ABSTRACT

The adults were treated otherwise; nevertheless pauper class provided a ready reservoir of labor after the early years of settlement, especially in the eighteenth century. The boys were frequently used as farm labor in such towns as Woburn, Weston, Marlboro, and Braintree, but not a few were put out to such artisans as cordwainers, housewrights, barbers, shipwrights, and cabinet makers. Plymouth sought the same end, but left the enforcement in the hands of the central governmental authorities rather than transferring it to the towns. Adult idleness and dissolute living were still proscribed, of course, but service in a family was no longer the cure: the house of correction, the work house, and supervision at work by selectmen of the town concerned supplanted the earlier discipline. The court, finding the mother unwilling to post a bond to secure Cambridge against any future charges, ordered the child apprenticed to Michael Fleg of Watertown until the age of twenty-one.