the detriment of the inhabitants of the lower rooms, and
failure to attend the regular "scrutinies" or the stated general
meetings for College business. At these scrutinies, any serious
charges against members of the Society were considered, and it is in
keeping with some of the judicial ideas of the time that some statutes
forbid the accused person to have a copy of the indictment against
him. For contumacy, for grave moral offences, for crimes of violence,
and for heresy, the penalty was expulsion. Less serious offences were
punished by subtraction of "commons," _i.e._ deprivation of allowances
for a day or a week (or longer), or by pecuniary fines. When College
founders provided clothes as well as board and lodging for their
scholars, the forfeiture of a robe took its place among the penalties
with which offenders were threatened. The "poor boys" who sang in
Chapel and waited on the Fellows were whipped like boys elsewhere, who
were being taught grammar, but the birch was unknown as a punishment
for undergraduates till late in the middle ages. The introduction (p. 066)
of corporal punishment into college life in England may be traced by a
comparison of William of Wykeham's statutes with those of Henry VI.
The King's College statute "De correctionibus faciendis circa delicta
leviora" is largely a transcript of a New College statute, with the
same title, and both contemplate subtraction of commons as the regular
penalty. But the King's College statute contains an additional clause,
to the effect that scholars and younger Fellows may be punished with
stripes. In the statutes of Magdalen, dated some seventeen years
later, William of Waynflete returned to the New College form of the
statute, but he provided that his demys (_i.e._ scholars who received
half the commons of a Fellow) should be subject to the penalty of
whipping in the Grammar School. The statutes of Christ's College
prescribe a fine of a farthing for unpunctuality on the part of the
scholars, studying in the Faculty of Arts, and heavier fines for
absence, and it is added that if the offender be not an adult, a
whipping is to be substituted for the pecuniary penalty. At Brasenose,
where the Fellows were all of the standing of at least a Bachelor of
Arts, the undergraduate scholars were subjected to an unusually strict
discipline, and offenders were to be punished either by fines or by
the rod, the Principal deciding the appropriate punishment in each
case. Fo