Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T06:20:00.376Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Poor children as apprentices in Colyton, 1598–1830

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Pamela Sharpe
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Articles
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , August 1991 , pp. 253 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

ENDNOTES

1 Dunlop, T. and Denham, R. E., English apprenticeship and child labour: a history (London, 1912) remains the standard work for pauper as well as other types of apprenticeship.Google Scholar

2 Slack, P., Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988)Google Scholar, for example, barely gives apprenticeship a mention as part of poor relief policy. Recent exceptions to the lack of scholarship about apprentices however, are Wales, T. ‘Child labour, begging and apprenticeship in early modern England’ (unpublished paper for the workshop on the history of apprenticeship and child labour, University of Essex, May 1986)Google Scholar and Snell, K., Annals of the labouring poor (Cambridge, 1985), especially 228–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Wall, R., ‘Leaving home and the process of household formation in pre-industrial England’, Continuity and Change 2(1), (1987), 77–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johansen, H. C. ‘Urban and rural households in Denmark in the late eighteenth century’ (unpublished paper kept at Cambridge Group, no date) confirms these urban/rural differences.Google Scholar

4 Dunlop, and Denman, , English apprenticeship and child labour.Google Scholar

5 Marshall, W.Rural economy of the west of England, (Newton Abbott 1796), 227.Google Scholar

6 Sharpe, P., ‘Gender-specific demographic adjustment to changing economic circumstances: Colyton 1538–1837’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1988).Google Scholar

7 White, R. G. C., The history of the feoffees of Colyton 1546–1946, (Bridport, 1951) and personal communication with present-day feoffees.Google Scholar

8 Devon Record Office (hereafter D.R.O) 3483A/PO24.

9 D.R.O. 3483A/PO26.

10 Feoffees' document (hereafter F.F.) 14/3.

11 3483A/PO13.

12 F.F. 15/4.

13 See Kussmaul, A., Servants in husbandry in early modern England, (Cambridge, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 D.R.O. 3483/PO13.

15 This confirms the findings of Wales that poor law officers turned their attention from younger to older children during the seventeenth century. See Wales, , ‘Child labour, begging and apprenticeship’.Google Scholar

16 Snell, , Annals of the labouring poor, 324–5Google Scholar found that the average age for male apprentices in Devon in the period 1700 to 1860 was 13.4. He found that pauper apprentices left home rather earlier. Devon was one of the counties which showed the earliest ages of children leaving home; elsewhere boys were generally at least 14 when they were apprenticed. Wall, R., ‘The age at leaving home’, Journal of Family History 3, 2 (1978), 181–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar compared the 1841 census for Colyton with listings for Swindon in 1697, Cardington in 1782 and Binfield in 1801 and also found that only in the case of Colyton did children as young as 10 live away from home. Although not referring to paupers, Yarborough, A., ‘Apprentices as adolescents in sixteenth century Bristol’ Journal of Social History 13, 1 (1979), 67–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar estimated that adolescents entered apprenticeship in sixteenth-century Bristol between the ages of 14 and 16. Brown, W. Newman, ‘The receipt of poor relief and family situation, Aldenham, Hertfordshire 1630–90’, in Smith, R. M., ed., Land, kinship and lifecycle (Cambridge, 1984), 405–20Google Scholar, found that in Aldenham in the second half of the seventeenth century, thirteen years and eleven months was the average age for boys and thirteen years seven months for girls. Erickson, A. L. in ‘The expense of children and maternal management in early modern England’ (unpublished paper given at International Economic History Conference, Berne, August 1986)Google Scholar also found apprenticeship as young as ten or eleven unusual. The opposite picture from Colyton is found in Rye where Graham Mayhew discovered in ‘Life-cycle service and the family unit in early modern Rye’ (published in this journal) that nine out of ten offspring over 16 lived with their parents.

17 Pinchbeck, I. and Hewitt, M., Children in English society (London 1969), especially 223n.Google Scholar

18 D.R.O. Chanter 880 Ecclesiastical court depositions.

19 F.F. 15/3, D.R.O. 3483A/P032.

20 D.R.O. 3483A/PO13.

21 Both examples appear in D.R.O. 3483A/PO13.

22 Sharpe, P., ‘Gender-specific demographic adjustment’ 126n.Google Scholar

23 Victoria and Albert Museum, Parliamentary Petition 1698: Case of the lacemakers in relation to the importance of foreign lace.

24 This is indicated in some of the few wills which survive for Colyton. See for example, Prerogative Court of Canterbury 3 April 1646, the will of John Newton, surgeon, of Colyton quoted in Smith, S. Anderson, Extracts from wills proved in P.C.C. relating to the parishes of Shute and Colyton, Co. Devon (London, 1901)Google Scholar. One of those who left was 21 year-old William French from Colyford who was bound apprentice on a vessel destined for America at Lyme Regis in 1683 mentioned in Dorset Record Office B7/M9/1–28. I am indebted to David Souden for this reference.

