When considering medieval attitudes towards school punishment, one of the most telling images emerges towards the end of the period. This is a rhetorical commonplace that ratchets up grammar's punitive elements to a particular extreme, portraying school as a place of hellish torment overseen by a raving, merciless tyrant. An early version of this conceit features in the work of Petrach, who associates the classroom with ‘dust and noise and the howling of grief’ and shows teachers ‘terrifying, torturing, persecuting’ their pupils; it can also be found in the alliterative satire Mum and the Sothsegger (c.1409), where one ‘Grumbald the grammier’ is made to ‘glowen for anger’ when the limits of his learning are exposed. However, the image gains particular force as the Middle Ages gives way to the Renaissance. At this point, Erasmus repeatedly portrays the grammar school as a ‘torture-chamber’ (carnificina) or ‘flour mill’ (pistrinum), in which teachers harass ‘the frightened crowd with menacing face and terrorising voice’ and ‘tear up the wretched boys with rods, birch, lashes, raging in all directions as they please’, creating an environment in which ‘you hear nothing but the cracking of rods, the whistling of birches, the wailing and sobbing, the savage threats’. A little later Montaigne makes almost identical pronouncements, also seeing the school as ‘a verie prison of captivated youth’: as Florio's translation puts it, ‘you heare nothing but whipping and brawling, both of children tormented, and masters besotted with anger … with a stearne-frowning countenance, and with hands full of rods’. In drama and visual art these images quickly develop in a stock topos. They reach notably grotesque proportions in an interlude of 1560 by the Cambridge student Thomas Ingelend, whose ‘tormenter … of infantes’ is nothing short of murderous, laying ‘an honest mannes sonne … dead and colde’ through ‘many strypes’. Likewise Hans and Ambrosius Holbein, in their marginal illuminations for Myconius's copy of the Praise of Folly, include a sketch of a scowling teacher hacking at a shrieking child, and set both figures beneath the unequivocal caption ‘the persecutions of schoolmasters’ (‘tyrannis ludimagistrorum’) (Figure 3).