"My Pappa is out, and my Mamma is asleep." minors, their routine activities, and interpersonal violence in an early modern town, 1653-1781.

On August 26, 1765, two girls, one 12 years of age, the other nine, looked out a window and saw a handsome young marine lieutenant by the name of William August Jenkins. Their names were Betsy and Ann Robertson, and with them were three maids: Ann, Sally, and Mary. What happened next was the source of much dispute and many intemperate words, as, indeed, was any episode in which the commissioner of the royal dockyard at Portsmouth was called on to discipline the junior officers who routinely descended on the town and terrorized its inhabitants. According to Jenkins, the older of the two girls invited him inside, saying, "Mr. Jenkins, my Pappa is out, and my Mamma is asleep, and if you will come in we can all have a game." (1) Jenkins readily acceded to the request, and for the next half hour "frisked about with Miss Robertson" and her maids. He denied, however, "having any design upon" Betsy Robertson, adding that he "considered her as a Child."

The girls' father, who was not informed of these events until the next morning, naturally took a much dimmer view of Lieutenant Jenkins' conduct. It was, he said, one of the maids who had invited Jenkins into the house, upon which "Mr. Jenkins then laid hold of Betsy and chased her through the hall & Kitchen into the Brewhouse, where he pulled her about and kissed her; but letting her go at the Rebuke of a Servant Ann, then in the Brewhouse, he followed Betsy into the Stall, & there acted the same behaviour again ..." Jenkins promptly exited upon being told that the mistress of the house was about to make an appearance, only to let himself back in through a window a few minutes later. He then resumed his pursuit of young Betsy, desisting only when it was clear that Mrs. Robertson had at long last roused herself.

It had been an episode worthy of Faydeau, with this one crucial exception: no one seems to have been amused. In the days that followed harsh words were exchanged between the girls' father and Jenkins, with the latter advising the former "that close confinement is the best Method he can think of for the preservation of his Daughters Chastity." It was in vain that the exasperated commissioner of the royal dockyard appealed to Jenkins' commanding officer, Colonel Hector Boisrond. Annoyed but by no means surprised, Boisrond dismissed the entire episode as one he could not "take any Cognizance of, any further than reproving [Jenkins] for the Indecency he has been guilty of, advising him to make the proper Apologies to Mr. Robertson and cautioning him against such behaviour for the future ..." Even this was too much for the young lieutenant, who instead of apologizing to the girls' father continued to taunt him, telling him on one occasion, "I think I have already made you a Man of more consequence than I ought to have done, by condescending to have any altercations with you upon so trifling a Subject."

Lieutenant William August Jenkins may not have been a gentleman, but he had at the very least grasped the essential principles of what has since come to be known as routine activities theory. Simplified, routine activities theory predicts that crimes are likeliest to occur when three conditions are present: a motivated offender; a suitable target, be it property or a person; and the absence of a capable guardian. (2) Jenkins was motivated; Betsy was a suitable and quite possibly a willing target; and, as the child herself is supposed to have said, "My Pappa is out, and my Mamma is asleep." That left Ann, Sally, and Mary, none of whom proved a capable guardian in the absence of Mr. and Mrs. Robertson.

Obviously, the primary use of routine activities theory is to predict where and when particular types of crimes might occur. But the theory can also be turned on its head, which is to say that the incidence of crime can tell us something about what people routinely do, and who, if anyone, is there to look after them. This is especially true of crimes against children. Where and when are these crimes most likely to occur, and who, if anyone, comes to the aid of children who are victimized? And what do these crimes tell us about the status of children and their relationship to adults?

