Introduction

This chapter discusses that child labour was discovered under the ancien regime. Child labour was, of course, nothing new - no more than childhood, but in early modern Europe the efforts to set children to work became systematic and intensive as never before. The elite and bourgeoisie of the ancien regime took the children of the poor and labouring classes as a resource to be disciplined and mobilised. In this respect, there was an analogy between the coming of manufactories under the ancien regime and the coming of factories during the industrial revolution. Even though medieval sources offer plenty of evidence of child labour, the lack of quantitative data rules out systematic comparisons over centuries. Medieval miracles feature working children: a nine-year-old girl spinning, a six-year-old housemaid, a little serving girl, a nurse aged about fifteen.