While medieval pedagogy expended a great deal of energy and thought on the proper uses of discipline, most of the statements encountered so far reinforce one key point: despite the doubts at work beneath its zealous regulation, the medieval school had a large amount of faith in beating as a supplement to education. A further measure of this esteem is the frequency and intensity with which withdrawal of the rod is discouraged. Several authors in the period advise against insufficiently applying punishment in the classroom, defending the practice against perceived laxity, often in extremely forceful terms. To drive home the point, they often construct detailed accounts of what will be forfeited by lenience, envisioning a classroom in which the influence of the rod has vanished or dwindled. What makes these anxious descriptions particularly notable is that they give insight into a further dimension of pedagogic discipline: together they cast light on what beating was thought to accomplish, and what it was thought to do for and to students, by attributing particular failures to its absence.

One of the harshest of these warnings comes from Goswin of Mainz, master and chancellor of the cathedral school at Liege in the eleventh century. Writing to his former pupil Walcher after his retirement in c.1065, Goswin foresees nothing but unmitigated disaster if chastisement is withdrawn from teaching. He already sees a steady loss of stringency since his own days as a teacher, bemoaning that the ‘poisonous root of avarice’ has produced ‘malicious, destructive custom and loss of discipline, to such a degree that it does not permit the control of the regular life to use solemn censure or the rod’. Indeed, he observes that the deterioration is so grave that negligence has more supporters than detractors: ‘should one deter the hand from the twisting paths of vice with a rod, the goad of fairness, immediately a great champion, or a multitude of similar defenders, intercedes on behalf of basic lapses in truth, or immature wantonness’. But bad as things are, there is still room for further decline. Should this ‘loss of discipline’ persist, Goswin states, learning itself stands to be lost: by setting aside the ‘goad of fairness’, teachers have not only abandoned students to ‘idleness, sluggishness and their god the belly’ but also replaced solid truths with idle and reckless nonsense.