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Children and youth have tended to be under-reported in the historical scholarship. This collection of essays recasts the historical narrative by populating premodern Scottish communities from the thirteenth to the late eighteenth centuries with their lively experiences and voices. By examining medieval and early modern Scottish communities through the lens of age, the collection counters traditional assumptions that young people are peripheral to our understanding of the political, economic, and social contexts of the premodern era. The topics addressed fall into three main sections: theexperience of being a child/adolescent; representations of the young; and the construction of the next generation. The individual essays examine the experience of the young at all levels of society, including princes and princesses, aristocratic and gentry youth, urban young people, rural children, and those who came to Scotland as slaves; they draw on evidence from art, personal correspondence, material culture, song, legal and government records, work and marriage contracts, and literature.
Janay Nugent is an Associate Professor of History and a founding member of the Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada; Elizabeth Ewan is University Research Chair and Professor of History and Scottish Studies at the Centre for Scottish Studies, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Contributors: Katie Barclay, Stuart Campbell, Mairi Cowan, Sarah Dunnigan, Elizabeth Ewan, Anne Frater, Dolly MacKinnon, Cynthia J. Neville, Janay Nugent, Heather Parker, Jamie Reid Baxter, Cathryn R. Spence, Laura E. Walkling, Nel Whiting.
The importance of apprenticeships in the medieval and early modern world has long been acknowledged. The role played by these relationships in shaping the lives of early modern European boys and the men they would become has been well documented. In addition to teaching a trade, these apprenticeships provided young men with a master who would monitor their behaviour and keep them from trouble and harm. However, work on apprenticeships has predominantly focussed on boys and men, rather than girls and women. Given the prevalence of male apprenticeships in extant documents, this is perhaps understandable. The training in which women partook has also been discussed, but more with regard to its ambiguity than what it meant for a woman's life and future. Women in the early modern period, it is accepted, tended to work in whatever trade or occupation was practised by their husbands. Although they might engage in their own trade, or in any number of by-employments, while carrying out their roles as wives and mothers, they tended not to develop a strong occupational identity of their own. As a result, girls were not usually entered into formal apprenticeships by their parents, and instead learned a variety of skills that would stand them in good stead for their anticipated future role of wife and helpmeet to a husband.
There were exceptions to these rules. Caroline Barron argued that single women in London in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries could become apprentices. Historians have uncovered a number of apprenticeship contracts for girls in medieval London, and the apprenticeship arrangements of girls have also been discussed for England more broadly by others. Elsewhere in Europe, female apprenticeships seem to have become somewhat more common by the early modern period, as work on France and Germany illustrates. In Bristol in the 1530s and 1540s, girls were often apprenticed to seamstresses. Two-thirds of female apprentices were apprenticed to seamstresses or housewives, who were themselves the wives of masters. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, in her investigation of female apprentices in the trades and crafts of early modern Bristol, noted that in the seventeenth century almost all women who entered apprenticeships (which differed from service contracts in that apprentices paid a fee to assume those positions) took on positions in domestic service, or else positions that combined a craft and household service.
