“The Childe of Bristowe” and the Making of Middle-Class Adolescence

Abstract

Abstract The behavior of middle-class youth became a prominent theme in the literature, laws, court cases, guild regulations, and thinking of fifteenth-century English society in an obsessive way uncharacteristic of preceding centuries. Books of advice for youth aspiring to make their way up the social ladder proliferated in manuscript form and spread even more with the invention of printing. Among the dominant metaphors were the relationship of the young to the old, the apprentice to the master, the uncultivated to the cultivated. The process of forming a concept of a societal ideal of middle-class adolescent behavior was, as Norbert Elias described, one in which meaning and form were picked up and polished in speech and writing and “tossed back and forth until they became efficient instruments for expressing what people had jointly experienced and wanted to communicate about.” In this chapter I will look at this process of polishing descriptions of adolescent behavior as they were circulated between literary and legal creations, on the one hand, and the actual experience of adolescence, on the other. The game of exchange between the literary and the historical leads to a fifteenth-century construction of adolescence. Although the ideal type may be seen in a number of written examples, the portrait appears most fully in a popular poem, “The Childe of Bristowe” and in its variant, “The Merchant and His Son.” These didactic narratives are a fifteenth-century version of Horatio Alger stories, adventure tales in which an aspiring lad overcomes the obstacles set in his way to achieve good fame and fortune.