1. Introduction
When Henry Taylor (b. 1737 in North Shields) was about 13 years old, he was apprenticed on a ship that was involved in the coastal coal trade and made occasional trips to Scandinavia. Like other contemporary autobiographers, he reflected on the physical correction that he experienced during his youth.Footnote 1 Although the ship’s disciplinary regime was ‘strict’, he had a ‘good master’ who preferred to correct boys’ idleness, carelessness or disobedience by making them do ‘degrading employments’. Taylor eventually became master of a ship and commented on the relative utility of corporal punishment – a tactic he claimed to have rarely used against his own subordinates. As he put it: ‘If boys were inattentive to, or unhandy in, doing their duty, I endeavoured to make them ashamed, by saying, “I was afraid that I should have no credit of them.”’ He went on to suggest that this approach ‘had a more powerful effect than blows could possibly have, which [were] often inflicted from caprice or passion, more than from any demerit in the party punished’.Footnote 2
Although some masters and mistresses likely agreed with Taylor’s points, it remained the case that they were legally entitled to punish their apprentices and servants for a host of infractions related to both work and the performance of subordination more broadly. Such correction, in the estimation of one influential seventeenth-century manual for justices of the peace, was meant to remain within certain (vaguely defined) bounds and not be meted out ‘outrageously’.Footnote 3 Subsequent legal commentaries noted that a master could ‘strike [servants and apprentices] with his hand, fist, staff or stick’ – even to the point of ‘draw[ing] blood’ – for ‘being negligent … or refus[ing] to … work’.Footnote 4 Others offered details about offences that could justify violence, suggesting that masters could ‘correct or punish’ (as well as ‘beat’) servants and apprentices for ‘abusive language, neglect of duty, or other misbehaviour’, provided they did so ‘with moderation’.Footnote 5 In practice, what constituted moderate (and, by extension, immoderate) correction could be subject to debate in legal and extra-legal contexts.
Apprentices occupied a unique place in broader contemporary discussions about the relationship among violence, discipline and work.Footnote 6 In this context, correction also served educational functions and theoretically worked to instil habits in young people that would, in addition to whatever occupational skills they might acquire in the course of apprenticeship, benefit them in the future. As Laura Gowing has recently suggested, violence was ‘inherent to the model of teaching’ to which contemporaries ascribed.Footnote 7 For its part, conduct literature aimed at apprentices acknowledged that corporal punishment could be a routine feature of service. In addition to advising apprentices on the duties that went along with their subordination, some guidebooks suggested that they should be prepared to ‘subject’ themselves to physical correction, even if they had done nothing to merit it.Footnote 8 Although this literature was usually written with male apprentices in mind, contemporaries did not believe that it was categorically inappropriate to use physical violence to correct girls.Footnote 9
In early modern England, violence was among the factors that could strain master–apprentice relations or cause them to break down entirely. Autobiographical writings give a sense of how youths responded to abuse and suggest that for some adults, earlier experiences of violence were sufficiently significant – if not distressing – to warrant comment decades later.Footnote 10 In some instances, apprentices developed bonds with their peers and took matters into their own hands. The mariner John Secker recalled an intricate plan in which he helped three other boys escape their ship while it was docked at North Shields; they eventually made their way to Liverpool, where they bound themselves to a merchant engaged in the ‘Guinea and Virginia trade’ in the early 1730s.Footnote 11 Although the impetus for their flight was because the cook ‘had beaten his boy pretty much that morning’, Secker suggested that the others had been beaten on previous occasions and noted that he himself had been waiting for an opportune moment to escape.Footnote 12 But correction was not guaranteed to generate solidarity among those who were subjected to it. Recalling his time in service, the carver and gilder Thomas Johnson wrote in detail about a work-related dispute in the early 1740s that resulted in his master striking him and suggested that such correction was not unfamiliar: he had ‘often felt … blows before’.Footnote 13 As Johnson retrospectively told it, he resented his master because of his lack of skill and the poor training that he provided, which delayed the development of his natural talent; his experiences of violence, by contrast, generated neither a sense of grievance against his master nor sympathy for apprentices who were struck by their own masters. His co-apprentice was a member of a clandestine club that met on Sunday evenings at a pub. Among other things, the group was a source of mutual aid for apprentices in various trades: every week, members paid ‘a trifle of money … to support any brother that should run away from his master for ill usage’.Footnote 14 However, Johnson was something of a scab and reported the club’s existence to the authorities; it was disbanded after his master (horsewhip in hand) and a constable appeared at a meeting. Even if Johnson subsequently claimed to have learnt little from his time in service, he appears to have acquired a soft skill that could be of considerable value: a willingness to align himself with those in authority at the expense of his comparatively insignificant peers.
