Tawse noun a leather punishment strap with thongs, formerly used in schools
‘“Oh, braw lassie! Did the schoolmaster not tawse her for it, though?”’ (Drums of Autumn)
The tawse (also called the belt) was generally associated with corporal punishment in schools. The tawse, along with its friends the pandie and the strap, has now (thank goodness) long gone from Scottish schools. It is defined as: ‘An instrument of punishment, a leather strap divided at the end into two or more lashes.’ Citations are found from the 1600s onwards. The Dundonald Parish Records for 1640, for instance, prescribed that: ‘According to the qualitie of the faults the maister shall inflict punishment, streking some on the loof [palm of hand] with a birk wand, belt or paire of taws’. There is also some evidence of ingenious techniques for enhancing the instrument’s brutal qualities: the ‘burnt-nebbit-taws’, it seems, refers to a tawse whose ends have been especially hardened in the fire. Ouch!
The word is related to taw, a term for a lash or whip. Tawse apparently takes on a plural ending to indicate the division of the strap into two or more lashes. Taw itself is derived from the Old English verb tawian, used to describe the preparation of raw materials, including the process of softening hides by beating them. You would hope this is the sense evoked in James Lumsden’s Rural rhymes and sketches in East Lothian (1885) and not a reference to someone exhausted from thrashing the daylights out of a child: ‘The ancient tawse-swasher pled weariness.’
In the last century, another context for the tawse is provided by Christopher Rush in his novel A Twelvemonth and a Day (1985), recalling memories of life in Fife’s East Neuk: ‘in many a playground battle, where tense gunfighters faced one another for the draw, the invisible weapon turned out to be Miss Sangster’s tawse, the terror of the imagination, and instead of an air cruel with cordite fumes and the whang of bullets, we watched the last scenes of such dramas turn to farce’.