Abstract
The household as a basic unit of governance has been shown to be integral to the social and political organization of medieval and early modern society.2 Just as they are today, premodern households were the primary place of socialization for children. Whether nurtured by parents or kin, foster carers, benevolent strangers, employers, or teachers, children learnt how to conduct themselves in the social world through the interactions and examples they encountered in the domestic settings of childhood.3 Just as it is today, this process had an inherently emotional aspect, as medieval and early modern children negotiated the forms of emotional comportment, control, and expression they encountered and were expected to adopt. In recent decades, scholars have been at pains to demonstrate that, also like today, love and affection were integral to premodern theories and methods of childrearing.4 But, unlike today, fear and dread played a significant role in the ideas and practices of child- rearing in the European past. For children, learning to revere and obey parents was the first lesson in how to submit to authority. In normative visions of household emotions, the desired attitude of children and youth towards heads of household was that of fear joined to love, echoing the emotional comportment of the individual Christian towards God.
See that ye correcte them devly & discretly for theyr faultes, so that they stonde in great feare & awe of the, and if words wyl not reclayme them than take the rod or weapon of correccion discretely vsed … be not to roughe nor to hastye with them, but so order your sel- ues to them that they maye both loue and feare you. Heinrich Bullinger, The Christen State of Matrimonye, trans. Miles Coverdale (1541)
My entierly beloued, the beginning of wysedome is the loue and feare God …
Anon., A Glasse for householders (1542)1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Heinrich Bullinger, The Christen State of Matrimonye the Orygenall of Holy Wedlok, trans. Miles Coverdale ([Antwerp: M. Crom], 1541)
See Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Colombia University Press, 1988).
Although the concept of socialization implies a process of education imposed on children in the reproduction of the social order, I follow Allison James (Socialising Children (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 2–5
Philippa Maddern, ‘Between Households: Children in Blended and Transitional Households in Late-Medieval England’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 3 (2010), 65–86
Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti, ‘Introduction’, in A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Age, ed. Cavallo and Evangelisti (New York: Berg, 2010), pp. 8–13.
For a medieval context, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 187–97
David Booy (ed.), Autobiographical Writings by Early Quaker Women (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 73
For the restoration of communal harmony in early modern courts, see Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 165–7.
Marjorie K. Mcintosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 119–24.
Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1981), pp. 25–62
On competing views of morality and the interaction between official, popular, and individual values in ecclesiastical litigation, see Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 10–11
Gowing, Domestic Dangers, pp. 41–8, 54–8; P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Fiction in the Archives: The York Cause Papers as a Source for Later Medieval Social History’, Continuity and Change, 12 (1997), 425–45
Cordelia Beattie, ‘Single Women, Work, and Family: The Chancery Dispute of Jane Wynde and Margaret Clerk’, in Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Michael Goodich (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 177–202
Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 3–4
Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 19–26
Philippa Maddern and Stephanie Tarbin, ‘Life Cycle’, in Cultural History of Childhood and Family, ed. Cavallo and Evanglisti, pp. 122–9; Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 35
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Wonying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 821–45
Carole Larrington, ‘The Psychology of Emotion and the Study of the Medieval Period’, Early Medieval History, 10, no. 2 (2001), 251–6
For a useful discussion of the approaches to conceptualizing emotions for historical study, see Susan Broomhall, ‘Emotions in the Household’, in Emotions in the Household 1200–1900, ed. Susan Broomhall (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1–37
James A. Russell, ‘How Shall an Emotion be Called?’, in Circumplex Models of Personality and Emotion, ed. R. Plutchik and H. Conte (Washington, DC: APA, 1997), pp. 205–20
For example, Bullinger, Christen State of Matrimonye, fols 8r (children), 60v (stepmothers), 62v (mistresses), 68v (servants), 73v-7Sr (mothers/wives). Caxton commended his translation of Jacques Legrand’s Livre de bonnes moeurs to an audience of ‘reders & herers’. See Jacques Legrand, Here begynneth a lytell boke called good maners, trans. William Caxton (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, [1498]), sig. [Ai]r. For the ‘multiple reading networks’ of Caxton’s courtesy texts and sixteenth-century domestic advice literature, see Merridee L. Bailey, Socialising the Child in Late-Medieval England, c. 1400–1600 (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), pp. 106–7
John Wyclif (eds), ‘Of Weddid Men and Wifis and of Here Children Also’, in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002)
Bartholomew Batty, The Christian Mans Closet Wherein is Conteined a Large Discourse of the Godly Training up of Children, trans. William Lowth (London: Thomas Dawson and Gregorie Seton, 1581), p. 22.
For attitudes of evangelical Christians to childhood, see, for example, Allison Coudert, ‘Educating Girls in Early Modern Europe and America’, in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 389–441 (pp. 390–7)
Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Householde Gouernement for the Ordering of PriuateFamilies (London: Thomas Creede, for Thomas Man, 1598), pp. 42–3
William Gouge, Of Domes ticall Duties Eight Treatises (London: lohn Haviland for William Bladen, 1622), esp. pp. 655–6
Richard Whitford, A Werke for Housholders or for Them Ye Haue the Gydynge or Gouernaunce of Any Company (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1530)
Thomas Carter, Carters Christian Common Wealth; or, Domesticall Dutyes Deciphered (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1627), pp. 132–3
F.J. Furnivall (ed.), Child Marriages, Divorces, and Ratifications in the Diocese of Chester, A.D. 1561–6 (Millwood: Kraus Reprint, 1973), p. 20
A study identifying more than 100 cases of child maniage in the north of England noted only one instance of violence, which was inflicted on Elizabeth Savell at her betrothal to John Clay. See Loretta Dolan, ‘Nurture and Neglect. Childhood and Childrearing Practices in the North of England, 1450–1603’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, the University of Western Australia, 2014), pp. 107, 130. For the beating of Margaret Heed by her father, cited in a 1488 London suit, see Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 74–8.
James Gairdner (ed.), The Paston Letters, A.D. 1422–1509, 7 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1973), II, p. 110.
Terence Murphy, ‘“Woful Childe of Parents Rage”: Suicide of Children and Adolescents in Early Modern England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 17, no. 3 (1986), 259–70 (pp. 260–1).
Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 312–14.
That is, rape, defined in terms of penetration, which the defendant had to prove; or assault with intent to rape, which could be proven on witness testimony and physical evidence; sodomy, again defined in terms of anal penetration; or assault with intent to commit sodomy, with lesser standards of proof. By a statute of 1576, any sexual intercourse with a child under the age of ten years was classified as felonious rape. The discrepancy between this age and the age of consent, Julie Gammon has argued, created particular confusion regarding the status of intercourse involving girls between the ages of ten and 12, which led to a number of cases being tried as misdemeanour assaults with intent to commit rape unless force and resistance could be proved. See Julie Gammon, ‘“A denial of innocence”: Female Juvenile Victims of Rape and the English Legal System in the Eighteenth Century’, in Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 74–95
Clive Emsley, Tim Hitchcock, and Robert Shoemaker, ‘The Proceedings — The Value of the Proceedings as a Historical Source’, OBP; Robert B. Shoemaker, ‘The Old Bailey Proceedings and the Representation of Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies, 47, no. 3 (2008), 559–80.
Garthine Walker, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England’, Gender and History, 10, no. 1 (1998), 1–25
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Stephanie Tarbin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tarbin, S. (2015). Raising Girls and Boys: Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household. In: Broomhall, S. (eds) Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137531162_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137531162_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-55406-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53116-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)