Rascals and rusticants

Pet bears and lobsters on chains, horses in the bedroom and firearms at the window: British universities have long tolerated outlandish behaviour. But when is enough enough, asks Harry Pearson

- Harry Pearson

YOUR starter for 10 on University Challenge: what links poet John Milton, explorer Sir Richard Burton and playwright Oscar Wilde? The answer? All three were rusticated. To the uninitiated, that may sound like something to make a chap's eyes water, but, in fact, it's the practice at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham Universities of temporarily suspending students, banning them from all facilities and sending them out as the name suggests'into the countryside'. Rustication is a lesser punishment than being 'sent down' (straight expulsion), but both are fates suffered by students who went on to achieve fame or notoriety-and, in some cases, both.

Today, an intemperate outburst on social media might be enough to see a student handed their wellies and a stout stick, but, in the past, university authorities took a more laissez-faire attitude to discipline. There was toleration of a good deal of horseplay, sometimes quite literally involving horsesleaving a nag in a tutor's bedroom was considered a terribly amusing jape by Regency bucks such as John 'Mad Jack' Mytton, who arrived at Cambridge in 1816, together with 2,000 bottles of Port 'to see him through his studies', got bored and left before they were finished. As a result, some of the most notorious scoundrels in British history have made it through our finest universities without a blot on their copybooks.

Take notorious Elizabethan rakehell the 2nd Earl of Rochester, who entered Wadham College, Oxford in 1660 and quickly 'grew debauched' (despite being only 13 at the time), but was awarded an honorary MA a year later.