The bulk of the surviving evidence about apprentices’ responses to violence was produced when they individually sought to have their indentures cancelled via the legal system. Though an unquantifiable portion of masters and mistresses treated their apprentices well, they also had incentives to refrain from meting out excessive correction. If apprentices ran away too early into their period of service, masters and mistresses risked losing the costs incurred in maintaining and training them, as well as the income their work might provide in the future; such considerations, coupled with the reputational damage that could arise from severe or serial mistreatment of apprentices, acted as something of a constraint on masters’ and mistresses’ behaviour.Footnote 15 Although many apprentices did not complete their contracted periods of service, those who initiated legal action in an effort to have their indentures cancelled constituted a minority.Footnote 16 When these apprentices complained to authorities, some cited immoderate correction as a – if not the – reason why they should be released from their indentures; others cited different factors. Whether apprentices’ complaints about violence were made sincerely or tactically, the abuse that they described necessarily fell on the extreme end of the spectrum. More quotidian forms of violence were unlikely to occasion formal complaint, not least because early modern English society regarded corporal punishment as routine and acceptable for certain categories of the population.Footnote 17
In London, apprentices or their advocates who sought to have their indentures cancelled could petition various courts if attempts at private mediation failed.Footnote 18 Masters and mistresses also used the courts in an effort to have recalcitrant apprentices punished or released from their service.Footnote 19 Some institutions within the City, such as the Chamberlain’s Court, developed a reputation for adjudicating disproportionately in masters’ favour; others, such as the Lord Mayor’s Court, were widely used by apprentices.Footnote 20 Outside of the City and its jurisdiction, the increasing number of suburban apprentices could take their complaints to justices of the peace at the Westminster and Middlesex Sessions. For the most part, historians have emphasized the degree to which the legal system provided apprentices with relatively efficient and inexpensive means to exit unsatisfactory arrangements. But matters could be more complicated when apprentices complained about violence. Studies of the Lord Mayor’s Court suggest that it was apparently less eager to take apprentices’ complaints about ‘improper chastisement’ at face value; in comparison to other genres of complaint, those involving allegations of immoderate correction were least likely to result in a discharge (with 46.13 per cent of apprentices who petitioned the court on these grounds securing a release from service) and were most likely to be challenged by masters and advance to the trial stage.Footnote 21 Studies of master–apprentice disputes elsewhere in England have likewise suggested that although legal authorities were not categorically insensitive to apprentices’ complaints about violence, they viewed them with comparative ‘scepticism’.Footnote 22
This article offers the first systematic analysis of the role that violence played in the management of apprentices and the gendered dynamics of violence in English apprenticeship more broadly.Footnote 23 It does so through an examination of 195 petitions in which apprentices requested to be released from their obligations to violent masters or mistresses, which were submitted to the Middlesex and Westminster Sessions between c. 1690 and 1830. To qualify as ‘violence-related’, a petition had to mention either classic ‘immoderate correction’ or a defined action that a master or mistress allegedly directed at an apprentice – beating them, striking them, whipping them or so forth. These violence-related petitions have been drawn from a larger set of 520 petitions that were filed by apprentices or their supporters (usually, though not exclusively, their parents) and 126 petitions that were filed by masters or mistresses to the Sessions over the course of the period. With the exception of a small number of petitions that were either unfit for consultation at the London Archives as a result of preservation issues or not locatable in online databases, all surviving and catalogued apprenticeship-related petitions in the Westminster and Middlesex Sessions Papers have been consulted to produce this article.Footnote 24
This article enhances our understanding of how violence shaped apprentices’ experiences of training, work and service during a period when girls constituted a growing minority of London’s apprentice population.Footnote 25 It also contributes to the growing body of literature on petitions and petitioning.Footnote 26 The discussion begins with a quantitative overview of the petitions, examining the proportion that cited immoderate correction, the terms and level of detail in which violence was described and its relationship to apprentices’ other stated grievances. It moves on to a more qualitative analysis, reconstructing the factors that could prompt masters and mistresses to mete out violent correction (as well as their commentaries on their perceived right to do so) and the tactics that petitioners used in crafting their complaints. Where other studies have considered the degree to which the ‘voices’ of petitioning subjects can be extracted from a genre that tended to ‘suppress individualized authorial presence’, this article takes an alternative approach by offering a more sustained focus on the formulaic nature of petitions and its implications.Footnote 27 Although female apprentices complained about violence at a disproportionate rate to their male peers, the material consulted here suggests that their petitions did so in comparatively formulaic and restricted terms. The final section considers these issues and what they might mean for our understandings of violence, gender and apprenticeship in the long eighteenth century, as well as the documents that facilitate a consideration of these topics.
2. A quantitative overview of the petitions
Master–apprentice relations in Middlesex and Westminster were not some sort of dystopian nightmare: just over a third (37.5 per cent) of all petitions filed by or on behalf of apprentices referenced violence (Table 1). The proportion of petitions that featured complaints about violence was subject to minor fluctuations, though it should be noted that survival issues make it difficult to gauge whether these figures accurately capture potential trends in change over time. In absolute numerical terms, over the course of the period, the majority of apprentices (who also happened to be privately indentured boys) complained about inadequate instruction – either on its own terms or in conjunction with other factors such as masters’ indebtedness. But in comparison to their peers who petitioned the Lord Mayor’s Court, apprentices at the Middlesex and Westminster Sessions were more likely to cite immoderate correction as a reason why their indenture should be cancelled. This may be partly explainable by the fact that the most commonly cited complaint in the Mayor’s Court (non-enrolment of indentures) provided the cleanest way to secure the cancellation of an indenture but could not be applied to apprentices outside the City of London.
Distribution of violence-related petitions
Source: The London Archives, Westminster (WJ/SP) and Middlesex (MJ/SP) Sessions Papers.
The gendered discrepancies in violence-related petitions are striking (Table 2). Girls were disproportionately likely to cite immoderate correction as a reason why they should be released from service, with 59.09 per cent of all petitions filed by or on behalf of girls containing complaints about violence. Where female apprentices were concerned, their gender – rather than the circumstances that occasioned their indenture – appears to have been the more significant factor. In comparison to their privately indentured peers, poor girls who had been apprenticed by parish officials were more likely to cite immoderate correction, but not dramatically so: such allegations featured in 64.71 per cent of all pauper girls’ petitions and in 57.15 per cent of all non-pauper girls’ petitions. Just over half (56.41 per cent) of the girls who petitioned about violence were apprenticed in various branches of the clothing trades (Figure 1).
Violence-related petitions, as number and share (%) of all petitions filed by apprentice group
Source: The London Archives, Westminster (WJ/SP) and Middlesex (MJ/SP) Sessions Papers.
Trades represented in female apprentices’ violence-related petitions.
