or as the Oriel MS. reads it, a ‘byrchely’ one,[1] & as the Forewords have shown that young people did get floggings in olden time, it may be as well to give here the sketch of a boy flea-bitten, no doubt, with little bobs of hazel twigs, that Richard Hill has preserved for us. Boys of the present generation happily don’t know the sensation of unwelcome warmth that a sound flogging produced, and how after it one had to sit on the bottom of one’s spine on the edge of the hard form, in the position recommended at College for getting well forward in rowing. But they may rest assured that if their lot had fallen on a birching school, they’d have heartily joined the school-boy of 1500 in wishing his and their masters at the devil, even though they as truant boys had been ‘milking ducks, as their mothers bade them.’]