Daily Life in Elizabethan England (14 page)

As the elder Wentworth suggested, university education was often only a prelude to study of the law at the Inns of Court. The Inns were residential institutions at the west end of London, close to Westminster, where young men could learn English law by attending lectures, observing actual legal and Parliamentary proceedings, and taking part in mock legal proceed-60

Daily Life in Elizabethan England

ings of their own. Closely associated were the Inns of Chancery, where young men might acquire a basic grounding in law, sometimes going on to study at the Inns of Court.

There were four main Inns of Court—Grays Inn, Lincolns Inn, Inner

Temple, and Middle Temple—with subsidiary dependent Inns, housing

over 1,000 students in all. Some of them were interested in legal careers and would remain for seven or eight years, eventually seeking to be licensed by the Inns to practice law (the Inns still perform this function today). Students at the Inns sat on benches, called
barrae
in Latin: once a student was deemed ready, his Inn summoned him to sit on the bench with the other practicing members of his Inn, and so become a barrister. A barrister was permitted to plead before the Common Law courts, with the exception of Common Pleas, to which a barrister had to be summoned after further practice, thereby becoming a Sergeant at Law. However, a person could provide legal counsel outside of the courtroom without becoming a barrister; such practitioners were called attorneys (in England today they are called solicitors).

Most students at the Inns stayed only long enough to acquire an acquaintance with the workings of the law; this knowledge could be of use to them as future landowners, justices of the peace, or holders of government office. The Inns also helped young men cultivate social skills and contacts to prepare them for a position in elite society.

A variety of other educational opportunities were available, particularly in London, which was sometimes called the third university of the kingdom. The Inns of Court had a Civil Law counterpart in Doctors’

Commons, which offered a more practically oriented course of study in the subject than was available at the universities. The Royal College of Physicians sponsored lectures in medicine and surgery, and from 1596 the Royal Exchange hosted Gresham College, an endowed institution offering lectures in subjects including astronomy, geometry, music, medicine, and divinity. These were essentially continuing education courses aimed at London merchants and other urban elites: lecturers were hired from the universities, but enjoined to emphasize practical aspects of their subjects that would appeal to their audiences. In addition, London, Cambridge, Oxford, and other towns had small private academies and tutors offering instruction in subjects that included foreign languages, administration, and accounting.

Vocational Training

For those children not in school, age 6 was about the time for beginning the first steps toward work. Initially, children’s work centered on the home and family. Young boys and girls performed light tasks about the house or helped out by minding their younger siblings. In the country, children were expected to work in the fields at harvest time, when the demand for
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labor was at its highest, binding and stacking the grain after the harvesters had cut it down. Children also helped their mothers by carding wool to be spun into thread, and they might be taught to knit to bring extra revenue into the home.

As they developed the physical and mental capacity, girls began to learn the skills they would need for running a household: cooking, brewing, spinning, dyeing, and basic medical skills. By the time she reached her teenage years, a girl would be capable of pretty much all the tasks that made up her mother’s daily routine.

For boys the process was slower, especially in the countryside where the heaviest male labor was beyond the strength of a young teenager. At first a boy in the country might help with the lighter sorts of field work, such as chasing or shooting birds at sowing time to keep them from eating the seeds, or clearing stones from the fallow fields. Over time they would take on more challenging work, but they would be well into their teens before they could sustain heavy labor like ploughing. By the age of 12 or 14, a boy may not have been ready for the heaviest tasks, but he was still expected to be fully integrated into the working economy: the Statute of Artificers declared that any boy aged 12 or older could be compelled to work.

Many children left home during their teenage years to enter service in another household. In most households, only the eldest son had a future in the family farm or family business—his sisters and younger brothers would not inherit the land or business and needed to make their own way in the world. Service allowed them to earn their keep while starting to position themselves for long-term self-sufficiency.

For young people, employment as a servant was in many ways akin to the sorts of jobs available to teenagers today: it paid little, and required little in the way of prior skills, but offered an opportunity to build a record as an employee that could position them for better opportunities in the future. However, the Elizabethan servant lived in the employer’s home, and the employer stood in the position of a parent. He was legally responsible for his servants as he would be for his own children, and so might discipline them as we would his own children, but he was also expected to look out for them as a parent. Service therefore offered a transitional stage between care by a parent and full independence.

Time spent in service allowed young people to accumulate some

money, make useful social connections, and acquire polish in the ways of their social superiors. Even aristocratic youths might spend some time as pages, gentlemen-ushers, or ladies-in-waiting in a higher-ranking household. Many people spent significant years of their teens and twenties in service. Between the ages of 20 and 24, some 80 percent of men and 50

percent of women were servants; two-thirds of boys and three-quarters of girls went away from home in service from just before puberty until marriage, or a period of about 10 years.

