What medieval Europe did with its teenagers
Today,
there's often a perception that Asian children are given a hard time by
their parents. But a few hundred years ago northern Europe took a
particularly harsh line, sending children away to live and work in
someone else's home. Not surprisingly, the children didn't always like
it.
He wrote to his masters in Venice that the English kept their children at home "till the age of seven or nine at the utmost" but then "put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years". The unfortunate children were sent away regardless of their class, "for everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own".
It was for the children's own good, he was told - but he suspected the English preferred having other people's children in the household because they could feed them less and work them harder.
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Dick Whittington, the apprentice
- London's folk hero Richard Whittington came to London as an apprentice to a mercer - an exporter of fabric, graduating in the 1370s
- He came from a wealthy family and there is no evidence he liked cats (the cat in the image above was originally a skull)
- He became very rich and was appointed mayor of London four times
His remarks shine a light on a
system of child-rearing that operated across northern Europe in the
medieval and early modern period. Many parents of all classes sent their
children away from home to work as servants or apprentices - only a
small minority went into the church or to university. They were not
quite so young as the Venetian author suggests, though. According to
Barbara Hanawalt at Ohio State University, the aristocracy did
occasionally dispatch their offspring at the age of seven, but most
parents waved goodbye to them at about 14.
So why did this seemingly cruel system evolve? For the poor, there was an obvious financial incentive to rid the household of a mouth to feed. But parents did believe they were helping their children by sending them away, and the better off would save up to buy an apprenticeship. These typically lasted seven years, but they could go on for a decade. The longer the term, the cheaper it was - a sign that the Venetian visitor was correct to conclude that adolescents were a useful source of cheap labour for their masters. In 1350, the Black Death had reduced Europe's population by roughly half, so hired labour was expensive. The drop in the population, on the other hand, meant that food was cheap - so live-in labour made sense.
"There was a sense that your parents can teach you certain things, but you can learn other things and different things and more things if you get experience of being trained by someone else," says Jeremy Goldberg from the University of York.
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Source: "Medieval Children" by Nicholas Orme
Beaten into submission
Some insight into how such a boy or youth might be trained comes from the [14th Century] French hunting treatise La Chasse by Gaston count of Foix... A lord's huntsman is advised to choose a boy servant as young as seven or eight: one who is physically active and keen sighted. This boy should be beaten until he had a proper dread of failing to carry out his master's orders.Source: "Medieval Children" by Nicholas Orme
Perhaps it was also a way for
parents to get rid of unruly teenagers. According to social historian
Shulamith Shahar, it was thought easier for strangers to raise children -
a belief that had some currency even in parts of Italy. The 14th
Century Florentine merchant Paolo of Certaldo advised: "If you have a
son who does nothing good… deliver him at once into the hands of a
merchant who will send him to another country. Or send him yourself to
one of your close friends... Nothing else can be done. While he remains
with you, he will not mend his ways."
A decade of celibacy was too much for many young men, and apprentices got a reputation for frequenting taverns and indulging in licentious behaviour. Perkyn, the protagonist of Chaucer's Cook's Tale, is an apprentice who is cast out after stealing from his master - he moves in with his friend and a prostitute. In 1517, the Mercers' guild complained that many of their apprentices "have greatly mysordered theymself", spending their masters' money on "harlotes… dyce, cardes and other unthrifty games".
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Find out more
Colin Heywood appeared on The Why Factor: Adolescence on the BBC World Service
In parts of Germany, Switzerland
and Scandinavia, a level of sexual contact between men and women in
their late teens and early twenties was sanctioned. Although these
traditions - known as "bundling" and "night courting" - were only
described in the 19th Century, historians believe they date back to the
Middle Ages. "The girl stays at home and a male of her age comes and
meets her," says Colin Heywood from the University of Nottingham. "He's
allowed to stay the night with her. He can even get into bed with her.
But neither of them are allowed to take their clothes off - they're not
allowed to do much beyond a bit of petting." Variants on the tradition
required men to sleep on top of the bed coverings or the other side of a
wooden board that was placed down the centre of the bed to separate the
youngsters. It was not expected that this would necessarily lead to
betrothal or marriage.
If they disapproved of a marriage - perhaps because the husband beat his wife or was hen-pecked, or there was a big disparity in ages - the couple would be publicly shamed. A gang would parade around carrying effigies of their victims, banging pots and pans, blowing trumpets and possibly pulling the fur of cats to make them shriek (the German word is Katzenmusik).
Hogarth's 1822 engraving "Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington" - an illustration of rough music
In France, Germany and Switzerland young people banded together in abbayes de jeunesse
- "abbeys of misrule" - electing a "King of Youth" each year. "They
came to the fore at a time like carnival, when the whole world was
turned upside down," says Heywood. Unsurprisingly, things sometimes got
out of hand. Philippe Aries describes how in Avignon the young people
literally held the town to ransom on carnival day, since they "had the
privilege of thrashing Jews and whores unless a ransom was paid".
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Master and apprentice
- Apprentices were sometimes abused by their masters
- Among cases recorded by guilds in France was a boy who was beaten with a set of keys by a silversmith until he had head injuries, and a girl beaten so severely that she died
- It is likely that girl apprentices were sometimes raped or prostituted, says Barbara Hanawalt
- But the fact that masters were tried shows that parents followed up on mistreatment, and didn't completely abandon their children
- Bequests from masters to their apprentices show that the relationship was often close
In London, the different guilds
divided into tribes and engaged in violent disputes. In 1339,
fishmongers were involved in a series of major street battles with
goldsmiths. But ironically, the apprentices with the worst reputation
for violence belonged to the legal profession. These boys of the Bench
had independent means and did not live under the watch of their masters.
In the 15th and 16th Centuries, apprentice riots in London became more
common, with the mob targeting foreigners including the Flemish and
Lombards.
On May Day in 1517, the call to riot was shouted out -
"Prentices and clubs!" - and a night of looting and violence followed
that shocked Tudor England.
"You've got quite a number of young men who are in apprenticeships who have got no hope of getting a workshop and a business of their own," says Jeremy Goldberg. "You've got numbers of somewhat disillusioned and disenfranchised young men, who may be predisposed to challenging authority, because they have nothing invested in it."
How different were the young men and women of the Middle Ages from today's adolescents? It's hard to judge from the available information, says Goldberg.
But many parents of 21st Century teenagers will nod their heads in recognition at St Bede's Eighth Century youths, who were "lean (even though they eat heartily), swift-footed, bold, irritable and active". They might also shed a tear over a rare collection of letters from the 16th Century, written by members of the Behaim family of Nuremberg and documented by Stephen Ozment. Michael Behaim was apprenticed to a merchant in Milan at the age of 12.
In the 1520s, he wrote to his mother complaining that he wasn't being taught anything about trade or markets but was being made to sweep the floor. Perhaps more troubling for his parents, he also wrote about his fears of catching the plague.
Another Behaim boy towards the end of the 16th Century wrote to his parents from school. Fourteen-year-old Friedrich moaned about the food, asked for goods to be sent to keep up appearances with his peers, and wondered who would do his laundry. His mother sent three shirts in a sack, with the warning that "they may still be a bit damp so you should hang them over a window for a while". Full of good advice, like mothers today, she added: "Use the sack for your dirty washing."
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