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Coming of Age: Youth in England, C.1400-‐1600 Coming of Age: Youth in England, c.1400-1600 Sarah Elizabeth Mawhinney Doctor of Philosophy University of York History August 2015 Abstract This thesis draws upon three main ideas about adolescence from modern social- scientific research and determines how far thoughts about a concept of adolescence, youth culture and generational conflict can be usefully applied to gain a better understanding of youth and the process of becoming adult in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. The focus of this study is principally urban. It is built upon evidence drawn from conduct literature, church court records, urban court records, civic records, verdicts from coroners’ inquests, churchwardens’ accounts, wills and private correspondence. This research offers a new perspective on existing debates within historical scholarship on youth in the pre-modern era. It challenges the artificial boundary between the late medieval and early modern periods that historians of childhood and youth have thus far tended to impose on the past. It also considers how far differences in gender, age and social status affected youthful experiences and assesses the extent of change and continuity over the two centuries in question. 2 Contents Abstract 2 Contents 3 Acknowledgments 4 Author’s Declaration 5 Introduction 6 Chapter One ‘Life at Home’ 59 Chapter Two ‘Life Away from Home’ 110 Chapter Three ‘Achieving Adulthood’ 144 Chapter Four ‘Youth Culture’ 171 Chapter Five ‘Generational Conflict’ 201 Conclusion 235 Abbreviations 254 Bibliography 255 3 Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my PhD research. I would like to thank the staff at the Borthwick Institute for Archives and York City Archives for their assistance. Thanks are also due to my colleagues in the Department of History and Centre of Medieval Studies who created such a stimulating environment in which to work and teach during my time in York. I owe a particular debt to my supervisor, Dr Jeremy Goldberg, who has been a constant source of inspiration, guidance and support throughout the course of my studies. I will always be grateful to my parents, John and Elizabeth, to Alexandra and to Steven for all their encouragement. 4 Author’s Declaration I, Sarah Elizabeth Mawhinney, declare that this thesis is a presentation of original work and I am the sole author. This work has not previously been presented for an award at this, or any other, University. All sources are acknowledged as References. 5 Introduction The concept of ‘adolescence’ connects and contrasts both etymologically and socially to the concept of ‘adulthood’. The past participle of the Latin verb ‘adolescere’ – ‘to grow [up]’ – is ‘adultum’. Whereas ‘adolescere’ represents a process, ‘adultum’ – ‘having grown up’ – represents the end point. Terms such as ‘adolescence’, ‘youth’ and ‘teenager’ are used routinely in modern parlance. Whilst these terms are embedded with ideas about growth, transition, and incompleteness, the term ‘adult’ is indicative of both completion and completeness. Consequently, studies of adolescence within the social sciences tend to frame young people primarily as not-yet finished human beings. They focus on adolescence as a universal stage in biological and psychological development involving a process that shapes minds and bodies for adult futures.1 The main concern of this thesis is to ascertain how useful modern ideas about adolescence are in an historical context. James Schultz begins his 1991 study of medieval adolescence in Middle High German texts published between 1050 and 1350 by highlighting some thoughts of contemporary developmental psychologists about the features of adolescence. These include the prevalence of generational conflict, struggles with parents and identity crises. Schultz uncovers no evidence of these features in the Middle High German texts that he looks at, so he comes to the radical conclusion that medieval German writers did not recognise a period of life corresponding in any meaningful way to modern adolescence.2 This polemical article prompts my own investigation. I want to explore how far modern social- scientific thoughts about adolescence can make sense of past lives and experiences. More specifically, I want to examine the extent to which an understanding of adolescence is apparent within fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Modern Social-Scientific Understandings of Adolescence The first expression of adolescence as a psychological concept appeared in the work of Hall in the late nineteenth century. In an article published in the Princeton 1 M. Bucholtz, ‘Youth and cultural practice’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (2002), pp. 529, 532. 