6 Servants and Servitude in Colonial America
The obligation of the masters was primarily to conform to the annual ruling
of the justices of the peace as to the legitimate and fair wages to be paid to
workers. The obligation of the workers was to engage in their task. During
the corn and hay harvest, justices of the peace and constables would require
and enforce, upon pain of punishment, workers “to serve by the day for the
mowing . . . or inning of corn, grain, and hay, and that none of the said per-
sons shall refuse so to do, upon pain to suffer imprisonment in the stocks, by
the space of two days and one night.” The statute also required unmarried
girls 12 years of age and up to work for wages and boys to work as agricul-
tural apprentices, upon pain, if refusing, of having their movements and
freedom restricted by the parish. Apprentices served until age 24 for boys
and 21 for girls. The statute provided for the protection of apprentices from
the abuse of masters and the protection of masters from the unwillingness to
work of apprentices.8
Although the English by Elizabeth’s reign had embraced ideas of the
essential freedom and rights of the English people, there continued to be an
attitude toward the poor that resembled the medieval past, when the vast
majority of the English population was bound to servitude in the system of
serfdom, or villeinage. The streets of London, for example, in 1569, and
many times thereafter, were cleansed of human refuse, as it were, and the
poor of all ages and conditions were sent to one of four bridewells, or hospi-
tals, which was a euphemism for a place where the incarcerated poor would
languish and stay out of the way. A law passed in Elizabeth’s 14th year (1572)
provided for corporeal punishment: vagabonds of at least age 14 would be,
stated the law, “grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the
right ear with a hot iron of the compass of an inch unless some credible per-
son will take him into service for a year.” Four years later, legislation pro-
vided that idle youths were to be supervised in their work by parish officials;
poor children and adults who refused to work would be incarcerated in the
parish workhouse or house of correction, where said recalcitrants would pro-
duce iron, flax, hemp, and wool for the benefit of the parish. Workhouses
often had something akin to a training school to teach youths the values of
work. Officials called “wardens” and “censors” supervised the poor in these
houses. In the wake of crop failures and famine from 1594 to 1597, Elizabeth
and her ministers developed a sophisticated poor relief system that included
overseers in each parish administering monies raised by the poor tax for
outright relief to the deserving poor or incarceration in houses of correction,
workhouses, or hospitals for the undeserving poor. The overseers were also
charged with putting poor children to work or apprenticing them to a mas-
ter. When public means of poor relief and solving the problem of vagrancy
failed, which usually happened, private charity might fill the gap. There were
schemes in many parishes to erect private almshouses and workhouses to
engage the poor more charitably than their public counterparts. Often public
Previous Page Next Page