PESUNALISM, the name given to a practice once prevalent in the Protestant univer sities of Germany, which seems to have been essentially the same as the ftur.!ing (q.v.) of the English public schools. The freshmen or students of the first year (called pennais fags) were considered by the elder students (" schorists") as virtually their servants. Whatever property the pennals had they must give up to the schorists. who now employed them in the meanest offices, made laughing-stocks of them, and beat and ill-used them—all which had to be endured without complaint. After a year of this discipline followed the ceremony of " deposition"—a practice older than pennalism itself, and borrowed probably from knightly consecration—in which the penual under went a number of symbolical trials, indicative generally of purgation from impurity and consecration to an intellectual life. Pennalisin is said to have been introduced in the beginning of the 17th c., and to have been mostly confined to the Protestant universities of Germany. But although the full development of the system may have been thus restricted, germs and modifications of it were much earlier and more general, as is maid fest from the prevalence of names of contempt for first year's students (see BEJAN), and from statutes passed by French universities as early as the middle of the 14th c.,
against levying payments for first footing from them. See also FAGGING. The servi tude imposed on the pennals was probably an aping of the usage of chivalry, by which a candidate for knighthood had to serve for a time as page to one already a knight. All attempts to check the evils of pennalism were long unavailing, as the pennals took part with the schorists in resisting all regulations of the authorities, which would have deprived them of the hope of exercising in their turn a like tyranny upon others. Edicts against the practice were issued in Jena and other universities about the beginning of the 17th c., but it was not till the last half of the century that the universities, by uniting in severe measures, were able to check the evil; and traces of it survived for a long time afterwards. In imitation of the students, a kind of pennalism was adopted by other bodies, more particularly by the printers, who retaired the ceremony of "deposition" after it had disappeared from the universities.—Schbttgen, Historie Pennalivesens (Dresd. 1747).