These are questions that have long bedeviled historians who study children and childhood in early modern Europe. Most of these historians are divided into two camps, one social, the other psychological. Members of the former camp hold that attitudes toward children are socially constructed; from this it follows that they can and will change over time. In the case of Europe, children were at one point supposed to have been little adults who were neither cherished per se nor segregated from the world of adults. The same argument holds that the status of children has undergone a gradual transformation, consistent with broader changes in the relations between men and women and the relations of families with the outside world. (3) Then there is the camp that holds that we are hardwired to love and protect our children, and that this was as true of early modem parents as it is of the middle-class parents who now shop at Baby Cap and Gap Kids. (4)

When it comes to early modem Europe, however, neither camp has at its disposal materials that shed much light on what working-class men and women thought about the children in their midst. Instead, historians must for the most part rely on what members of the middle and upper classes saw fit to record, which is to say that the historical record is dominated by the people who had the most time and the most resources to lavish on their children. Our data, by contrast, are dominated by the ordinary men, women, and children who appeared before local justices of the peace, whether for assault, petty theft, vagrancy, or other misdemeanors. Interspersed in their complaints are 144 cases involving assaults on or by minors, including two cases of rape or indecent assault. To the extent that these cases consist of assaults, they show relations between adults and minors at their very worst; at the same time, however, they also show that many adults were willing to intercede on behalf of people younger and smaller than t hemselves, and that even the adults who beat minors were capable of exercising some restraint.

The data and their context

The sessions papers date from 1653 to 1781. There are, of course, gaps, especially in the earlier years, and it is only after 1695 that the papers are sufficiently continuous to support statistical comparisons. (5) All told, they consist of 14,201 complaints lodged before the town's magistrates; of these, the majority, or 7,658, consist of assault in one form another, including incidents in which a confrontation did not progress beyond a threat or insult. The number does not include riots, incidents of dangerous riding, vandalism, or disturbing the peace, each of which obviously contained varying degrees of aggression. The complaints are for the most part very brief, and as such do not readily lend themselves to an extensive qualitative analysis.

The records happen to span a crucial period in what might broadly be termed "the history of the emotions." Two changes stand out as currently established in historical scholarship: first, attitudes toward interpersonal violence would appear to have undergone a profound change over the course of the eighteenth century; and second, this change coincided with a reclassification in the status of children--or at least some children. Both ideas can in many ways be traced back to The Civilizing Process, which was first published in German in 1939. Its author, the sociologist Norbert Elias, postulated that Westerners have over time become much better at controlling their impulses, including the urge to strike or hurt other people. Among the factors contributing to this "civilizing process" are the growth and increasing complexity in social functions, which in Elias' model help to constrain behavior by forcing individuals to attune their behavior to that of other people. These forces, he argued, "are to be found where ver, under competitive pressures, the division of functions makes large numbers of people dependent on one another, wherever a monopolization of physical force permits and imposes a co-operation less charged with emotion, wherever functions are established that demand constant hindsight and foresight in interpreting the actions and intentions of others." (6)

Elias' model figures prominently--and often without adequate recognition--in the work of the late Lawrence Stone. Stone, drawing on numbers compiled by Ted Gurr, (7) argued that both homicides and other forms of interpersonal violence declined dramatically in England between 1600 and 1800. (8) Because this reported decline occurred in the absence of an organized police force, Stone attributed it to forces that look very much like Elias' civilizing process, that is, "to a cultural softening of manners, to a greater sensitivity to cruelty and violence," and to "the social rise of a middle-class culture and a more market-oriented society." (9) John Beattie's time-line moves in roughly the same direction, with overall levels of violence declining between the Restoration and 1800. (10) Beatrie has also found a growing intolerance for attacks on wives, children and servants from about 1750 on (11) ; this finding, as we will see, finds only limited support in our own data. Peter King, writing in 1996, is considerabl y more cautious. He finds that attitudes did not change until the late eighteenth century, and that the change was in large part initiated from above by magistrates. (12)

There is, of course, always the possibility that Portsmouth, with its rough mix of prostitutes, publicans, soldiers, and sailors, simply bucked all trends, and was as violent at the beginning of the eighteenth century as it was at the beginning. But, as Figure 1 shows, this was not the case. On the contrary, reported assaults actually declined in the second half of the eighteenth century, even as the town's population grew and the incidence of war also increased. The overall trends, then, fit nicely with what Stone and Beattie would have predicted. Assaults on minors, however, did not follow the same downward trajectory. This is illustrated in Figure 2. The trend, as discussed on page 575-576, raises several interesting possibilities.

