Appleby History > Alan Roberts > Early Modern Villagers > Apprentices
Appleby Families: Villagers in Early Modern Times
Part 8: The Appleby Apprentices
by Alan Roberts
Despite similarities to servants in their age at recruitment and geographic mobility, apprentices occupied a separate social niche in the parochial hierarchy. One reason was that apprenticeship was almost exclusively restricted to males entering into the services of tradesmen and merchants from a restricted socio-economic group. Not everyone could afford the cost of indentures. Despite evasions of the property restrictions on entry into trades laid down in the Statute of Artificers of 1563, there was a definite social bias in favour of the wealthier inhabitants. The few, scattered references to apprentices in the Appleby records are almost all post 1660, and they suggest that apprentices were drawn primarily from the yeomanry and gentry in each parish. Here, as in other rural areas, apprenticeship caused a loss of young men to London and to local market towns.
Some of the myths surrounding apprentice-migration to London in the early modern period have now been dispelled. We now know that apprenticeship, far from being confined to an unrepresentative elite claimed young men of many different stations from all parts of the country. However, the gentry were by far the most actively involved in apprenticeship placements and they made full use of their kinship connections. For example, in 1684, while Sir John was lord mayor of London, George Moore of Appleby provided a legacy of £100 for each of his two younger sons, Thomas and Robert, to apprentice them in city trades. The family's London connections evidently proved useful in securing placements. The trustees of Appleby Grammar School also secured placements for some local boys. In September 1701 George Wait, the Latin master, conferred with Thomas Moore, his fellow trustee, and Sir John in London, as to a suitable occupation for widow Wainwright's three sons. Mr Wainwright had been a master at the school and, despite his small estate, a gentleman. His two younger sons were thought more suited to 'country trades'. One had an offer from a local shoemaker while the other was almost ready to be apprenticed to a tailor, the usual course, apparently for the sons of craftsmen and smallholders. The trustees recognised that the eldest son, John, was
a very ingenious boy [who] would make a good scholar. but because [his guardians] have not the wherewith[all] to maintain him, we thought that if he had but a good trade, be would by his ingenuity and good behaviour much advance himself.
In due course John was apprenticed to Mr Thomas Burdett, one of the trustees, where he could, presumably, fulfil these expectations. The trustees also acted as benefactors for those who could not afford indentures, as is shown in 1707 when they were instructed to take £5 from school funds to apprentice William Mould, the son of a deceased yeoman, to John Williams of Ashby. Financial considerations played an important part in placements. George Wait's decision to apprentice his two sons to provincial cheesemongers in 1725 was undoubtedly influenced by the growing local market for dairy produce. Clearly the cost of indentures, ranging from £1.10.0 for a local nailer to £150 or more for London stationers and goldsmiths' guilds, was a major consideration. This may be one of the reasons why yeomen like John Taylor and Thomas Stretton apprenticed their sons to local craftsmen rather than to the more prestigious specialist tradesmen. Placement with an apothecary, an attorney or a jeweller would have cost at least six or seven times as much.
Yet the status of apprentices was only indirectly linked to their wealth and family background. The status of apprentices in rural areas was enhanced, for example, by literacy or the ability to keep accounts. Apprentices could be enrolled in a wide range of specialist craft and merchant guilds in London but there were fewer opportunities in country towns and villages where most trades were connected with agriculture. In Appleby the infrequency of any references to apprentices in wills and other documents tends to suggest that their numbers were small and restricted to tradesmen's and craftsmen's households. Only two references were found to confirm that apprentices were taken on by local craftsmen. One is where the Appleby register records the burial of John Berry, an apprentice to Thomas Wilson, yeoman, in 1658. The other, at a somewhat later date, records the apprenticeship of Thomas Rowlands of Faningtoe, in Leicestershire to an Appleby cordwainer. Apprentices are therefore in many respects even more 'invisible' than servants.
The critical factors bearing upon the status of apprentices were probably their relative youth and the comparatively low status of craft occupations. Most apprentices seem to have started indentures when they were about thirteen years old. Calculations based upon the average lengths of apprenticeships suggest that their median age was closer to twenty, so many of them were fully grown youths. These older apprentices, unpaid apart from the obligatory food and lodgings, represented an invaluable source of cheap labour for the skilled craftsmen. These two factors combined to place apprentices in a position that combined the role of servant and craftworker.
Sources and Notes
The 1563 statute required that an apprentice's father should be able to dispose of 40s freehold, or in the case of entry into a merchant household, £10 annually, or be the son of a gentleman or merchant.
V.B. Elliott, thesis, 153.
L.R.O. George Moore, 1686/136.
After 1660 the Moores had connections to a wide range of City trades including salters, fishmongers, dyers, and merchants; Robert Moore was buried at Cripplegate, 1735: Nichols IV, 443-4.
L.R.O. Moore Correspondence, DE 1642/49, DE 1642/55
Entry, 11 June 1707, Appleby School Minute Book (L.R.O. 28 D55/112); Cf. William Mould's inventory, 1698: PR I/103/21.
Apprenticeships, L.R.O. wills, George Wait, 1725. V.B. Elliott, thesis, 8.
Taylor's son, William, apprenticed to a Tamworth cooper, Stretton's son, John to a Coventry weaver, at a cost of £7 and £6 respectively: Warwickshire Apprentices and their Masters, 1710-60, ed. K.J. Smith, Dugdale Society, Oxford, 1975: 133, 136; Cf. Edward Higgs described in 1700 as a day-labourer and in 1706 as 'a poor man' in Appleby PR, yet in apprenticing his son Thomas to Jonathon Harris, a Coventry weaver, in March 1713, he is described as a yeoman: Ibid., 69..
Apprenticeship to a Coventry apothecary in 1719 cost £50, an attorney £80 (1724), a Birmingham jeweller, £50 (1755): K.J. Smith, Warwickshire Apprentices, 21, 120, 123.
Account keeping in the case of Roger Lowe who acted as unofficial notary and accounts reckoner in one northern parish: Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire, 1663-74 ed. W.L. Sachse (New Haven, 1938), 4 . L.R.O. Appleby PR: 1658; K.J. Smith, Warwickshire Apprentices, 119. Both Thomas Higgs and William Mould, were 13 when taken on as apprentices at Coventry and Ashby respectively.
©Alan Roberts
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