tted to
the privileges of the University. Camillus returns with ointment, (p. 119)
and they proceed to some horseplay which Joannes resists (Compesce
eius impetus et ut equum intractatum ipsum illum constringe). Tusks
and teeth having been removed, the victim is supposed to be dying, and
is made to confess to Bartoldus a list of crimes. His penance is to
entertain his masters "largissima coena," not forgetting the doctor
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