And it is here that we once again cross paths with Lawrence Stone. Stone, following in the footsteps of Philipe Aries, made the strongest possible case for the social construction of childhood, with parents becoming more emotionally attached to their children--and more willing to segregate them from the adult world as the latter's chances of survival increased. These changes are supposed to have occurred over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and are broadly grouped under the rubric of "the closed domesticated nuclear family." At the same time, parenting skills are supposed to have improved as adults became better at mastering their own impulses and at developing strong emotional ties. In this equation children benefitted to the extent that they were more apt to be cherished, and they suffered to the extent that they were now barred from the pleasures and vices of the adult world. (13)

Figure 2 would suggest otherwise, unless, of course, we choose to believe that assaults on minors were becoming increasingly unacceptable, and thus were much likelier to be reported to authorities. (There is also the simple fact that from about 1750 on the population was growing rapidly, which is to say that the proportion of minors had increased; this, in turn, leaves open the possibility that the number of assaults on minors increased, but that the actual incidence remained flat or even decreased.) The real problem is that the data behind Figure 2 do not look anything like the sorts of data that Stone worked with in writing The Family, Sex and Marriage in England. The children of ordinary working men and women fall between the cracks in Stone's model; moreover, given the downward trend of real wages from about 1750 on, (14) it seems highly unlikely that poor parents suddenly became fonder of their children just as more and more of them managed to survive and insisted upon being fed. Cunningham, it seems, is much closer to the mark when he says that the children of the poor were seen as necessarily and desirably different from the children of the rich until the very end of the eighteenth century, and that it was not until well into the nineteenth century that large numbers of people came to believe that work was incompatible with the true nature of childhood. (15) And finally, privacy, which figures so prominently in Stone's model for the evolution of families and children alike, was simply out of the question for the vast majority of early modem households.

The town and its inhabitants

Indeed, it is hard to imagine a town with less privacy than early modern Portsmouth. The town's population, including that of nearby Gosport, numbered perhaps 14,500 in 1725, (16) and it continued to grow throughout the century, with sharp increases, both in baptisms and in the number of temporary residents, whenever the country was at war. Much of the town's growth can be attributed to immigration, a phenomenon that has been observed for many other English towns of the time, (17) with Portsmouth and its conurbation accounting for an ever growing percentage of the region's population. The rapid growth of the royal dockyard, which started with 294 employees in 1687 and ended with more than 2,000 by the end of the War of Spanish Succession (1702-1713), inevitably led to severe overcrowding, and with it, high levels of mortality among the town's population.18 Mortality would presumably have been highest among the town's infants and children, contributing, if we are to believe Stone, to a certain callousness towa rd children and adults alike. (19)

Portsmouth was by all accounts an exceptionally violent town. Its primary industry was war, a feature that became more pronounced after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. (20) With the accession of William of Orange England became involved in a succession of increasingly costly wars with France, making Portsmouth an ideal base for launching military operations against the Bourbons and their allies on the Continent. Each time this happened large numbers of local men were pressed into indefinite service abroad, leaving their wives to support themselves and their children as best they could. (21) At the same time, thousands of unruly young men from elsewhere in England would descend on the town, whether to be shipped out, demobilized, or simply to wait while their ships were repaired and refitted in the royal dockyard. These conditions were naturally conducive to violence, especially when, as was so often the case, sailors and soldiers flocked to the town's public houses in search of alcohol and prostitutes. Junio r officers, including men like young lieutenant William August Jenkins, were perhaps the worst offenders: not only were they exceptionally touchy on points of honor, they also carried swords and used them freely. (22) (Jenkins himself challenged Mr. Robertson to a duel; Robertson wisely declined.) The behavior of men and officers alike appalled many observers, including, most notably, Major-General James Wolfe. It was in Portsmouth that he spent his last days in England; unlike Lieutenant Jenkins, he was not easily tempted by what he saw:

