Studying objections or exceptions to church court witnesses allows for a fine-grained analysis of popular conceptions of labour patterns and social behaviours of young people. The evidence analysed in this chapter demonstrates the advantages of studying this material. It has shown that popular attitudes towards young people and labour were more complex than those laid out in the 1563 Statute of Artificers. It also highlights dissonance between the Statute legislators and the populace in their conceptions of the state of the young and unmarried. The vocabulary used by objection-raising witnesses in discrediting the testimonies of young people expressed concerns of poverty, vagrancy, and lack of fixed abode, but service was not exclusively presented as the solution.
The labour laws gave parishioners a means by which to control the exceptionally poor or exceptionally unruly but not necessarily a framework by which to regulate the behaviour of
all young unmarried people of modest means. Hill is right to suggest that the legislation accentuated the marginalisation and exploitation of the very poorest in society, but for most young people its impact was probably much less.
1 I am currently working on analysing consistory court depositions from the diocese of Norwich with a view to undertaking a comparative study of exceptions responses as prosecution rates for infringements have been found to be higher in East Anglia. Service was not conceived of as the only remedy to the vices of young people. Equally, it could be occasionally considered a solution for the unruly behaviour of those who did not fall under its remit (as the examples of wealthier young people indicate). There is tension between the presentation of service as an institution that regulated and controlled youth, and evidence that shows that the godly household free of vice and corruption was far from the reality of service for some. More than 10 per cent of all female servants recorded between 1550 and 1650 in the church courts had fallen pregnant.
2 It is important to note the context for this high figure. Church courts were responsible for enforcing morality in early modern society and punishing those who had sex outside marriage fell within the remit of the court. Nonetheless, when coupled with the persistent trope of lecherous masters and vulnerable female servants in plays and other writings from the period, the figure surely indicates that service must have been perceived as a typical context in which sex outside marriage might occur. This high proportion surely shaped popular conceptions of service. It is therefore unsurprising that service was considered only one form of labour available to young women.
Falling foul of the Statute did not leave a sufficient stain on one’s character to form an effective objection to their testimony before the court. While in some isolated cases direct mention of a failure to be a yearly covenanted servant was lodged as an objection to a young person’s deposition, objections typically invoked a broader range of social, economic and moral deficiencies. The economic concerns that the Statute focused on addressing through service and the social regulation that preoccupied enforcers were discussed much more loosely by witnesses in court. Ordinary people accepted a wider range of patterns of work among the young than were formally mandated by the Statute and its magistrates.