From the perspective of the young, the stability of service might offer the chance to gain wealth and skills to marry and earn their own living. But other forms of employment could offer higher remuneration.
1 Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, ‘The Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850’, Journal of Economic History, 75 (2015), 405–47. Whittle found that a servant couple who had worked for around five years each and had saved all their wages could together buy and stock only a cottage holding in early modern England. Service, she concludes, was ‘not a route to social mobility’ in and of itself.
2 Jane Whittle, ‘Servants in Rural England c. 1450–1650: Hired Work as a Means of Accumulating Wealth and Skills Before Marriage’, in Maria Ågren and Amy Erickson (eds), The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain, 1400–1900 (Aldershot, 2005), p. 104. The Statute of Artificers reinforced this idea by aligning service as a form of employment for those under a modest income threshold. Those with greater wealth were accorded more labour freedom.
But the ‘exploited poor’ that Hill talks of might benefit from service in another way.
3 Hill, ‘Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen’, pp. 345–6. Contemporary writings framed service as socially and morally beneficial to the young. Wales suggests that, from the mid-seventeenth century, calls for social and moral reform intersected with concerns about labour shortages. He cites a 1682 rebuke from the Kent justices of young people working in service for only part of the year and ‘getting a habit of idleness, laziness and debauchery’.
4 Wales, ‘“Living at their own Hands”’, 29. The word ‘debauchery’ covers a multitude of immoralities, many of which were the subject of the objections raised to witnesses listed under the category ‘criminal activity or antisocial behaviour’ (Table 8.2). Theft and sex outside marriage were the two most common activities that witnesses objected to amongst those aged thirty and under and are the focus of this section.
Young male witnesses were much more frequently accused of theft than their female counterparts by opposing witnesses: two-thirds of the accused were men.
5 The gender pattern was even more pronounced among the older group of witnesses with whom exception was raised: men represented 93 per cent of those in this age bracket linked with theft. Theft was referred to in conjunction with being vagrant in five of the nine accusations. Again, explicit references to being without a master were largely absent. Only one direct link was made. Thomas Powell, a twenty-year-old witness from Bathampton in Somerset, described himself as a yeoman in his 1603 deposition. His status (and assumed wealth) would have spared him from forced service under the Statute. No objection-raising witness contested his wealth, acknowledging that he was maintained by his father, but this was not represented in a positive light. Thirty-year-old Susanne Cottle, a married woman, deposed that he ‘doth live verie rudelye & idlye without a master’. Mason John Skryne added that he ‘hath knowne him to steale som apples out of another man’s orchard’ within the last year. While the Statute imposed no requirement for Thomas Powell to be employed in service, each objection-raising witness in this case took exception with both his masterlessness and his criminal activities. What was permissible by Statute was not accepted by his neighbours, particularly in light of his proclivity for theft. The tension between Statute and popular opinion is clear in Agnes Jeffery’s deposition: she deposed that he ‘hath noe Master
but liveth under his father’, indicating that she saw a contradiction in his unruly lifestyle, social status and living situation.
6 SHC, Marcus Taber vs Thomas Powle (1603). Italics my own. While this may have been an exceptional case, it nonetheless reveals that Thomas Powell’s stable residence did not offer the order and discipline that society sought for young people.
Social concerns expressed about young people by objection-raising witnesses could therefore transcend class divides. The perceived benefits of service as a means of social regulation extended to a wider group than the Statute set out. This maps onto evidence found elsewhere: in 1615 in Exeter, Marie Stone, the twenty-five-year-old wife of a baker, criticised Elizabeth Strachley, the daughter of a wealthy widow, saying ‘it were [would be] good for you to be putt forthe to service, and not steye at home seeing you are no better hable to govern your self’.
7 DHC, Chanter 867, Henry Cockram vs Bartholomew Jaquinto (1615). However, the Statute presented living at home as a privilege to be accorded only to those meeting its wealth criteria. In the cases above, while the Statute assumed that young people like Thomas Powell and Elizabeth Strachley from wealthier households would be well governed without entering service, their neighbours sometimes disagreed. Conversely, the Statute assumed that young people from poorer households could not be well governed and therefore mandated that labouring young people should be placed in service.
If theft was more strongly associated with male objectionable witnesses, women aged thirty and below were much more likely to be identified by objection-raising witnesses as having engaged in sexual relations outside marriage. Unmarried women have been seen as the particular target of the Statute, appearing more frequently before the secular courts for non-compliance. Sex outside marriage and illegitimacy were of particular concern.
8 For examples, see Wales, ‘“Living at their own Hands”’, 19–39; McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior, p. 160. Wales indicates that ‘presentments of young women do not overtly focus on matters of sexual behaviour, although it is more than possible that in many cases fears and assumptions were too commonplace to need articulating’.
9 Wales, ‘“Living at their own Hands”’, 35. Sexual misbehaviour has certainly been understood as gender-related; Laura Gowing found that the language of insult in the London consistory courts was almost always focused on sexual immorality in relation to women.
10 Gowing, Domestic Dangers, pp. 62–3. See also Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 195–216; Bernard Capp, ‘The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 162 (1999), 70–101. High female presentment rates could therefore be explained by fears of pre-marital sex.
The contemporary preoccupation with illegitimacy is nonetheless puzzling given that rates were quite low in early modern England; Macintosh found only 1.8 per cent of live births to be illegitimate in Romford between 1562 and 1619.