The condition of the troops that compose this garrison (or rather, vagabonds that stroll about in dirty red clothes from one gin-shop to another) exceeds all belief. There is not the least shadow of discipline, care, or attention. Disorderly soldiers of different regiments are collected here; some from the ships, others from the hospital, some waiting to embark,--dirty, drunken, insolent rascals, improved by the hellish nature of the place, where every kind of corruption, immorality, and looseness is carried to excess; it is a sink of the lowest and most abominable of vices. (23)

The town's largest employer was the royal dockyard, which by the eighteenth century employed roughly a quarter of the town's permanent male population, in addition to generating jobs in ancillary services and trades. (24) Its workforce included large numbers of adolescent males whose modest wages were appropriated by the craftsmen to whom they were apprenticed. (25) These lads would appear to have been a puny lot, as has, in fact, been observed for their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe. (26) In 1744, for example, the Navy Board felt compelled to issue a directive requiring that all new-hires "be full five feet high and fifteen years old, but if not of that height, then to be sixteen years of age, well set and able lads capable to labour ... " (27) This is an important point: assuming that there is some basis to the claim that "big people hit little people," (28) Portsmouth's youths, like youths elsewhere in early modem Europe, were both at risk and at a disadvantage when they entered the world of work. In the parlance of routine activities theory, many of them became suitable targets just as they were deprived of capable guardians.

One other point stands out: then as now, many of the town's paupers happened to be minors. This is borne out by the countless cases in which poor families applied for relief by attempting to establish that they were in fact legally settled in either of the town's two parishes--Portsmouth and Portsea. Pauper children--and their pauper parents--were naturally a source of acute annoyance to local ratepayers, none of whom wished to become liable for the upkeep of indigent families. Along with their parents, these children could expect to be treated very roughly, contributing, if only indirectly and cumulatively, to an environment in which all minors might be treated very roughly. At best, the children of the poor could expect to be put to work at a very early age, (29) thus increasing their odds of coming into contact with potentially violent adults. In the parlance of routine activities theory, they suddenly found themselves promoted to the dubious status of suitable targets. Consider the case of young William S weet. When his father died in or around 1660 William was placed as an apprentice with a man by the name of Edward Wigmore, only to be released from his indenture after the latter was charged with "unreasonably correcting the child." (30) Then there was the case of George Godman, whose widowed mother went to the authorities when his master, a tailor by the name of Money, beat him with a horsewhip and knocked him down. (31)

Definitions

The most basic problem is one of definitions. That is, who was a minor and who was not, and what were the gradations within this broad category? The first point that stands out is that Portsmouth's clerks often used the terms "infant" and "child" interchangeably, which in and of itself suggests a cheerful confusion or indifference in the minds of contemporaries. (32) In 1720, for example, a sailor by the name of Pickernell stood accused of assaulting "Robert Harding, an infant aged about eight years," (33) while one year later, in 1721, a three-year old pauper by the name of William Rice was identified in one instance as an infant and in another as a child. (34) Then there was the case of the "infant" Elizabeth Sparrow, who along with her mother Susanna was alleged to have assaulted Elizabeth Boyes in 1724. (35) No less baffling is the case of Edward Newberry, who at the age of 11 was still described as "a little boy." (36) Then there is the example of Lieutenant William August Jenkins, who engaged in sexual play with twelve-year-old Betsy Robertson even though he "considered her as a Child."

