The price of an apprentice : contracts and trials in the woollen industry in sixteenth century Italy

Abstract

The history of work in the modern era has – often unfairly – considered children’s work to be a minor aspect of the household, if not « complementary » to the economic activities unfolding within it. While the traditional garzonato [apprenticeship] represented a formative stage of an adolescent’s life, geared toward learning a trade that would be practiced in adulthood, other work done outside of a trade career was considered – often incorrectly – as « minor » and as a mere response to a family’s economic or structural difficulties. As a result the wages of pueri, that is children between the ages of 7 and 14, were usually considered « supplementary » to the household budget in relation to the wages of more adult workers, and thus stripped of their individual nature. However, research on certain Italian and European cities has enabled a partial revision of these interpretations, offering a broader framework for the causes and significance of children’s work in modern times. Drawing on the proceedings from a number of central and northern Italian civil and business courts (Padua, Florence, Vicenza, Milan), cross-checked with a large body of notarial acts, this paper seeks to show how children’s wages played a role that went beyond just remunerating work or supplementing family income. In fact, wages were primarily a means to ensure the temporal continuity of a relationship of debt and credit between two or more people, allowing the children – and their respective parents and guardians – to enter into relationships with other individuals and build social as well as economic ties that might prove useful in the future. Second, children’s wages were not set according to a ‘standard’, but rather reflected apprentices’ individual characteristics, which were primarily defined by the characteristics of their biological family. Finally, by earning wages these children were able to begin a long process of integration into ancien regime society. On the basis of these and other elements this paper proposes to critically discuss the nature, role and function of children’s wages in modern times.