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THE ASTROLOGER SIMON FORMAN

RECALLS HIS BOYHOOD DAYS

Now Simon had put himself for an apprentice for ten years with Matthew Commin, with condition that he should be three years at the grammar school. Which his master performed not—which was a part of the cause why he went from his master afterwards. Simon at first, being the youngest apprentice of four, was put to all the worst, and being little and small of stature and young of years, everyone did triumph over him. Especially a kitchen-maid named Mary Roberts; oftentimes she would knock him that the blood should run about his ears . . . On a certain frosty morning his master and mistress were both gone to the garden and their kinswoman with them, leaving none at home but Simon and Mary, willing Mary to took into the shop and help, if occasion served. They being gone, so many customers came for ware that Simon could not attend them all. Whereupon he calls Mary to stand in the shop. She came forth, reviled him with many bitter words, and said she should anon have him by the ears, and so went her way again. Simon . . . made the best shift he could and rid them all away. He shut the shop door, took a yard [rod] and went into Mary, who so soon as she saw him, was ready to have him by the ears. But Simon struck her on the hands with his yard, and belaboured her so, ere he went, that he made her black and blue all over.

Simon Forman’s Diary, in A. L. Rowse,
Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age: Simon Forman the Astrologer
(New York: Scribner, 1974), 271–72.

An alternative path to service that shared some of its features was apprenticeship. Parents who had the necessary connections might find a tradesman to whom they could apprentice their child, signing a contract that bound the child to remain in service to the master for a term of years.

According to typical terms from a London indenture of apprenticeship, the apprentice “his . . . master faithfully shall serve, his secrets keep, his lawful commands everywhere gladly do. He shall not commit fornication nor contract matrimony within the said term. He shall not play at cards, dice, tables, or any other unlawful games. He shall not haunt taverns nor playhouses, nor absent himself from the master’s service day or night unlawfully.” For his part, the master was expected to teach the apprentice his trade: “The said master his said apprentice shall teach and instruct or cause to be taught and instructed, finding unto his said apprentice meat, drink, apparel, lodging, and all other necessaries, according to the custom of the City of London.”11

Apprenticeship often began in the late teens: most apprentices in London began around 18–20 years old, or a year younger among those who had been born in London. The duration of the apprenticeship was governed by the guild to which the tradesman belonged, but seven years was the
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most common figure, and the legal minimum by statute. More prestigious trades often required a longer period of apprenticeship—apprenticeships in London’s Company of Grocers normally took eight or nine years.

An apprentice who completed the term successfully could become a

journeyman and was allowed to take full employment in the trade. Those whose families had the necessary connections and resources could eventually seek admission to the guild as an independent master, setting up in business for themselves. The typical interval in London between completing apprenticeship and becoming an independent master was a bit over three years, although many took six years or more. Not all apprentices successfully completed their term—in London, the figure was only 41 percent, the rest either leaving or dying before completion of the apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship was a privileged position, and families paid to have their children taken on in this way. The apprenticeship was in many ways similar to service in establishing a kind of family relationship between apprentice and master, but unlike service, it offered the promise of learning a skill that the apprentice could use to improve his economic prospects in the long term. The overwhelming majority of apprentices were boys, though some positions were available to girls in trades like needlework.

Coming of Age

During the teenage years, several points of passage marked a young man or woman’s integration into the adult world. By age 14, those children not of the privileged classes were expected to be full working participants in the economy. Fourteen was also the youngest age at which children could go through the ceremony of confirmation, which allowed them to receive communion at church; however, the ceremony was often put off until age 16 or even 18, and it was not widely regarded as an important ritual—Puritans generally rejected it altogether. Boys were subject to military service at age 16. Full legal majority came at age 21. According to Parliamentary law, the minimum age for finishing an urban apprenticeship was 24, while agricultural laborers were to be regarded as apprentices until age 21. However, the most important turning point in the life of both men and women was marriage.

Marriage

Marriage was the point at which an individual acquired full status in the society. For a man, to be married was to be a householder, and to be a householder was to be an independent person. Independent bachelors were extremely rare. Since marriage meant independence, it could not really take place until the couple were sufficiently established in the economy to support themselves.

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A wedding in the early 1600s. [Ashton]

We tend to think of the Elizabethans marrying very young, an impression that has much to do with the 14-year-old Juliet of Shakespeare’s play. Technically, church law permitted marriage at age 12 for girls and 14 for boys, although parental consent was required for anyone under the age of 21. In reality, such young marriages were almost unknown. The mean age of marriage was around 27 for men, 24 for women. The age was lower among the upper classes: 24 and 19 among the aristocracy, 27 and 22 among the gentry. Women in London also married a bit younger, the mean age being 22 to 24.

The first step on the path to marriage was finding a prospective match.

How this worked depended on a person’s station in life. The higher you were on the social ladder, the more control your family exerted over the process. For wealthy and prestigious families, the stakes were high: it was considered essential that the match was suitable to the family’s interests. The children of such families were typically entrusted to the care of tutors, schools, relatives, and others who could be counted on to control the child’s social environment, making them less likely to end up in an unauthorized match. This doesn’t mean that the children had no say in choosing their partner—both church law and public sentiment insisted on
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