line among schools of this kind.

"The schoolmaster shall take in school at five o'clock in the morning,
in summer, and at six in the winter,[1] give lessons to each one
according to his rank, age and capacity, and explain them well and
mannerly, hearing them at the proper time, and pointing out to the boys
their mistakes and failures, so that by this means they may acquire
skill and honor. After lunch, he shall come to school at eleven
o'clock, except on festival days, and then at twelve, to give lessons
and instruction till four, if that be the usual hour of leaving off
work for the day. In the evenings he shall teach them Latin and
penmanship faithfully and modestly, and keep them as busy as possible,
so that they may get a good and gentle training and be preserved from
idle talk, quarrels, and brawls. He shall charge them to talk little
and use few words, and when in and out of school to speak with each
other in Latin; but with their parents and the people at home they may
talk German. He shall teach them the cantum in verse, antiphonies
(alternate chanting in choirs), intonations (singing along with the
priest), hymns and requiems in various ways, suited to the time and
occasion. He shall earnestly exhort them to behave with decorum in the
church, the choir, the church-yard and the belfry, to abstain from
disputing, shouting, huzzaing and bell-ringing, either in, upon or
around the church, and also not to touch the bells, at peril of being
stripped and flogged soundly from top to toe. When school is out they
shall go together before the charnel-house and each one shall repeat
with devotion a pater noster, an ave maria or the psalm _de profundis_
and then return home quietly. Striking each other with satchels,
pinching, spitting, fighting and stone-throwing, shall be punished by
the rod. The schoolmaster shall beat them with rods, and not with his
fist or staff, and particularly not on the head, lest, on account of
their youth, he might thereby do great damage to the organ of memory."

Thus the rod was formerly the chief means of school-discipline. And
even far into the era of the Reformation a yearly holiday was observed
under the name of "The Procession of the Rods," in which all the pupils
of the schools went out in the summer to the woods, and came back
heavily laden with birch-twigs, cracking jokes by the way and singing:

Ye fathers and ye mothers good,
See us with the birchen wood
Loaded,