ABSTRACT
The experience of growing up was shaped for a growing proportion of the population by institutions that encroached on what can be seen as the territory of the family, particularly in service and education. The experience of childhood was also shaped by attitudes to discipline. The age of seven was traditionally seen as a watershed in the life of a child and most apprentices and servants left home in their mid-teens. Work was far more characteristic of the lives of children in preindustrial England, as from the start of the nineteenth century child labour began to be regulated and increasingly replaced by formal education. Before industrialisation, the role of the child in work was small scale, most of it agricultural and within the context of the family economy. Children and apprentices were sometimes subject to horrific abuse under the guise of discipline.
