The corporal punishment of working children occupies an important position in both the history of child labour and in wider discussions about the general welfare of children in the past. The majority of historical discussions of child punishment in early mills and factories have implied that physical abuse was common and many accounts have relied heavily upon contemporary anecdotal accounts of brutality gathered from government reports such as the Sadler Committee of 1831–32. The Hammonds, for example, argued that in cotton mills ‘scarcely an hour passed in the long day without the sound of beating and cries of pain’, whilst James Walvin has claimed that in textiles mills ‘thousands of pathetic children were beaten awake, kept awake by beating and, at the end of the day, fell asleep too exhausted to eat’. Such generalised statements have become a mainstay of social histories of eighteenth and nineteenth-century industrial life, although scholars have rarely questioned the evidence base upon which assumptions rest and few have investigated the methods or rationale of workplace violence. Indeed, the functions of workplace violence and the social origins of its victims have remained largely unexplored beyond the mainly selective evidence of early government inquiries. The consensus is that early factories and mines were intrinsically abusive places for children.