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Objecting to Youth: Popular Attitudes to Service as a Form of Social and Economic Control in England, 1564–1641
Charmian Mansell
In 1563 the Statute of Artificers explicitly laid out an agenda for regulating labour for large swathes of England’s population. The statute ruled that those between the ages of twelve and sixty who had not secured an apprenticeship or position in service and were not contracted to work for at least half a year should be compulsorily placed in annual service. Only those who owned (or whose parents owned) goods to the value of £10 or land worth 40s annually were exempt. Maximum wage rates were set locally by Justices of the Peace and labour mobility was controlled: to seek work elsewhere, servants were to produce testimonials, complete with seal, from two honest householders and a constable of their city, town or village.
1 R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents: Being Select Documents Illustrating the Economic and Social History of Tudor England (London, 1951), pp. 338–50. In theory, the Statute applied to anyone of working age, but in practice it targeted unmarried labouring men and women below the age of thirty. We might assume that their freedoms were suddenly and severely curtailed by this legislation. However, the Statute was not an innovation in policy. Ordinances and acts aiming to control labour were introduced from as early as the Black Death. In 1349 the Ordinance of Labourers was enacted to regulate employment and wages at a time when labour supply was diminished and surviving workers could demand higher wages.
2 For a detailed discussion of the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers, see Jane Whittle, ‘Attitudes to Wage Labour in English Legislation, 1349–1601’ in this volume. By the mid-sixteenth century there were new perceived threats to stable employment structures. Maximum wage rates, last set in 1515, were now untenable for workers due to price inflation and, consequently, higher wages were demanded. Although it had a less pronounced demographic effect than the Great Pestilence of 1347–9, a wave of influenza epidemics in the late 1550s augmented the crisis.
3 See F. J. Fisher, ‘Influenza and Inflation in Tudor England’, Economic History Review, 18 (1965), 128; Donald Woodward, ‘The Background to the Statute of Artificers: The Genesis of Labour Policy, 1558–63’, Economic History Review, 33 (1980), 33–4. The Statute of Artificers was therefore an elaboration and consolidation of earlier legislation that addressed these challenges to the national labour market.
4 Woodward, ‘The Background’, 33.Early scholarship on the Statute focused on the economic concerns and political agendas that explain its introduction.
5 For example, see S. T. Bindoff, ‘The Making of the Statute of Artificers’, in S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurtsfield and C. H. Williams (eds), Elizabethan Government and Society (London, 1961), pp. 56–94; Woodward, ‘The Background’, 32–44; Fisher, ‘Influenza and Inflation in Tudor England’, 120–9. The extent of its enforcement has since been analysed as a barometer of socio-economic attitudes; records of the petty and Quarter Sessions expose those who did not comply with the legislation, while advice to constables printed in legal handbooks indicates growing concern amongst authorities.
6 See Tim Wales, ‘“Living at their own Hands”: Policing Poor Households and the Young in Early Modern Rural England’, Agricultural History Review, 61 (2013), 19–39; D. Hay ‘England 1562–1875: The Law and Its Uses’, in D. Hay and P. Craven (eds), Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill, 2004) pp. 59–116; F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Home, Work and Land, from Essex wills and sessions and manorial records (Chelmsford, 1976), pp. 146–74; J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 183–4, 197–8. However, records of the enforcement of the law offer only a picture of those who were reported to the authorities for various infringements (which included leaving service before the end of covenant, living at one’s own hands, and paying or accepting higher wages than the established maximum rates). Many people did not meet the Statute’s wealth threshold but lived by their own means without a stable annual wage, and yet they were not reported by local constables.
7 Charmian Mansell, ‘Female Service and the Village Community in South-West England 1550–1650: The Labour Laws Reconsidered’, in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe 1400–1900 (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 77–94. It is difficult to quantify how many people successfully lived out of the institution of service, but it is clear that alternative employments were available to labouring young men and women.
Through the study of prosecutions, an additional concern of contemporary lawmakers has been exposed. Magistrates’ notebooks resonated with the same perceived vices of young, unmarried people – sex outside marriage, disorder and disobedience – that were proclaimed in moralists’ tracts. It is argued that these vices held significant explanatory power for the stringent enforcement of the labour legislation, particularly against women.
8 Wales, ‘“Living at their own Hands”’, 32–3, 35; Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), p. 60. The 1563 policy-makers made no explicit reference to this concern; only the aim to ‘banish idleness’ is set out in the Statute’s preamble. While the Statute came to be used to control vice, this was not necessarily the original intention of the legislators.
9 Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, p. 339. What is clear is that authorities came to see the Statute as a solution for tackling economic problems as well as concerns over the socialisation and morality of young people. Service became a remedy for both.