When it came to discussing who was responsible for correcting them, most girls cited their mistress – either alone (43.59 per cent) or in conjunction with masters (30.77 per cent). Masters were cited as the sole abuser in 23.08 per cent of girls’ petitions, and one apprentice’s petition noted that her mistress had encouraged the servants to beat her. Details about violent masters may have been included to indicate that the girls in question were placed in disordered households, even if their day-to-day experiences of work, training and correction primarily involved interactions with their mistresses. Although contemporaries believed that it was acceptable to correct boys and girls using physical methods, prescriptive literature maintained that violence was meant to operate along gendered lines, with masters disciplining boys and mistresses disciplining girls.Footnote 28
Boys’ petitions (Table 2) cited a wider range of complaints, with 34.36 per cent of all petitions filed by or on behalf of male apprentices featuring allegations about violence. Pauper and non-pauper male apprentices cited violence in roughly similar proportions, with just over a third of all petitions filed by each group featuring allegations of immoderate correction (36.36 per cent and 34.26 per cent, respectively). While most boys noted that correction had been meted out by their masters, a small number alleged that their mistresses either had been abusive or had failed to intervene when journeymen were violent; others suggested that their mistresses had ordered the journeymen to beat them. Such details hinted at wider dysfunction within the household and tapped into contemporary anxieties about the nature of women’s authority over their male subordinates. As one eighteenth-century legal discussion of masters’ disciplinary rights suggested, a master should not ‘delegate [this] power to another’ – namely, his ‘wife’. It went on to note that if an apprentice was ‘beat[en]’ by his mistress, ‘it was a good cause of departure’ from service.Footnote 29
Petitions described violence in different terms and with varying degrees of detail. For the purposes of analysis, qualitative accounts of violence have been divided into three categories – outlined in Table 3 – that can be analysed in relation to other variables.Footnote 30 Formulaic descriptions (Category 1) of violence entailed complaints about apprentices being ‘imoderately beaten’, ‘beat and abused’, ‘unreasonably beaten … in a violent manner’, ‘given … immoderate correction’ and so forth. Detailed descriptions (Category 2) included remarks about specific violent acts, the nature or frequency of correction, tools or implements that were used, the physical impact that correction had on the apprentice’s body and so forth. Representative examples include apprentices’ complaints about being ‘w[h]iped … with a cord several times untill he [was] black & blue’; ‘tyed to a stock[ing] frame [and beaten until] something [was] broken in [her] body’; and ‘struck … many times with … pieces of … wood about four feet long’.Footnote 31 Category 3 combines detailed descriptions of violence with information about verbal threats that masters and mistresses allegedly made to apprentices; such threats usually involved threats of extra-legal coercion (more extreme forms of physical violence, including killing the apprentice) but could also entail threats of legal coercion (sending the apprentice to the house of correction for punishment). Roughly half of all violence-related petitions contained formulaic descriptions of violence (see Table 3).
Descriptions of violence by category, as share (%) of all violence-related petitions by group
Source: The London Archives, Westminster (WJ/SP) and Middlesex (MJ/SP) Sessions Papers.
Although all the apprentices’ petitions analysed here referenced immoderate correction, most did so in conjunction with other grievances. Petitions that cited violence as the sole reason why an indenture should be cancelled made up just under a third (29.74 per cent) of all violence-related petitions. It was more often the case that complaints about violence were cited alongside other problems. A breakdown of the range of complaints in violence-related petitions is presented in Table 4, along with the categories of violence distributed across each category of complaint. Where additional grievances were mentioned, complaints about ‘want of necessaries’ appeared in about a fifth of all violence-related petitions, with such allegations appearing in a larger proportion of girls’ petitions (33.33 per cent, in comparison to 17.95 per cent for boys). This suggests that some masters and mistresses who dispensed immoderate correction were inclined to be generally negligent; that the two forms of abuse were coupled in contemporary thinking; or some combination of the two. It also raises the possibility that the threshold for what constituted generalized ‘mistreatment’ of female apprentices was lower. Furthermore, while boys and girls both cited immoderate correction and inadequate training as reasons why their indentures should be cancelled, a higher proportion of girls’ petitions contained complaints about so-called drudge work. This corroborates Gowing’s finding that female apprentices were susceptible to being made to do domestic chores that not only were inappropriate to their position but also frustrated their acquisition of relevant skills.Footnote 32 Boys’ violence-related petitions were more likely to feature complaints about inadequate training as such; they also cited a wider range of complaints. Although some allegations – for instance, that the apprentice had been cast out by the master or committed to the house of correction for misbehaviour – were exclusively made by boys, the number of petitions in question makes it difficult to establish whether these were reflective of broader gendered trends.
Range of complaints cited in violence-related petitions and categories of violence by complaint
Source: The London Archives, Westminster (WJ/SP) and Middlesex (MJ/SP) Sessions Papers.
As Table 4 indicates, there was a correlation between the detail in which violence was described and the reasons why apprentices sought the cancellation of their indenture. Where immoderate correction was the sole complaint, petitions tended to describe violence in more detail, and this sub-genre yielded the highest number of petitions in violence Category 2 (detailed) and Category 3 (detailed + threats). By contrast, in petitions where allegations about immoderate correction appeared alongside other grievances, descriptions of violence tended to be more perfunctory, clustering in Category 1 (formulaic). When the bulk of petitioners’ energy was devoted to anatomizing masters’ and mistresses’ other contractual failings, passing details of abuse might have been included to bolster apprentices’ claims by painting a more holistic picture of their inadequacies.
The story, however, was slightly more complicated than this functionalist analysis might suggest. Although girls’ petitions cited violence at a disproportionate rate to their male peers, they were more likely to describe violence in formulaic terms. As Table 3 demonstrates, about two-thirds of the petitions in which girls complained about correction clustered into Category 1, while a minority went into more detail. Boys’ petitions displayed more range across Categories 1–3. Gender differences were also observable in how petitions discussed the circumstances that led up to or the immediate causes of correction. Although the majority of apprentices’ petitions neglected to mention these factors, a higher proportion of those involving male apprentices included such details (25 per cent of boys’ petitions versus 7.69 per cent of girls’ petitions).
