2024/08/01 by James D. Fisher · 2 voices
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Arts and Humanities · #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Architecture, Design, and Social History #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0268416025000062
Abstract This is the first of two articles examining a highly distinctive but overlooked system for organizing child and youth labour in rural England. It reveals how parishes used their powers under the 1601 Poor Law to allocate children as unpaid indentured farm servants (for up to 17 years) to local landholders occupying properties of a certain value. As both apprentice and master could be compelled by law, parish authorities were able to implement centralized rotation schemes. This article (Part I) addresses the initial questions of when, where, why and how compulsory apprenticeship schemes were introduced, based primarily on a survey of the South West before 1750. It presents new evidence of how they emerged as local experiments from the 1670s in a context of overlapping crises and became widespread by the mid-eighteenth century. The consequence was a labour system that bound children to local soil, and thus had peculiar parallels to serfdom, leading nineteenth-century authorities to condemn it for distorting the ‘free’ labour market.