The State and the Child in Sixteenth Century England

Abstract

/ iF all the assets of which the State stands possessed, noIle are more g }valuable than the children, but of all its assets, the State has in the 5 past been of none so wasteful and so heedless.[2] So wrote W. Clarke Hall in I9I7. This summary generalization was doubtless prompted by the awakening of the public conscience to the importance of the care and education of children, which was one of the most striking developments of the later part of the nineteenth century, and which has produced in our own day an entirely new conception of the duty of the state towards the child. But this hazardous generalization, however true it may be of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, does injustice to the paternalistic governments of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Children loomed large in the social legislation of the sixteenth century. They were regarded as an important part of the social structure and valuable assets of the commonwealth, and the problems associated with their maintenance and training were matters of national concern. Ideas as to the kind of training necessary were often vastly different from those of to-day, but similar emphasis was laid on the importance of training to fit each child for his proper place in society. Amidst much that is alien to contemporary modes of thought, some few aspects of Tudor policy for children seem nearer to the ideas of the Welfare State than those of any period sntervening. But in a mental climate essentially different from our own, benevolence and harshness, even ferocity, were often intermingled, and a reariew of the treatment of children in various social groups in the sixteenth century reveals many social attitudes that contrast sharply with our own. The problem of the care and training of poor and destitute children was one which exercised the minds of legislators and municipal reformers throughout the sixteenth century. In this respect it was one aspect of a most difficult and intractable problem that faced all governments of Western Europethe necessity to found a system of poor relief to deal with the increase in distress and destitution, and to replace on a systematic basis the inadequacy of 273