Abstract
Apprenticeships were usually arranged between a boy’s father and a prospective master, and once contracted the apprentice left the parental home to learn a particular craft or trade.1 The apprentice undertook to work hard, to conduct himself soberly, to keep his master’s secrets and not to marry until his terms had been completed; in return, the master offered accommodation, maintenance and technical training. Instruction in skills was accompanied by moral lessons, since masters, guardians in loco parentis, were obliged to ensure that their apprentices observed saints’ days and attended divine service.2 This was, then, an essentially familial mode of organization through which the apprentice would ideally be elevated to the positions of established citizen, freeman of the livery company and respected adult member of society.
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Notes
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts ( New Haven, CT and London, 1990 ), p. 173.
Richard Johnson, The nine worthies of London (London, 1592; S.T.C. 14686), sigs C4.
William Chappell and J. Woodfall Ebsworth, eds, The Roxburghe Ballads 9 vols (London, 1871–97), vol. VII, p. 582.
Sebastian Giustinian, Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII tr. Rawdon Brown, 2 vols (London, 1854), vol. II, pp. 70–1.
Thomas Rogers, Leicester’s Ghost, ed. Franklin B. Williams, Jr (London, 1972 ), p. 18.
A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London and New York, 1985 ), pp. 93–5.
Kathleen E. McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood (Basingstoke and London, 1994), p. 58.
Anthony Copley, Wits fittes and fancies (London, 1595; S.T.C. 5738), p. 129.
Henry Roberts, Lancaster his allarums (London, 1595; S.T.C. 21083), sig. A4.
See William Lilly, A History of his Life and Times, from the Year 1602–1681 2nd edn (London, 1826), p. 25.
Sir John Ferne, The blazon of gentrie (London, 1586; S.T.C. 10824), p. 72.
T.C. Mendenhall, The Shrewsbury Drapers and the Welsh Wool Trade in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1953), pp. 88–9.
Cyprian Blagden, ‘The Stationers’ Company in the Civil War Period’, The Library, 13 (1958), p. 2.
Sir Edward Coke, The second part of the Institutes (London, 1671; Wing C4952), pp. 668–9.
Sir John Doddridge, Honors pedigree (London, 1652; Wing D1793), p. 150.
Stephen R. Smith, ‘Almost Revolutionaries: The London Apprentices during the Civil Wars’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 42 (1979), pp. 313–28.
Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford, 1992), p. 37.
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© 1997 Mark Thornton Burnett
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Burnett, M.T. (1997). Apprenticeship and Society. In: Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230380141_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230380141_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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