ABSTRACT
In “the good old times” flogging was permitted by the statutes of many colleges, and was a favourite recreation of the deans, tutors, and censors of the day. Dr. Potter, of Trinity College, flogged a collegian, though arrived at man’s state and wearing a sword by his side, and Dr. Bathurst, president of that College, used to surprise the undergraduates, if walking in the grove at unseasonable hours, with a whip in his hand. Dr. Johnson, in his “Memoir of Milton,” says: “I am ashamed to relate, what I fear is true, that Milton was one of the last students in either University that suffered the public indignity of corporal correction.” Aubrey mentions the story of Milton being whipped by Dr. Chappell at Cambridge, and afterwards being transferred to the tuition of one Dr. Tovell. But there is a tradition that Dr. Johnson himself was scourged over the buttery hatch at Oxford. There is, however, no authoritative statement on the matter, and it must remain a moot point whether Milton or Johnson was the last student on whom the Rod was inflicted at the Universities. In the Dublin College Journal, the fact of such and such a pupil having been trained in that seminary is recorded in the words, educatus erat sub ferula—that is, “was educated under the Rod,” from which it may be inferred that the teaching was fostered by the birch.
