While punishment provoked a broad range of responses, one voice notably absent from its debates is that which concerns the present chapter – the voice of children themselves. Most of the sources encountered so far contain little trace of the reactions of boys or girls to discipline, whether expressed directly or filtered through the interpretations of instructors; even their expected responses to flogging produce few direct references, either in terms of one-off penalties or the larger regimen of grammar training. Even though division and ambivalence seem to be built into the rod, as it draws together numerous competing claims, theories and rationales, and attracts equal levels of conviction and uncertainty from commentators, its disputes have little obvious room for children and their reflections. Despite being the target of pedagogy's generalisations, children seem at best a fugitive and remote presence in the discourse.

In some respects, of course, this comparative silence is only to be expected. In the first place, pedagogy is predisposed to treat pupils as objects rather than agents, speaking about rather than to them. After all, its fundamental purpose is to supply students with a formalised voice, rather than provide a register for their own words, either likely or actual; in fact, discussion of birching makes this aim particularly explicit, as it often regards punishment as a means of suppressing untutored speech, as previous chapters have shown. But more gravely still, the structures of literacy themselves can often work against recording the experience of punishment. This problem can be seen most plainly in the series of texts that express gratitude over beating: typical in this respect is Alcuin's letter to the community at York, which thanks the monks for raising him with a mixture of ‘maternal affection’ and ‘fatherly chastisements’, or Walther of Speyer's tribute to ‘my elder of incomparable life’ Baldrice, who did ‘not withdraw the finger of correction’ even when giving the ‘assistance of an affectionate midwife’, or Everaclus's message to Ratherius of Verona, which praises the teacher's coercion and counsel in a single breath, stating that ‘under your thumb, learned and skilful, I do not blush to flinch my hand from the rod’.