Apprenticeships and Nurture on Harn
This submission is based on a historical look at how Apprenticeship and the closely related practice of Nurture worked in the medieval world. I will start by looking at certain clues as the nature of these systems that survived the medieval period, in some cases into the twentieth century.
The concept that a youth did not become an adult until the age of twenty-one or more recently eighteen doesn’t seem to have taken hold until the Victorian age of the 19th century. In Medieval England boys of twelve were expected to join the men in taking the annual keep the peace oath. This oath was not only a pledge to obey the King’s Laws, it was also a promise to report all who broke the law and take them for the sheriff. Every freeman and boy of age twelve in each hundred was to take the oath. In colonial America, where the militia laws were based on those of England, boys of fifteen were counted as part of the militia. In other words they were subject to being called out for military duty as soldiers, an adult responsibility. It should also be noted that in colonial America boys of fourteen were old enough to get married and start a family. This in fact remained the case is some states as late as the World War Two period. In Germany, as late as the 1950’s, boys who had completed apprenticeships would begin their wander years as journeymen at age sixteen. All of these holdovers suggest that boys entered adult life at between fourteen and sixteen years of age in the medieval period.
Medieval apprenticeship contracts usually contained a clause requiring the wife of the master the apprentice would train with to supply “motherly care.” This implies that the individual entering the apprenticeship was young enough to need “motherly case.” Given that most boys of fourteen would be entering the adult world the only conclusion that can be drawn is that apprentices were well under the age of fourteen. In fact most were between seven and ten. I should also note the ancient regulation of King’s Collage Cambridge that states: “Only King’s Letter Boys may play marbles on the chapel steps.” Collage freshmen in our world don’t play marbles. Twelve year olds do, or did when I was twelve. In the Medieval period most boys entered collage at about twelve and collage undergraduates were children. This, I should note, was in some cases still true at the University of Wisconsin in the 19th Century.
Nurture was the system by which noble boys were trained. The basic rule in England and France was: “The lord hath the right to the nurture of the vassal’s child.”·[1] The Harn Core rules state that this training was done by some manor knight or other but there would be at most only one youth of an age to be a squire for every four knights if this part of the training was done between fourteen and twenty-one. In fact all young nobles were nurtured in the household of the lord from whom their father held. This would be an earl, baron, or even the king. The arrangement would benefit the child since such a household would have knights with many skills a youth would need to learn. But even before the boy was old enough to begin serious war training there would be other things a boy from a rural manor use to playing with peasant children would need to know such as etiquette, heraldry, and gentlemanly skills such a music and dancing. These would be taught by the lord’s lady or those of her encourage while the child also received “motherly care.” This arrangement also benefited the lord. It gave his a hostage against the loyalty of his vassal, it insured that the young knights who had grown up in his nurture were loyal to him, and that they had received the best training in knightly skills possible from the ablest instructors the lord could engage.