xford (1624) whipping is the penalty contemplated
for undergraduates under eighteen. But when we come to the statutes
which were drawn up in 1698 with a view to the foundation of Worcester
College, not only is there no mention of the birch, but even pecuniary
penalties are deprecated for minor offences, for which impositions (p. 069)
and gating are suggested.

Minor penalties were enforced by the Head of a college, the Vice-Head,
the Deans, and, in sixteenth-century colleges, by the tutors. By later
college statutes, these officers received for their personal use a
portion of the fines they inflicted, and appeals were sometimes
permitted from an officer to the Head, and even to the Chancellor or
Vice-Chancellor of the University. The oath taken by scholars
frequently bound them to reveal to the authorities, any breach of the
statutes, and there are indications that members of the College were
encouraged to report each other's misdeeds. Thus the Master of
Christ's is to fine anyone whom he hears speaking one complete
sentence in English, or anyone whom he may know to have been guilty of
this offence, except in sleeping-rooms or at times when permission had
been given.

Oxford and Cambridge Colleges were, as we have seen, endowed homes for
the education of secular clerks. All of them, on entrance, had to have
the tonsure, and provision was often made for the cutting of their
hair and beard. At Christ's College, there was a regular College
barber "qui ... caput et barbam radet ac tondebit hebdomadis singulis."
They wore ordinary clerical dress, and undue expenditure on clothes
and ornaments was strictly prohibited, _e.g._ the Fellows of (p. 070)
Peterhouse were forbidden to wear rings on their fingers "ad inanem
gloriam et jactantiam." The early founders did not insist upon Holy
Orders for the Heads or Fellows of their colleges, though many of them
would naturally proceed to the priesthood, but in later college
statutes all the Fellows were ultimately to proceed, at stated times,
to Holy Orders and to the priesthood, though dispensations for delay
might be granted, and students of Medicine were sometimes excused from
the priesthood. When they became priests they were, like other
priests, to celebrate mass regularly in the Chapel, but were not to
receive payment for celebrations outside the College. As mere tonsured
undergraduates, they were not, at first, subject to regulations for
daily attendance at divine servic