3. The contents of petitions
Some apprentices’ complaints about immoderate correction presumably were opportunistic attempts to exit service; masters and mistresses were certainly inclined to suggest as much. Because accounts of how masters and mistresses responded to charges against them when they appeared at the Sessions were not recorded in detail, it is difficult to reconstruct precisely what they might have said in their defence. But an attorney’s case notes from suits involving allegations of immoderate correction in the London Mayor’s Court give a flavour of the arguments that they made in that jurisdiction. Around 1700, a jeweller was prepared to admit that he had repeatedly struck his apprentice but maintained that such correction had been done ‘very easily’. As he told it, his apprentice only began to complain about mistreatment after announcing his intention to ‘sue out his indentures’ and because he had learnt ‘a particular art relating to his trade [so thought] himself fit enough to be a master’.Footnote 33 In 1699, another master likewise argued that his apprentice had fabricated stories about immoderate correction: having served four years, the youth had ‘learnt his trade’ and ‘would fain be gone … to work for himself’.Footnote 34 Other masters admitted that they had been (moderately) violent, but noted that their actions had been justified: they struck apprentices for refusing to work; for deliberately ‘spoiling’ work; for being ‘surly’, ‘idle’ or ‘sawcy’; or, in one instance, for immoderately correcting a younger apprentice.Footnote 35
At the Middlesex and Westminster Sessions, a small number of counter-petitions were filed by masters and mistresses who refuted the charges against them.Footnote 36 They tended to suggest that their apprentices had either melodramatically refashioned justified correction as severe violence or concocted the claims altogether in an attempt to leave service (and sometimes also to recoup the premium that had been paid to place them in service).Footnote 37 In exceptional cases, notes on the back of apprentices’ petitions indicate the logic that informed masters’ and mistresses’ responses, as well as the forms of legal assistance they might seek. Notes on an apprentice wheelwright’s 1708 petition recorded that his master (with the help of witnesses) proved that the apprentice was ‘negligent and refuse[d] to obey … commands’, thereby justifying correction.Footnote 38 In 1689, two years into his apprenticeship, John Gordin requested to be discharged from his mistress, Sarah Fellows, on the grounds that she was ‘in soe poore a condition’ that she was unable to provide him with adequate training as a watch case maker. A note on the back of Gordin’s petition (written in a different hand) was addressed to his mistress (‘Sister Fellowes’) and advised her to seek advice from a specific counsellor. Doing so, the unidentified author suggested, would help her prove that the apprentice ‘neither wanted for worke nor any thinge eales & how hee hath his traide & if worke bee scarse it is your losse more then his, for his desire … is to bee his owne master & to worke for himself being master of his trade’.Footnote 39 The surviving violence-related petitions from the Westminster and Middlesex Sessions do not always contain details about the amount of time that had elapsed between the start of an apprentice’s indenture; a number of the girls’ indentures also specified periods of service that were shorter than the traditional seven years. While some of the boys and girls who filed petitions did so before they had completed their first year of service, apprentices from both groups usually took their complaints to the authorities at more advanced stages. For boys, the median and mean amount of time elapsed from the start of their indenture to the filing of their petition was about three years; for girls, the mean was 2.80 and the median was 2.17 years.
To the extent that petitions constituted an initial complaint and set of talking points, with additional details to be provided when apprentices (and their supporters/witnesses), masters and mistresses appeared in person at the Sessions, it is understandable that many were formulaic. However, the fact that some petitions were formulaic, while others were not, raises the possibility that processes of scribal elision or omission were at work. Notes on the back of some petitions indicate how formulaic accounts of violence could obscure grislier allegations, with additional details emerging orally during the Sessions and being corroborated by third parties who were recruited to support apprentices’ claims. An apprentice brush maker’s 1732 petition stated that he had been ‘barbarously beaten’ by his master, but notes on the back (in a different hand) described how he had been ‘whipped … soe severely that [he] could not lift up his head’ and had been ‘blood[ied] divers times’, to the point that he was unable to work.Footnote 40 A few years later, Thomas Banbury’s petition noted that his master (a stocking maker) beat him in ‘a very barbarous and inhumane manner’. At the Sessions, it emerged that Banbury’s master had a habit of disciplining his apprentices in questionable ways: one person prepared to state that it ‘had been his usual way of beating his apprentices … with hammers’, while two others were on hand to describe how he would ‘beat his apprentices if they would not doe as he ordered them’.Footnote 41 Formulaic wording could also conceal sexual violence. While the 1707 petition of Margaret Carter, apprenticed in housewifery, described how her ‘master and mistress [had] very often immoderately corrected [her] in a very inhuman[e] manner’, a note on the back of her petition suggested that Carter’s master had also attempted to ‘debauch her’. Although other girls were presumably victims of sexual violence, such allegations were omitted from the official texts of the consulted petitions; they did, however, appear in one petition that a mistress filed in an attempt to be rid of her late husband’s apprentice, whom she accused of attempting to ‘debauch’ a servant in the household (among other misdemeanours).Footnote 42
