How to Treat College Freshmen in 1495

(Image: University of Wisconsin-Platte)

Ask the Past is a delightful blog that conveys medieval advice to modern readers. For example, would you like to haze college freshmen? According to a Leipzig University statute promulgated in 1495, it is forbidden:

Statute Forbidding Any One to Annoy or Unduly Injure the Freshmen. Each and every one attached to this university is forbidden to offend with insult, torment, harass, drench with water or urine, throw on or defile with dust or any filth, mock by whistling, cry at them with a terrifying voice, or dare to molest in any way whatsoever physically or severely, any, who are called freshmen, in the market, streets, courts, colleges and living houses, or any place whatsoever, and particularly in the present college, when they have entered in order to matriculate or are leaving after matriculation.

Behave yourselves.

Link -via Marginal Revolution


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I bet those rules did as much good then as they did 400 years later.

Hazing only started to fade away after World War II, when so many veterans went to school on the G.I. Bill. After Normandy, those guys weren't taking any sh#t from upperclassmen who were younger than them.
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