ABSTRACT
Jeremy Black and Donald MacRaild have observed that many of the subjects historians would like to study most are the least well documented.2 The subject of children in sixteenth-century England certainly confirms Black and MacRaild’s observation due to their infrequent appearances in contemporary autograph sources such as letters and diaries. It is true that parents and others may have documented the lived experiences of some children,3 but on the whole the majority of the country’s minors are conspicuously absent from such records. As a consequence, historians have turned to records, in particular legal records, where children feature as ‘other parties’. Few people in the sixteenth century left behind narratives of their lives, but there were a considerable number who used the ecclesiastical and secular courts to resolve many disputes arising from day-to-day living. Historians have on the whole concluded that the history of children is
always mediated through the voices of adults. Keith Thomas, for example, refers to the notion of children being a ‘muted group’ in history, a sentiment echoed byWillem Frijhoff, who asserts that ‘adults speak for children’.4 Ludmilla Jordanova develops this point of view further by claiming that there can never be a history of children separate from that of adults because ‘there is no autonomous, separate voice of children in which a separate history could be rooted: their testimony is inevitably bound in with the world of adults, through which they learn their languages, mental habits, and patterns of behaviour’.5
Admittedly, it is very rare to uncover a source individuals wrote by themselves when still a child but that does not mean that we do not hear the sound of children’s voices. The historian just has to work harder at teasing out children’s voices from those that mediate children’s pasts, a process little different from writing the history of many other groups in society. There would be an insignificant historiography on the poor and illiterate if the only sources historians had at their disposal were those written by the subjects themselves. And, as is the case
in all histories of civilisation, you will hear the voices of some children louder than others due to the nature of how the sources were recorded. Turning our attention to what extant sources are available for this study, it
should be observed that sixteenth-century English society was heavily influenced by the written and printed word regardless of class.6 The expansion of record keeping in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by governments and civic bodies, aligned with the increase in printing, resulted in the plentiful survival of written records.7 The skill of writing was generally associated with professional scribes and trained clerics, whose sphere of activity concerned business matters. Artisans and merchants would also have been literate enough to keep accounts, as indicated by an extract from the Brewers of London’s First Book, which states in 1422 that henceforth all records were to be kept in English as ‘many of our craft of Brewers have the knowledge of writing and reading in the said English idiom, but … the Latin and French … they do not in anywise understand’.8 Even those who could not read the written word were privy to ideas and news through oral culture and tradition, giving them a degree of functional literacy. It is with this breadth of diversity in mind that I have approached the sample group of children for this book, defining them not by social class but as part of the whole community that participated in everyday life in sixteenth-century northern English towns and villages. People in the sixteenth century would not have referred to themselves in the
class divisions historians do today, but rather by the occupations of their neighbours, or the lands and tenements that they held.9 Such practice is reflected, almost without exception, in all the sources used in this book. This is an important consideration as it allows us to perceive how ordinary people made sense of their worlds and how they compared themselves to their neighbours. Moreover, it enables us to avoid using anachronistic analysis of the sources by realising that people in the past did not think as we do today.10 But how can we best discern the lived experience of children from legal records while avoiding the anachronistic pitfalls of interpreting children’s history? It is imperative that this study is guided by the sources as to how childhood was defined in sixteenth-century northern England and the first step we must take is to appreciate the kinds of cases in which children appear, as well as the roles they occupied in the testimony. Such an appreciation will naturally shape the nature of the appearances of children the evidence offers us, and will influence how we assess the evidence. Children regularly appeared in a number of legal sources but in the main
these were limited to four distinct types of proceedings: suits relating to underage marriage (church courts); disputes over inheritance and wardships (Court of Chancery); disagreements over service contracts (Court of Chancery and Quarter Sessions); and maintenance in relation to illegitimate children (church courts and Quarter Sessions). They were also cited in items in Town orMayors’ Books. However, children were rarely called as witnesses in sixteenthcentury court cases. Certainly, under canon law it was forbidden for a child below the age of puberty (twelve for girls, fourteen for boys) to act as a
witness.11 Additionally, in no circumstance could a child testify on behalf of one of their parents. The reasoning behind this decision reflected the belief not only that children did not have the discretion or reason to give testimony that would protect adult interests but also that allowing a child to speak in the courtroom would weaken adult authority.12 The children included in this book did not appear as witnesses when children but did appear as litigants or witnesses when they were old enough to give legal testimony and thereby gave retrospective accounts of their childhood.13 In addition, children appear as underage subjects of parental or adult concern and protection, and also as third parties casually mentioned in adult testimony. It is important to remember when dealing with legal documents that the
‘grammar of the law’ is crucial to understanding the cultural implications of how the trial process operated.14 Who was legally allowed to appear as witness and what was acceptable testimony, as well as the rules governing the creation of court documents all conspired to shape the narratives produced in the depositions. It is in acknowledgement of these considerations that the questions for this chapter have been developed. How did the legal process work and how was the evidence recorded? Was there a particular social composition to those who used the courts and was it different from that of the whole of society? How can we read the sources for evidence of the lived experiences of children? What can we deduce from the records about community norms in relation to children? The use of legal documents is not a new phenomenon for historical
research. F. W. Maitland, the English legal historian, observed that they were ‘the best, often the only, evidence we have for social and economic history’.15
Maitland may have been referring to the secular courts but, as Christopher Haigh has noted, the observation applies equally to records of the ecclesiastical court, whose influence over the behaviour of people during the period in question was equal to that of their temporal counterparts, if not greater.16 As Ronald Marchant has indicated, the function church courts performed within sixteenth-century English society reflected the Bible’s view of conflict resolution. Matthew 18:15-17 states that if the person who has sinned against you will not listen to reason from you or from others, then you must ‘tell it to the church’.17
