Abstract
Service was as important as any other concept in Middle English, and patriarchal households institutionalized it. As a result, master-servant relations of labour defined what it meant to be young in medieval England. This section unpacks the centrality ofservitude in medieval childhood through the history of common words such as boy and girl, and by examining the practice of apprenticeship. From Middle English to early-modern English, the language shifts toward greater specificity of age and a clearer distinction between childhood and servitude.
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Notes
Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthews, “Introduction;” in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2000): xi–xxiii.
This is a well-documented observation. Hilding Back, The Synonyms for ‘Child,’‘Boy,’‘Girl’ in Old English: An Etymological-Semasiological Investigation (Liechtenstein: C.W.K. Gleerup, Lund, 1934): 121
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life translated by Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962): 366–567
John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988): 5
Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001): 17
Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001): 307;
P.J.P. Goldberg, “Family Relationships,” A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Middle Ages edited by Louise J. Wilkinson (New York: Berg, 2010): 35–36.
Anatoly Liberman, An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008): 135–144.
See Anatoly Liberman, “The Etymology of English boy, beacon, and buoy,” American Journal of Germanic Linguistics & Literatures vol. 12, no. 2 (2000): 201–234; Liberman, An Analytic Dictionary, 13–20.
R.M. Liuzza (ed.), The Old English Version of the Gospels: Volume One — Text and Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Joseph Bosworth (ed.), The Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Gospels in Parallel Columns with The Versions of Wycliffe and Tyndale (London: Reeves & Turner, 1888).
Matt. 10:24; 26:4o; Luke 6:4o; 8:9; 14:26–27; 17:22; 18:15–22; 24:33; John 6:24; 7: 11, 18; 18:15–16; 19:26–27; 20:3–4; 21:20, 23, 24. Further discussion of names for the Apostles in Anglo-Saxon poetry can be found in Albert Keiser, “The Influence of Christianity on the Vocabulary of Old English Poetry,” University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature vol. 5, no. 1 (February 1919): 25–27.
Bosworth says that Augustine of Canterbury came to England in the sixth century with the Vetus Italica (an earlier) Bible rather than St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. He suggested that the Anglo-Saxon translations are based upon the former, and this was also the position of Hiram Corson, Hand-Book of Anglo-Saxon and Early English (New York, NY: Henry Holt Company, 1873): 505–509. Yet, others conclude that the Vulgate was the authoritative bible in early-medieval England, and it was produced and presented by Abbot Ceolfrid to Pope Gregory II in 716, prior to any Anglo-Saxon translations.
See Frederick F. Bruce, History of the Bible in English (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 1961).
See the MED, and E.J. Dobson, “The Etymology and Meaning of Boy” Medium Ævum vol. 9 (1940): 121–154
Merridee L. Bailey, Socialising the Child in Late Medieval England c. 1400–1600 (Rochester, NY: York University Press, 2012): 24.
Grzegorz A. Kleparski, “Churls, Harlots and Sires: The Semantics of Middle English Synonyms of Man,” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia vol. 39 (2003): 51.
Gen. 21: 19; 22:3; 22:19. A valuable parallel printing of a 1623 translation from Wilburgham and an Anglo-Saxon translation is offered by S.J. Crawford (ed.), The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, Ælfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament and His Preface to Genesis (London: Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1969).
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Paul Davis Chapman, Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing Movement, 1890–1940 (New York: New York University Press, 1988).
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Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval England: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993): 138.
For age estimates for apprenticeship see Angel R. Colon, A History of Children: A Socio-Cultural Survey across Millennium (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2001): 219–220
P.J.P. Goldberg, Medieval England: A Social History, 1250–1550 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004): 111; Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London, 135–136.
Hugh Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood (London, UK: BBC Books, 2006): 40.
Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London, 132, 145–147; Chris Given-Wilson, “Service, Serfdom, and English Labour Legislation, 1350–1500;” in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages edited by Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2000): 21–37.
Stephen Henry Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages. Class, Status, and Gender (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995).
P.J.P. Goldberg, “What Was a Servant?” in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages edited by Elizabeth Matthew and Anne Curry (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2000): 10–18.
On the household master’s powers, see Georges Duby, “Private Power, Public Power,” in A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World — Volume II edited by Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988): 28, 55.
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, second edition (New York, NY: Scribner, 1971): 67; Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood, 81
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Philip A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia, II (New York and London, 1896): 1–2n; Colon, A History of Children, 220.
Grant McCracken, “The Exchange of Children in Tudor England: An Anthropological Phenomenon in Historical Context;” Journal of Family History vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter, 1983): 303–313.
On these elements of master-servant relations see the essays in Susan Broomhall (ed.), Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2008).
Dorothy Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1954): 94.
David Herlihy, “Medieval Children,” in Essays on Medieval Civilization: The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures edited by Bede Karl Lackner and Kenneth Roy Philip (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1978): 114.
For commentary and a translation of the Colloguy see Stephen J. Harris, “Ælfric’s Colloquy,” in Medieval Literature for Children edited by Daniel T. Kline (New York and London: Routledge, 2003): 112–129.
Mathew S. Kuefler, “A Wryed Existence: Attitudes Toward Children in Anglo-Saxon England,” Journal of Social History vol. 24 no. 4 (Summer 1991): 830.
Patricia Demers, From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children’s Literature to 1850, second edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004): 7–12.
Bertha Haven Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers in the First Decades after the Black Death (New York, NY: AMS Press, 1970), first published 1908.
P.J.P. Goldberg, “Migration, Youth, and Gender,” in Youth in the Middle Ages edited by P.J.P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2004): 94–97.
For a review of this literature on this issue see Clare Crowston, “Women, Gender, and Guilds in Early Modern Europe: An Overview of Recent Research,” International Review of Social History vol. 53 (2008): 19–44.
Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early-Modern England (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1994): 133–155; Goldberg, Medieval England, 102–105; Goldberg, “What is a Servant?,” 68–69.
The point is also emphasized by Sandra Cavallo, “Family Relationships,” in A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Age edited by Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti (New York, NY: Berg Publishers, 2010): 15.
Anne Curzan, Gender Shifts in the History of English (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 133–179.
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B. Diensberg, “The Etymology of Modern English Girl,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen vol. 85 (1984): 473–475; Liberman, An Analytic Dictionary, 94–100.
Jennifer Higginbotham, “Fair Maids and Golden Girls: The Vocabulary of Female Youth in Early Modern English;” Modern Philology vol. 109, no. 2 (November 2011): 171–196.
Grzegorz Kleparski, “Pejorative Developments Interpreted Differently,” Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny vol. 33, no. 1 (1986): 25–49.
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© 2013 Patrick Joseph Ryan
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Ryan, P.J. (2013). Boys, Girls and the Practices of Servitude. In: Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364791_3
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