25 Sharpe, , ‘Gender-specific demographic adjustment’, 201n.Google Scholar

26 The policy of giving an allowance for each child seems to have been introduced in parishes in west Dorset and east Devon around 1792. See Body, G. A., The administration of the poor laws in Dorset 1760–1834: with special reference to agrarian distress’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southampton, 1965), 202Google Scholar. Also Taylor, J. S., ‘Poverty in rural Devon 1780–1840’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1966)Google Scholar and Hoare, N. F. ‘The community of Colyton and its poor 1800–1850’ (M.A. dissertation, University of Leicester 1972–1973) 9, 20, 22.Google Scholar

27 Wall, , ‘Leaving home and the process of household formation’, 77–101Google Scholar. Industrialization has been thought to produce the situation where children spent prolonged periods of time in the parental home. See Anderson, M., Family structure in nineteenth century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971)Google Scholar; Katz, M. B. and Davey, I. E., ‘Youth and early industrialisation in a Canadian city’, in Demos, J. and Boocock, S. S., Turning points: historical and sociological essays on the family (Chicago, 1975) 81–119.Google Scholar

28 Mitchell, B. R. and Deane, P., Abstract of British historical statistics (Cambridge, 1961).Google Scholar

29 F.F. 14/3.

30 Schofield, R. S., ‘An anatomy of an epidemic – Colyton, November 1645 to November 1646’, in Local Population Studies, ed., The Plague reconsidered: a new look at its origins and effects in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (Matlock, 1977), 95–126.Google Scholar

31 Clapp, B., ‘The place of Colyton in English population history’, The Devon Historian 24 (1982), 4–9Google Scholar believed the amount of fighting which took place in Colyton in the civil war had a significant effect on mortality. Oswald, N. C., ‘Epidemics in Devon 1538–1837’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association 109 (1977), 73–116 described epidemics in Devon and chronicled the outbreak of typhus which probably preceded plague.Google ScholarPubMed

32 Sharpe, P. ‘Further analysis of the victims of plague in Colyton 1645–46’, forthcoming article in Local Population Studies; Sharpe ‘Gender-specific demographic adjustment’, 88–9.Google Scholar

33 There are a few problems with this. To some extent the patterns of seasonality are distorted by apprenticing children in batches which was a feature of the early eighteenth century in particular. For example, all the children who were apprenticed in the year 1711 were bound on 6 July. These cases have been omitted from this table but it is not clear whether this was an administrative feature or, in fact, a result of farming labour needs. There was also a tendency for the register entry to lag behind the indenture date and a few apprentices were simply contained in the annual account in the overseers' account book without the month being specified.

34 Sharpe, , ‘Gender-specific demographic adjustment’, 173–8Google Scholar. Snell, , Annals of the labouring poor, 20–1, 48Google Scholar. Snell's graphs which show the seasonal distribution of unemployment for both eastern and western counties indicate that unemployment was lowest in late summer.

35 Elliott, V. Brodsky, ‘Marriage and mobility in pre-industrial England’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar found that the motivation for emigration for many London apprentices was the death of their father.

36 F.F. 15/1.

37 Rutman, B. and Rutman, A. H., ‘Now-wives and sons in law: parental death in a seventeenth century Virginia county’, in Tate, T. W. and Ammerman, D. L., eds., The Chesapeake in the seventeenth century (Chapel Hill, 1979), 153–82 for comparison with step-relations established under conditions of high mortality in early America.Google Scholar

38 Shammas, C., ‘The domestic environment in early modern England and America’, Journal of Social History 14, 1 (1980), 2–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar commented on the ‘domesticity’ of early modern ‘middle-class’ wives. Middleton, C., ‘The sexual division of labour in feudal England’, New Left Review 113/114 (1979), 147–68 argues that in medieval England wealthier peasants' wives did not work.Google Scholar

39 F.F. 17/7 Feoffees' Minute Book 1766–1853.

40 Vancouver, C., General view of the agriculture of the county of Devon (London, 1808), 92–8Google Scholar stressed that a lack of cottages delayed marriage in the west of England. Certainly instances are shown in the settlement examinations young married couples moving in with their parents and it is possible that at that time pressure of space and funds meant that a younger member of the family might be apprenticed.

41 D.R.O. R4/1/PO16.

42 Parliamentary Papers: Report on the employment of women and children in agriculture 1843 XV: 47.

43 Marshall, , Rural economy, 221.Google Scholar

44 D.R.O. 3483A/PO20.

45 D.R.O. 3033A/P07–36.

46 D.R.O. 3483A/PO20.

47 D.R.O. 3483A/PO20.

48 D.R.O. 3483A/PO20.

49 D.R.O. 3483A/PO21.

50 D.R.O. 3483A/PO20.s