Petitions were a group effort, and the final contents of any given document simultaneously reflected and omitted details that petitioners or their advocates provided to scribes.Footnote 43 But petitioners’ dependence on scribes rendered them susceptible to the vagaries of individual discretion in various ways; the potential consequences of this dependency could be more pronounced in situations where legal authorities were structurally disinclined to take the petitioners’ allegations at face value or in cases where individual petitioners were unable to marshal witnesses who could credibly corroborate their claims. Although an unquantifiable portion of apprentices were able to find people to speak convincingly on their behalf, this was not always the case. In 1696, justices at the Middlesex Sessions found that a snuff box maker’s apprentice could not prove that his master had given him ‘immoderate and unreasonable correction [as] suggested in his petition’ and ordered him to serve out the remainder of his indenture.Footnote 44 Elsewhere, apprentices’ complaints could be stymied by the justices’ willingness to take a master’s word over that of multiple apprentices. In 1770, two youths who were apprenticed to a cabinet maker and upholsterer filed separate petitions outlining the violence to which they claimed to have been subjected; they were ordered to return to service after their master filed a counter-petition in which he not only noted that he had been unstinting in his ‘kind and indulgent treatment’ of his apprentices but also outlined a number of infractions that would have justified striking them.Footnote 45 Again, case notes from the Lord Mayor’s Court can be used to reconstruct the obstacles that apprentices could face in securing credible witnesses. To the extent that violence occurred in work settings and within the context of the broader household, some prospective witnesses might be structurally disinclined to provide evidence against those upon whom they were dependent.Footnote 46 After a tailor challenged his apprentice’s complaints about immoderate correction in the 1690s, the Mayor’s Court attorney James Gibson noted that the youth’s potential ‘witnesses [were the master’s] journeyman and [would] be unwilling to discover the beatings’ as a result.Footnote 47
Some petitions went beyond the formulaic descriptions that were characteristic of the genre as a whole. These documents had a hybrid quality: if, like other types of petition, they presented individual petitioners’ circumstances and the problems for which they sought redress, they also contained narratives of relevant historical interactions and statements of the sort found in legal depositions. It is plausible to assume that scribes sourced such details directly from apprentices or their advocates. Such accounts provided magistrates with a more thorough picture of the abuse to which apprentices claimed to have been subjected. They also illustrated how masters and mistresses could use physical and verbal coercion in concert with one another in their efforts to discipline apprentices.Footnote 48
Other petitions contained reports of exchanges between masters (less often mistresses) and apprentices and recounted details of violence alongside threats of violence that were meant to serve similarly disciplinary functions. These might be read as hyperbolic statements that were made in the heat of the moment, but they presumably derived their force from the fact that some apprentices were fatally ‘corrected’ by their masters or mistresses. In 1707, Bertha Gordon described how her daughter’s mistress had ‘threatened to knock out her braines’, and two decades later another apprentice in an unspecified trade worried that her master would ‘be as good as his word either in making [her] a cripple or in murdering [her]’.Footnote 49 An apprentice joiner and cabinet maker noted in 1769 that his master regularly beat him and had also ‘threaten[ed] to cut out his little heart with a saw’ and to ‘cleave his skull with any working tool he might have in his hand’.Footnote 50 In 1736, less than a year into his apprenticeship to a jeweller, Daniel Pacquot petitioned to be discharged on the grounds of immoderate correction – some of which had been meted out by a master who was frustrated by the fact that a previous beating had rendered him unable to work. Pacquot complained that on one occasion his master had attempted to put his hand in a vice to prevent him running away while he struck him and said, ‘You dogg, kill yourself or I will’.Footnote 51 In 1709, Margaret Anderson complained about the mistreatment to which her son was subjected by a glover he had been placed in an apprenticeship with by parish overseers; the boy developed ‘fitts’ after successive beatings, at which point his master and mistress reportedly announced their intention to ‘whipp him out of his fitts’.Footnote 52 Some masters who were accused of beating their apprentices used threats to highlight their relative restraint, indicating how apprentices’ support networks could curb the severity of correction in the process. In 1824, a carpenter who struck his apprentice several times allegedly told him that ‘if it was not for his sh[i]tt[e]n father … he would punch his head’.Footnote 53 Others threatened their apprentices by highlighting their own comparative benevolence. After a tailor observed his apprentice’s supposedly substandard work in 1801, he remarked that ‘many a master would have taken him off the board and horsewhipped him’ for his inattentiveness.Footnote 54 The apprentice, apparently unmoved by this attempt at motivational speaking, ran away shortly thereafter. Still other masters used threats in an effort to deter apprentices from approaching legal authorities.Footnote 55
As we saw in the previous section, most apprentices’ petitions did not outline the circumstances or conflicts that resulted in their being beaten or struck. When it came to drawing up petitions, apprentices and their advocates might well have omitted such details for tactical reasons. By presenting apprentices as the hapless victims of abusive – or, in the contemporary parlance, excessively ‘passionate’ – masters or mistresses, petitioners could attempt to shift the debate away from what constituted ‘immoderate’ correction and instead suggest that their treatment was as unjustified as it was capricious. However, a subset of apprentices’ petitions did relate circumstances or infractions that occasioned their punishment; while these details related to specific controversies, they typically presented discrete incidents of correction as being of a piece with a broader pattern of abuse.
