To cane on the hand or the seat?

Here’s the question for today: which is better, to cane on the hand or on the rear end? Modern thinking – if ‘modern’ is the word I’m looking for – has it that it’s too dangerous to cane across the palm of the hand. There is a real danger of causing severe damage to the fingers if the lash is a bit off target. Or, of course if the ‘boy’ being punished flinches and moves the hand. This might put the schoolmaster in some danger.


No, it is much safer all round to whack the cane across the seat of the trousers, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Back in the nineteen-fifties Gerva D’Olbert in his book Chastisement Across The Ages (The Fortune Press, 1956) had a lot to say on the matter.

Often there are gradations of punishment, based on the anatomical region to which the correction is applied. But these gradations do not always coincide. Different schools employ differing scales; moreover, opinion varies as to the relative heinousness of the different offences for which punishment is due. A further type of variation is introduced by the relative severity of the diverse instruments of chastisement. Thus the question of grades of punishment is by no means so simple as it might at first sight appear.

Sometimes we find the principal variation to consist in the part of the person on which the correction is meted out. In this case, slighter offences are almost always corrected on the hand or hands, and more serious sins on the posteriors. A further refinement is sometimes introduced, in which the most heinous crimes of all are punished on the bared posteriors: thus a threefold gradation is presented. Why the hand should be considered a less painful place of correction it is so difficult to see; probably three reasons militate towards this decision: first, the greater disgrace and degradation in posterior-chastisement; secondly, the lesser sensibility of the skin of the hand; and thirdly, the paradoxical fact that, the hand being a more obvious, graceful, and useful limb, the executioner would probably restrain himself somewhat when punishing, while he would know few such qualms in inflicting correction on the buttocks.

Be this as it may, the immediate results of hand-caning or hand-strapping (for hand-birching has hardly as yet been introduced) can be especially disastrous particularly when the hand is so blistered or cramped that it can hardly hold a pen to write the school-lessons. If both hands are chastised – as would seem usually to be the case – then the situation is worse still. However, the hands recover their powers fairly swiftly.

This opinion, however, is challenged by certain authorities. An investigation of conditions in a certain religious school showed that most of the pupils regarded posterior-punishment as more immediately painful, but hand correction as more lasting in its effects. This was probably due in part to the greater number of strokes inflicted on the hands, the maximum (which was often applied) being twelve on each hand. This method saddened the flesh, so as to produce a delayed recovery. Be it noted also that, in this same establishment, posterior-chastisement was reserved for the boys of “preparatory school age,” that is up to about thirteen while hand-correction, with a greater number of strokes, was used on the older pupils. The instrument of expiation, a “pandy-bat” or thick strap with holes, was employed in all cases, though with variations in size to suit the size of the culprit’s person. A further refinement was to be seen, in which – as in many cases – the very worst offences (committed apparently by few pupils) were punished by posterior correction with a still greater number of strokes, in the case of all pupils alike. In this school, all punishment was administered on

the bared person, which may have added to the desired sense of degradation, and which may account also for the disuse of posterior correction for those above the age of thirteen, expect, as we have noted, in the case of severest moral sins.

In most educational establishments, however, correction on the posteriors is not given on the naked skin. Since clothed correction, other things being equal, is clearly the less painful of the two, it is perhaps strange that hand-correction, which was always naked, was considered the lesser chastisement. Probably the main reason – as we have suggested – was the reluctance of masters to chastise the hands with the same force as the hinder parts. Instances have been known, none the less, in which an enraged usher has inflicted a correction of but one or two stripes on the hand, which drew blood instantaneously. Such extreme actions would most likely have been condemned by the authorities themselves, especially as the punishment was clearly inflicted in anger. The same does not apply to the institution of severe posterior-chastisement for exceptional moral offences; here there is no limit to the physical consequences of the expiation.

Picture credit: The Gem

 For more extracts from Chastisement Across The Ages, click here

Traditional School Discipline

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