10 Griffiths, Youth and Authority, p. 60.In studying the Statute, popular attitudes towards young people and labour have been overlooked in favour of studying the effectiveness of the machinery of the state. Enforcement of the Statute was dependent on the cooperation of parish officials, who were often forced to mediate between central government mandates and their neighbours’ interests.
11 For a fuller discussion of the role of constables in appeasing neighbours and the state, see Joan Kent, The English Village Constable 1580–1642: A Social and Administrative Study (Oxford, 1986); Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth Century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980), pp. 21–46. Socio-economic control of young people probably accelerated in the seventeenth century as Puritan ideologies of the middling sort (who often held prominent local offices) formed the basis of regulating sinful behaviour.
12 Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 198–220. However, Marjorie McIntosh and Margaret Spufford contend that regulating activity predates the Puritan movement.
13 Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 4; Margaret Spufford, ‘Puritanism and Social Control?’ in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 41–57. Martin Ingram notes in his study of church courts that some villages sought to control misbehaviour around 1600, even when Puritanism was not evidently at work.
14 Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 166–7, 233–7. Although her focus is not specifically on young people, McIntosh instead highlights the combined actions of local society and governing elites. Her work on the reporting of offences to local courts indicates that, while parliamentary proclamations and statutes were issued to address these perceived social problems, action was effected by local leaders. They were usually men (though occasionally women) from well-established, respectable households who knew how to engage with the legal system to tackle these problems.
15 McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior, esp. pp. 2, 24–33.But a key question remains unanswered: if society was so keen to regulate behaviour,
how was it possible for young men and women to live outside service? Christopher Hill marks the 1563 Statute of Artificers as an important milestone in determining how labour was conceptualised in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He notes that the poor were exploited and compulsorily forced into wage labour (i.e. service), thus rendering them ‘unfree’.
16 Christopher Hill, ‘Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labour in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in C. H. Feinstein (ed.), Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth: Essays Presented to Maurice Dobb (Cambridge, 1967), p. 340. Robert Steinfeld points out that, even when the labouring poor ‘freely’ entered into a contract of service, the contract was legally binding and their freedom was therefore curtailed. They could not depart from service and were forced to serve.
17 Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labour: the Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill, 1991), chapter 2 but esp. p. 24. While Keith Wrightson, McIntosh and others debated the importance of Puritanism in driving social regulation, Hill reminds us of the broad spectrum of opinions that was held in early modern England in relation to those without means. He points out that at the very same time that Puritans and other reformers were ‘evolving a doctrine of the dignity of labour’ others – primarily those of working status such as members of the Digger movement – were displaying a hatred of wage labour.
18 Ibid., p. 347. Enforcement of the labour laws was surely, then, a mixed bag. It is small wonder that many individuals living outside service fell through the cracks of the legislation.
Church courts offer a glimpse of the working lives of young people and their labour patterns.
19 See, for example, Alexandra Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 201 (2008), 51–95; Mansell, ‘Female Service and the Village Community’, pp. 77–94; Charmian Mansell, ‘The variety of women’s experiences as servants in England (1548–1649): evidence from church court depositions’, Continuity and Change, 33 (2018), 315–38. These records may not seem an obvious choice for studying labour legislation; explicit references to the Statute and its enforcement are rare in church court depositions, as it did not fall within the remit of these courts. However, they reveal much about attitudes towards young people and labour. Alexandra Shepard’s work on the language of poverty and labour used in church court depositions has been pivotal in unpicking how ideas of credibility were fused with economic worth. She demonstrates that appraisal of one another’s worth incorporated both material wealth and ideas of morality and work ethic.
20 Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2015); Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour’, 51–95.This chapter deploys Shepard’s approach of using church court depositions as evidence of popular attitudes to social rank and position, while also building upon my own previous work on the Statute of Artificers.
21 Mansell, ‘Female Service and the Village Community’, pp. 77–94. It explores the extent to which the economic and social concerns expressed in the Statute mirrored the concerns of society. And it does so through a close examination of the grounds upon which opposing parties in the church courts discredited the testimonies of unmarried witnesses aged thirty and under. Depositional evidence is drawn from the church courts of the dioceses of Bath and Wells, Exeter, Gloucester and Hereford. This is a region of England for which we know little about the extent to which the Statute of Artificers was enforced. The chapter focuses on objections (known as exceptions) to the testimonies of witnesses recorded in sixty-three sample cases heard in these courts between 1564 (the year after the Statute was introduced) and 1641. These objections rarely explicitly expressed living outside service as a key marker of vice among young people. Rather, objections more commonly centred on the lack of a fixed place of residence, whether that was in service or the family home. Lacking a position in service was also largely absent in articulations of other perceived vices of young people: principally, sex outside marriage and theft. The legislative power of the Statute encourages us to focus on service as the solution to problems of youth. But, in reality, the relationship between the two was less straightforward. Early modern society’s conceptual framework for the regulation of young people’s labour and sociability was much broader than the Statute mandated.