Some apprentices’ petitions suggested that their masters used violence to increase their productivity or to compel them to work beyond levels that could be reasonably expected. In 1692, an apprentice cabinet maker named Owen Macarty successfully petitioned to be released from service on the grounds that his master expected him to do ‘a much greater portion of worke … than he [was] able to performe’ – even more than was ‘expected of journeymen who [were] perfett masters of their trade’. Macarty’s petition implied that his master beat him to make him work more; it also described how multiple beatings had rendered him unable to work and engage in the hands-on skill acquisition that apprenticeship entailed.Footnote 56 Other apprentices were corrected for working too slowly. John Salter, a carpenter’s apprentice, complained in 1804 that his master usually kept him occupied making packing cases and picture frames – tasks that did not, in his estimation, constitute proper training. On one occasion, it took him an hour longer than expected to finish a packing case; although he told his master that he had ‘worked as hard as he possibly could’, he was beaten for his idleness.Footnote 57 In the 1790s, Joseph Altrap, who had been placed in a parish apprenticeship to a wool comber in Bethnal Green, complained that his master struck him with a horse whip and described how his mistress joined in the beatings.Footnote 58 He was subjected to a particularly severe beating one day after his master asked how much work he had done and was dissatisfied with the answer.Footnote 59 Exceptionally, the justices sentenced Altrap’s master and mistress to three months in Bridewell, but their term was reduced after the couple filed a petition requesting to be released.Footnote 60
Girls were also corrected for their alleged idleness. About two years into her five-year apprenticeship, a barrister who was responsible for Mary Pritchard petitioned to have her indenture cancelled on the grounds that the girl’s mistress (a dressmaker) expected her to work ‘until 11 or 12 o clock at night’; to wake up ‘as early as 3 or 4 in the morning … to resume her work’; and frequently struck ‘violent blows with her hands [or] a yard stick’. On one occasion, Pritchard’s mistress hit her in the face because she had ‘not repaired some article of apparel … by the time she was ordered to repair it’.Footnote 61 Girls elsewhere in England complained that their mistresses placed comparable demands on them. In 1711, the apprentice lacemaker Hannah Ball deposed to authorities at Shaftesbury’s borough court that her mistress regularly set her on ‘ten hours work’ – implying that she should be able to complete the tasks in question within ten hours. However, Ball noted that she was regularly unable to finish (even after working for 16 hours or more) and was beaten by her mistress as a result.Footnote 62 Back in Middlesex, similar dynamics were on display in a petition filed on behalf of Mary Dauter, a poor girl who had been apprenticed to a watch chain maker in 1781 by parish officials who used funds from a charitable bequest to pay her £7 premium. Four years into her apprenticeship, they requested Dauter’s indenture be cancelled because her master beat her on the ‘pretence that she did not do work enough’.Footnote 63 He purportedly expected her to work for 14 hours a day and on Sundays.Footnote 64 Significantly, this petition suggested how violence could become normalized in the context of apprenticeship and subsequently passed on from one generation to the next. When parish officials questioned Dauter’s master about the methods he used to discipline or correct her, he allegedly remarked that ‘his [own] master had used him ill when [he was] an apprentice and he would use her the same’. By this logic, apprentices did not simply learn occupational skills from their masters or mistresses; they also learnt managerial styles that could, for better or worse, be applied to their own subordinates in due course.
In describing the work-related infractions that had prompted their beatings, Dauter’s and Pritchard’s petitions were unique.Footnote 65 The surviving and catalogued petitions that were filed by or on behalf of girls typically discussed correction in formulaic terms; while petitions sometimes included details about specific forms of violence that girls experienced, they usually neglected to mention the infractions or circumstances that had prompted correction or abuse. Frances Atkinson’s 1768 petition, which described how her mistress (a milliner) ‘corrected [her] beyond the measure of any indiscretion she was guilty of’, was singular in that it obliquely acknowledged that the girl had done anything that might warrant punishment.Footnote 66 Where (privately indentured) girls’ petitions deviated from formulaic scripts, they were more likely to highlight girls’ susceptibility to being made to do menial chores or labour that was inappropriate to their position, adding generic details of violence in the process. Anne Askew had been in service to a widow who posthumously provided funds to place her in an apprenticeship. In 1692, five years into her indenture, Askew’s petition noted that her master had ‘taught [her] nothing [about] making gold and silver lace’; made her spend the better part of a year doing ‘housework’; and subjected her to ‘the most cruel and unreasonable correction many times’.Footnote 67 In 1715, a mantua maker’s apprentice named Sarah Gibson outlined the varieties of ‘comon household worke’ that she had been made to do and added that her mistress had ‘imoderately beaten’ her.Footnote 68 Four years into her apprenticeship in the 1760s, Elizabeth Daniel complained that her mistress, another mantua maker, neglected to instruct her and instead kept her occupied looking after her child on ‘working days and Sundays’. She added that her mistress frequently beat her and announced that she would do so ‘whenever she [thought] proper’.Footnote 69
As indicated by the fact that they petitioned to have their indentures cancelled, all of these girls (or their supporters) found the terms of their service to be wanting. However, when it came to outlining the circumstances that led to their beatings, the Westminster and Middlesex petitions suggest that male apprentices might have been afforded more latitude. A subset of boys’ petitions discussed violence with reference to instances when they had – as a result of insufficient instruction, inappropriate work, unreasonable demands or other issues – challenged their masters and went on to outline how such challenges had occasioned correction. Some of these petitions downplayed apprentices’ assertiveness by referencing behavioural expectations outlined in their indentures, for instance by noting that they had framed their critiques in a ‘submissive manner’.Footnote 70 Others described how they had been punished for taking their grievances to the authorities, implying that their masters regarded such overtures as a punishable form of ‘insubordination’. In 1760, Joseph Churchill complained that his master (a watchmaker who had a succession of lodgers) regularly made him do menial chores and beat him on several occasions after he prosecuted one lodger (a Portuguese sailor) in the Old Bailey for sodomizing him.Footnote 71 In 1735, the apprentice cabinet maker Edward Pavet filed a second petition after his previous one had resulted in him being ordered to return to his master. His second petition outlined the physical and verbal abuse that his master inflicted upon him in the months since he first approached the authorities: Pavet’s master had beaten him in the head; sworn that he ‘should know sorrow’ for the remainder of his apprenticeship; and threatened that he ‘should have no more comfort … then [sic] a cat in hell’ if he ran away.Footnote 72 More often, however, male apprentices’ verbal ‘insubordination’ was presented as a justified response to masters’ failures to fulfil their contractual obligations.
