The only thing that surprises me is what you say about the birch. I have read accounts of birchings at Eton in relatively modern times, and the victims saying that although the ritual was humiliating, it didn’t actually hurt much more than the cane; there is even an account of someone who was birched by a court in the isle of a man saying that he’d had worse at school. My theory is that the English school birch was really a spanking weapon: one whack of the birch didn’t hurt very much, but the idea was that the victim got a large number of light strokes which left him very sore indeed.
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