speaks in later years of the vexations and torments with declining
and conjugating and other tasks which school children in his youth
had to undergo. The severity he there met with from his teacher was
a very different thing from the strictness of his parents.
Schoolmasters, he says, in those days were tyrants and executioners,
the schools were prisons and hells, and in spite of blows,
trembling, fear, and misery, nothing was ever taught. He had been
whipped, he tells us, fifteen times one morning, without any fault
of his own, having been called on to repeat what he had never been
taught.

At this school he remained till he was fourteen, when his father
resolved to send him to a better and higher-class place of
education. He chose for that purpose Magdeburg; but what particular
school he attended is not known. His friend Mathesius tells us that
the town-school there was 'far renowned above many others.' Luther
himself says that he went to school with the Null-brethren. These
Null-brethren or Noll-brethren, as they were called, were a
brotherhood of pious clergymen and laymen, who had combined
together, but without taking any vows, to promote among themselves
the salvation of their souls and the practice of a godly life, and
to labour at the same time for the social and moral welfare of the
people, by preaching the Word of God, by instruction, and by
spiritual ministration. They undertook in particular the care of
youth. They were, moreover, the chief originators of the great
movement in Germany, at that time, for promoting intellectual
culture, and reviving the treasures of ancient Roman and Greek
literature. Since 1488 a colony of them had existed at Magdeburg,
which had come from Hildesheim, one of their head-quarters. As there
is no evidence of heir having had a school of their own at