Most of these boys’ petitions discussed the relationship between violence and tensions related to their training and work and were filed at relatively advanced stages of service. In 1737, about six years into his apprenticeship to a cordwainer, Charles Cort noted that his master expected him to procure ‘peggs, tacks and all manner of working tools out of his own money in doing his masters business’ and beat him after he ‘refus[ed]’ to do so on the grounds that his master was obliged to provide the tools.Footnote 73 The same year, an apprentice leather clog maker complained about three years into his apprenticeship that his master ‘swear[ed], curse[d], dam[ned]’ and beat him each time he requested more instruction.Footnote 74 A few years earlier, John Nutting described how his master spent the first four years of his apprenticeship making him paint houses and looking after a horse when he should have been learning how to paint coaches; when he complained, his master ‘flew into passions’, beat him and vowed that ‘he would be the death of [his apprentice]’. In one incident, after Nutting raised his arm to shield himself, his master took him before the justices and claimed that the apprentice had attempted to strike him.Footnote 75 An apprentice carpenter complained in 1745 that, although he was five years into his apprenticeship, his master had kept him busy making ‘mopsticks and carrying … burthens’. He noted that he had frequently requested more instruction and different tasks, but this succeeded only in making his master develop a ‘great hatred and malice’ towards him and striking him for minor or non-existent infractions.Footnote 76 In 1802, a law stationer’s apprentice named Thomas O’Leary recounted a dispute with his master that had resulted in a particularly severe beating. One Sunday, after he was told to work, he ‘remonstrated with his master [about] the hardship and impropriety of being ordered to work on the Lord’s day’, especially because he was ‘much fatigued’ and the task he was being told to do was not ‘urgent’.Footnote 77 After O’Leary announced his ‘determination not to write’, his master beat him with enough severity to give him a black eye. Such petitions indicated how apprentices had attempted to engage in private dispute resolution before complaining to the justices; they also shifted the discussion away from debates about what constituted ‘immoderate’ or ‘justified’ correction and instead recast masters’ violence as being of a piece with a broader failure to fulfil their contractual obligations.
Apprentices’ petitions also suggest that some masters and mistresses articulated a vision of their own rights in the course of everyday social relations – specifically, those conferred by their legal entitlement to use corporal punishment to discipline their subordinates. When John Myers, an apprentice printer, complained to his master in 1784 that he ‘had not any work’ and was subjected to excessive correction for minor infractions, his master allegedly beat him and ‘damned him [and said] he had a right to beat him when he pleased’.Footnote 78 After an apprentice watchmaker and his father confronted the former’s master in 1748 about the substandard training he provided (which included making the apprentice do ‘trifling errands relating to the kitchen [and] nursing children’), the watchmaker announced that ‘no person should prescribe rules to him’ and subsequently beat the apprentice.Footnote 79 Other masters, such as the pawnbroker William Wise, appeared confident that the law was weighted in their favour. When his apprentice’s mother confronted him in 1819 about a succession of beatings he had given her son, Wise told her that he had ‘various ways … to plague an apprentice if he did not do as requested and which the law could not take notice of’.Footnote 80 Other masters were more circumspect. John Sergeant was apprenticed to a musical instrument maker who ‘beat’ him but also had some sense of what sorts of violence might run afoul of contemporary norms and occasion legal difficulties. His master allegedly told him: ‘Although I cannot strike you I will bite and punch you.’Footnote 81 With the exception of Elizabeth Daniel’s previously mentioned petition (in which her mistress remarked that she would beat her apprentice ‘whenever she [thought] proper’), such statements were exclusively attributed to masters in the surviving petitions.
The extent to which masters’ and mistresses’ reported speech can be taken as an accurate record of their statements is an open question. Given the debatable nature of what constituted ‘justified’ versus ‘immoderate’ correction, as well as the institutional backing that masters and mistresses could enjoy in this genre of dispute, it is plausible to assume that some did indeed make such comments. Whatever the case, in the context of petitioning, these narratives had tactical utility. In this subset of petitions, violence was transformed from something that was structurally and legally permissible into something else: the actions of individuals who apparently believed themselves to be uninhibited by the constraints imposed by the law and contemporary ideas about the responsible exercise of authority alike.Footnote 82 Such despotic remarks, one imagines, might not play well in court. If justices were representatives of a system that was weighted in the interests of authority, they were nonetheless expected to maintain the illusion of impartiality. The continued viability of apprenticeship as an institution depended in part on legal authorities’ willingness to provide youths (and their parents or other supporters) with a means of redress. As Peter Rushton suggested, ‘the courts provided the reality of justice to some, though they promised it to all’.Footnote 83
4. Conclusion
Violence was a structural feature of apprenticeship, and service more broadly, in England both before and after the 1814 repeal of the apprenticeship-related clauses in the Statute of Artificers. Masters and mistresses were legally entitled to use physical discipline against their subordinates, and, in the main, apprentices’ indentures said nothing about correction – ‘immoderate’ or otherwise. Indeed, by defining apprentices’ work-related and broader duties to their masters and mistresses, indentures obliquely outlined a range of ‘deviant’ behaviours that might warrant punishment. Although masters and mistresses were expected to refrain from meting out excessive correction, if challenged, they could claim that violence against their apprentices had been moderate and justified in the circumstances. Legal authorities were, at least some of the time, inclined to take masters’ and mistresses’ word over that of apprentices.