2 J.A. Schultz, ‘Medieval adolescence: the claims of history and the silence of German narrative’, Speculum, 66:3 (1991), pp. 519-39. 6 Review in 1882, he characterised adolescence as a period of severe crisis. He claimed that it featured a ‘lack of emotional steadiness, enthusiasm and sympathy’ alongside negative tendencies such as ‘violent impulses, unreasonable conduct, and a particular susceptibility to external influences’.3 Hall’s subsequent encyclopaedic work entitled Adolescence: Its Psychology, and its relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, published in 1904, marked the foundation of adolescent psychology as a discipline. In this text, he depicted adolescence as a difficult phase of the lifecycle characterised by almost continuous ‘storm and stress’ from the ages of fourteen to twenty-four.4 He also argued that young males and young females had very different adolescent experiences. Hall provided the first comprehensive theory of adolescence in modern history and his work has had a lasting influence.5 Hall’s interpretation of adolescence was challenged by Mead in a foundational anthropological study entitled Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928. She explicitly referred to his characterisation of youth in the introduction to her text. She claimed that young people in Samoa became successfully integrated into adult society without displaying any of the negative effects of ‘storm and stress’ and generational conflict that Hall believed to be common features of this stage of the lifecycle. Mead argued that the characteristics he identified were the product of particular cultural developments and were not universally experienced.6 Her study established adolescence as a crucial topic of anthropological investigation.7 Most significantly, her anthropological ethnography revealed that every culture views adolescence differently and experiences are not therefore uniformly applicable. This emphasised how the modern adolescent cannot be deemed the modal adolescent.8 Only a handful of similar studies appeared over the next fifty years and it was not until the late 1970s that a firmer anthropological interest in 3 G.S. Hall, ‘The moral and religious training of children’, Princeton Review (1882), pp. 26-48. 4 G.S. Hall, Adolescence: its psychology, and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education, 1 (New York, 1904), p. xix. 5 See A. France, Understanding youth in late modernity (Buckingham, 2007), pp. 25-7. 6 M. Mead, Coming of age in Samoa (New York, 1928), p. 2; C. Wallace and S. Kovatcheva, Youth in society: the construction and deconstruction of youth in east and west Europe (New York, 1999), pp. 30-2. 7 Bucholtz, ‘Youth and cultural practice’, p. 525. 8 A. Schlegel and B.L. Hewlett, ‘Contributions of anthropology to the study of adolescence’, Journal of Research on Adolescence, 21:1 (2011), p. 287. See also J.J. Arnett, ‘The neglected 95%: why American psychology needs to become less American’, American Psychologist, 63:7 (2008), pp. 602-14. 7 adolescence emerged.9 At this time the Harvard Adolescence Project commenced. It resulted a decade later in the publication of four major anthropological ethnographies which focus on adolescent life in a variety of cultures that only comparatively recently began the transition from traditional to modern ways of life.10 These studies approach adolescence from the perspective of adulthood. They downplay youth-centered interactions and youth as a cultural category in favour of an emphasis on the transition to adulthood and on adolescence as a biological and psychological stage of human development.11 The identification of four sequential developmental stages spanning from birth to adolescence by Piaget and Inhelder provides a rationale from developmental psychology for the identification of particular adolescent traits.12 They argue that at the age of eleven a new mode of formal operations commences which involves hypothetical-deductive reasoning – that is, the ability to explore propositions that are hypothetical or false and to develop powers of reflection and criticism.13 The idea of developing formal reasoning enables them to explain more specifically why certain experiences become typical features of adolescence. Piaget and Inhelder claim that a new-found capacity for combinatorial logic and the ability to construct both ideals and contrary-to-fact situations are accountable for the adolescent formulating alternatives to parental directives, acting more rebelliously, having problems making decisions and becoming more dependent on peers for advice and assistance in this respect. They also maintain that individuals come to be markedly more private and secretive about their lives during their adolescence because an 9 Schlegel and Hewlett, ‘Contributions
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