11 Marjorie K. McIntosh, A Community Transformed: the Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 68–9. See also Roger A. P. Finlay, ‘Population and Fertility in London, 1580–1650’, Journal of Family History, 4 (1979), 26–38; Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 137–41. But the exceptions raised against female witnesses
do support the idea that this was a public concern. Of seventeen witnesses under thirty who were described as living incontinently with another person or having had sex outside marriage, twelve were women. In 1629, tailor Francis Deswall of Yarpole in Herefordshire deposed that twenty-five-year-old servant Mary Maylard ‘hath been suspected to be of lewd behavioure, and an incontinent person, and [he] hath heard John Cannop confes that he had the carnall use of her body about a yeare agoe’.
12 HARC, HD4/2/13, Jane Dirry vs Sibell Francke (1629). Scattered evidence confirms that parishioners were concerned about young women falling pregnant outside wedlock and there is some indication they considered service a solution to this. In 1601, cordwainer John Jellyborne of Glastonbury in Somerset voiced his concern about Alice Stone, his former servant. He noted she had had several masters and proceeded to name seven positions in service (once with himself) that she had held within the last twelve to fifteen months:
First, with one John Raynolds of the Signe of the Hart in Glaston then with John Lane, or first with the said Lane, and then to the Hart. Then to the Pellycane, then to the Bell, then to the Hart againe, thease 3 places being severall Innes in Glaston aforesaid. Then shee came to this deponent and made covenant to dwell with him for a yeere.
In associating Alice with employment in inns and places of entertainment, John perhaps already hinted at her loose morals. He then continued that, while she was employed in his service,
one Philipp Greene then constable of Glaston came to him & tould him of the said Alice, saying that shee was a light idle huswief, and one muche feared least shee would suffer her self to bee begotten with childe, and so charge the towne with a bastard.
Such frank expression of fear of illegitimacy is rare in the church courts, as a false allegation could lead to a defamation suit. But John Jellyborne was on relatively safe ground, as it transpired that he and other witnesses firmly suspected Alice to have had an illegitimate child.
13 SHC, DDCd32, Henry Sock vs Maria Barter (1601).The chargeability of a fatherless child on the parish was of clear concern here. If a father could not be identified, poor rates levied on parishioners were used to maintain the mother and child. The focus on ensuring the sexual chastity of young unmarried women was therefore as much an economic concern as a moral one. The language of poverty mapped closely onto the vice of having a child out of wedlock.
14 See Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, p. 138. The aims of the Statute and the poor laws intersected in this respect. Across the dataset, thirty-five individuals were identified as parenting an illegitimate child. Interestingly, almost equal numbers were men and women; but of the sixteen young people (aged thirty and under) associated with this perceived offence, ten were women and words associated with poverty were simultaneously used to describe seven of them. The economic implications of having a child out of wedlock were clearly perceived as much lesser for young men. Only one young man was described as poor or similar, indicating the wider range of choices available to men with illegitimate children to earn a living.
Nonetheless, there is little evidence in the depositions to suggest that illegitimacy and sex outside marriage could be avoided by placing young women under a master. John Jellyborne’s deposition is unique in its coupling of illegitimacy and being masterless or living outside service. It is possible that his deposition deliberately played into the narrative that young women required the control of a master. In fact, it might be somewhat ironic that John Jellyborne saw Alice Stone’s illegitimate pregnancy as connected to her lack of a secure position in service. Many masters appeared before this very same court for fathering their servants’ children. Of the c.900 female servants who were recorded across all depositions of the four courts between 1550 and 1650, 114 had or were suspected to have had a child out of wedlock. In two-thirds of these cases, the master of the servant was implicated as the father.
15 In the remaining third of cases, the father was either unidentified or a man who was not their employer was named. In 1605, a defamation suit was raised in the Gloucester court, whereupon a master was accused of fathering the child of his servant (she herself had named her fellow servant as the father). The defamatory words were spoken by a young woman in the street who bemoaned the situation, reporting what may have been a familiar adage: ‘the servant hath the name but the master had the game’.
16 GA, GDR/95, William Locksmithe vs Alice Butler (1605). Furthermore, given the number of witnesses who testified in court against predatory masters, it is reasonable to assume that service may not have been seen as a safe haven for young women. Authorities’ attempts to curtail the vice of illegitimacy through service failed to recognise that masters’ behaviour could fall short of their expectations. As a result, their means of addressing the problem of illegitimacy may have been out of step with popular concerns.
Few unmarried women who gave birth out of wedlock could remain in service. Employers were unlikely to house a newborn and unmarried new mothers would have little or no time to perform service. Returning to service was more likely if their child had died or was sent away. In 1587, a servant named Jane of Driffield in Gloucestershire gave birth to her master’s child. Her master, a yeoman named William Hawkins, gave a ‘poore man monye to carrye the same childe out of the conntrye’, allowing Jane to remain in his service.
17 GA, GDR/65, Thomas Iles vs Joanna Addams (1587). More typically, however, unmarried mothers performed forms of day labour in conjunction with childcare. Cicilia Frances alias Kempe, aged thirty, of Wedmore in Somerset, deposed in 1626 that she was worth nothing but her clothes and did charwork for Mr Robert Hole. She admitted that ‘shee was never marryed, and that shee hath had two base children borne of her bodie the one of them aged seaven years old & upwards & the other dyed’.
18 SHC, DDCd51, Eleanor Hodges vs Nicholas Barker (1626). Service was supposed to provide a secure labour framework for the unmarried. But unmarried mothers were rarely the beneficiaries of this system. The institution that promised to protect young women from the vice of pre-marital sex and illegitimacy simultaneously facilitated those ‘vices’ by placing them in a stranger’s household where patriarchal power dynamics left them exposed to the sexual advances of their employers. When these women then fell pregnant, the institution turned them away.