In contemporary thinking, boys and girls were both acceptable objects for corporal punishment, with mistresses and masters being expected to chastise subordinates of the corresponding gender. These expectations were reflected in the Westminster and Middlesex petitions, although, as we have seen, girls were apparently more susceptible to cross-gender violence, with just over half of girls alleging that their masters had been either involved in or solely responsible for abuse. Boys’ reported experiences of violence, by contrast, were markedly more homosocial. Some masters, in comparison to mistresses, may have operated under the impression that theirs was a more portable and unconditional authority which entitled them to chastise their female subordinates – notwithstanding contemporary prescriptive recommendations to the contrary.Footnote 84 Furthermore, the potential murkiness surrounding female apprentices’ precise role in the household – as evidenced by their complaints about being made to do menial chores – may have created circumstances in which they were vulnerable to be corrected for failings that were not immediately related to the training and work for which their mistresses were responsible.Footnote 85
While some masters and mistresses used violence to punish apprentices’ real or perceived infractions, others employed a combination of physical violence and verbal threats in an effort to cultivate an environment of productivity and discipline – if not fear – among their subordinates. However, while boys and girls both experienced violence, the Middlesex and Westminter material suggests that the latter were disproportionately likely to seek a cancellation of their indenture on these grounds, with complaints about immoderate correction appearing in almost two-thirds of all petitions submitted by or on behalf of girls; comparable allegations appeared in about a third of all the petitions submitted by or on behalf of boys. What might account for this discrepancy? Contemporaries may have regarded violence against girls as less acceptable – or less normalized – than violence against boys, with a corresponding expectation that male apprentices would tolerate correction without comment. Equally, for female apprentices and their supporters, making complaints about immoderate correction might have been regarded as an efficient way to secure a release from service.
About half of the petitions considered here described violence in formulaic terms, with scribes drawing on a set of stock phrases to highlight the substance of the complaints that apprentices and their supporters made to the authorities. In the main, the scribes who produced petitions for the Westminster and Middlesex Sessions neglected to reproduce accounts of the circumstances that had occasioned abuse, or masters’ and mistresses’ purported motivations for meting out correction. Although such formulaic wording had the potential to obscure more disturbing allegations, it can be explained in part by the nature of apprentices’ stated grievances. Where immoderate correction constituted one of other complaints about masters’ and mistresses’ more unambiguous contractual failings, there was evidently less need to describe it in anything other than boilerplate terms. By contrast, when violence was the sole reason why apprentices or their supporters sought a cancellation of their indentures, petitions went into more detail.
But if many petitions bordered on the stultifyingly generic, there were nevertheless gendered variations in the ways that they recounted violence. About two-thirds of female apprentices’ petitions contained formulaic descriptions; while just under half of boys’ petitions involved comparably formulaic descriptions, a larger proportion went into greater detail. There may have been an informal socio-cultural prohibition against describing the violence that girls experienced in ‘excessive’ detail, with contemporaries regarding it as unseemly or inappropriate to do so. Equally, male apprentices’ complaints about violence may have been expected to meet a higher threshold, with the result that their petitions were more likely to recount and reconstruct the circumstances surrounding their correction. Given the number of surviving petitions from the Westminster and Middlesex Sessions, it is difficult to say whether these gendered variations were representative of broader trends in the ways that apprentices’ complaints were articulated via petitions or limited to the catalogued material considered here.
Whatever the case, these differences had implications for the sorts of information that appeared in girls’ and boys’ petitions, and the windows that these documents offer into apprentices’ experiences. The richest violence-related petitions from the Sessions not only contain details about the circumstances, infractions or challenges to their masters’ or mistresses’ authority that resulted in apprentices being corrected but also offer incidental information about the nature of their work; the ways in which they attempted to negotiate or contest the terms of their service and training; the relationship between physical violence and other disciplinary techniques that masters and mistresses might employ; and the ways in which masters and mistresses conceptualized their legally conferred right to correct their subordinates. To the extent that the surviving petitions recounted such information, they were more likely to be produced on behalf of male apprentices.
On one level, this discrepancy might be speculatively attributed to something like a gendered bias in the institutional settings where petitions were generated. Gowing has shown that other categories of document related to apprenticeship – notably indentures – were imperfectly able to accommodate girls into a system that had evolved with boys in mind and remained overwhelmingly male.Footnote 86 Analogous factors may have been at work in the context of petitioning, with the result that girls’ petitions tended to be more laconic and formulaic not only because female apprentices (and their mistresses) occupied comparatively ambiguous places in the broader population but also because a cultural vocabulary that might facilitate more robust discussions of their experiences of authority, service, training, work and the violence that it could entail was comparatively underdeveloped. On another level, this discrepancy could be attributed to the narrative tactics employed by female apprentices and their supporters. If it was potentially efficacious for some boys’ petitions to narrate their experiences of violence with reference to their contractually justified acts of verbal ‘insubordination’ – notably in the form of critiques of their working conditions or their masters’ supposedly inadequate provision of training – the material considered here raises the possibility that the same was not true for girls. Given contemporary anxieties about the nature of women’s and girls’ speech, there are understandable reasons why petitioners should have sought to avoid giving the impression that the apprentices in question had spoken to their superiors in ‘inappropriate’ ways – perhaps even in situations where girls’ verbal challenges to their mistresses (or masters) were rooted in a grasp of their contractually defined entitlements.Footnote 87 While petitions themselves were testament to an awareness of young people’s rights in the context of apprenticeship, the mechanics involved in the act of petitioning may well have predetermined and circumscribed the contents of female apprentices’ petitions, with the result that certain kinds of information were less likely to appear in them and that (some) girls’ complaints about violence may have been destined to remain on terrain that was more hospitable to their mistresses. For all the insights that petitions provide into the dynamics of apprenticeship, their contents were shaped by structural and cultural factors that could suppress individualized content in ways that were analogous to, but distinct from, the more familiar forms of ‘authorial’ suppression characteristic of the genre.
Acknowledgements
Richard Bell, Rachel Eckersley, Amy Erickson, Laura Gowing, Emma Kalb, Ed Legon, Craig Muldrew, Jack Sargeant and Julia Schmidt discussed various aspects of this piece. Andrea Caracausi, Robert Stearn, Keith Wrightson, the journal’s anonymous readers and Alex Brown commented on an earlier draft. I am grateful to them all. This research was supported with fuding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement number 101105212 and a visiting fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library. The material related to apprentices in the furniture trades was collected with the support of a John Bedford Fellowship in furniture history at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute (LAHRI).
Competing interests
None.
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