With the exception of paupers and vagrants, the ages of litigants were recorded only up to the age of 18 or 19, suggesting that individuals effectively ceased to be regarded as minors at about the age of 20. Even then, however, few individuals would have been regarded as true adults. (37) Young men, for example, could expect to work several more years as apprentices or servants in the households of their masters, after which they and their prospective spouses were still several years away from amassing the resources with which to establish households of their own. (38) At the age of 20, moreover, many of them were still far from fully grown, their development having been stunted by the combined effects of poor nutrition and hard manual labor. (39)

The most useful division for the purposes of routine activities theory is between minors who were too young to work outside the home and those who were not. The assumption, of course, is that work, often in a faraway town, brought with it fundamental changes in the routine activities of minors while also depriving many of them of capable guardians in the form of parents and other relatives. The same circumstances also increased minors' exposure to alcohol and the places where it was served, (40) thus greatly increasing their odds of being drawn into a brawl. As late as 1839, the year when John Dunlop published his Philosophy of Artificial and Compulsory Drinking Usage in Great Britain and Ireland, it was still very common for apprentices to join their elders in drinking bouts. Thus in one small town

... it was usual for the apprentices to visit the company after dinner, and partake of drink along with them: a collection of money was also made for the apprentices to drink the next day. His master always paid wages in a public house, where spirits were continually given. At each fair of the town (of which there were four in the year), the apprentices received some shillings to drink ... There were four apprentices; and all of them, by the time they had finished their term of four years and a half, were regular drunkards. (41)

There is every reason to believe that these conditions were even more pronounced a hundred years earlier, and that they were especially pronounced in early modem Portsmouth, which as of 1716 had no fewer than 207 public houses, (42) in addition to countless private residences in which widows and wives supplemented their meager incomes by selling beer and gin.

There was considerable range as to when a minor might be farmed out as an apprentice or servant. As a rule, the poorer the child, the earlier his or her entry into the workaday world. A poor child might thus be farmed out as an apprentice at the age of eight (43); most minors, however, would appear to have started their careers as servants or apprentices anywhere between the ages of 14 and 16. (44)

The victims

The youngest victims were, quite literally, babes in arms. They were attacked simply because they happened to be with their mothers, the latter being the intended target. Assailants, however, would appear to have made little distinction between the two; by the same token, there were at least 20 incidents in which assailants attacked women who were visibly pregnant.

All told, there were 24 cases in which children were the incidental victims of attacks targeting adults. These included three attacks on fathers and 19 on mothers. (45) In 1716, for example, Margaret Edgar complained that Nicholas Bantham had assaulted her, and "that at the same time and place" another person "did assault and beat Joseph Edgar, an infant and son of the deponent." (46) When Mary Smith threw stones at Dorothy Haytin in 1737, she also managed to bruise "the young child [the] deponent was carrying." (47) When Samuel Dicklegg poured water on Elizabeth Wills in 1755 he also succeeded in dousing her child. (48) When Richard Gill assaulted Sarah Way in 1743, "The child in her arms was also bruised in her arms." (49) And in 1756, Anne Churchill and Sarah Bartlett beat Hannah Hunt, "who then had a child in her arms." (50)

More typically, however, parents would appear to have been absent when their children were attacked. This, at least, can be inferred from cases where a third party lodged a complaint on behalf of a child, as detailed in Table 1. The majority, or 26 out of 40, of these third parties were women. When men intervened they were most likely to do so on behalf of children old enough to be left on their own and to perform basic tasks for adults, quite possibly for the men themselves. It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what prompted third parties to intervene on behalf of children. In at least one case, dating from 1748, the prosecutor did not know the child's surname, suggesting that the woman intervened not because she was a caregiver or neighbor but rather because she was horrified by what she had seen. (51) The virtual absence of prosecutions brought by fathers may or may not be significant; obviously, fathers who were employed as sailors or soldiers would have been absent for long periods of time, espec ially in times of war. On the other hand, children whose fathers were known to be in town may have been less likely to be targeted. They were not, in other words, suitable targets.

Table 2, which details prosecutions brought by minors, picks up exactly where Table 1 starts to drop off, that is, between the ages of 13 and 14. These prosecutions are of particular interest because they suggest that the town's residents mastered the rudiments of the law at what would now be considered a very young age. As Table 2 indicates, the youngest plaintiff, a girl by the name of Jane Kelly, was just nine years old when she went before a justice of the peace. (52) She was, however, an exception. Most junior plaintiffs, or 44 out of 53, fell between the ages of 13 and 16, that is, the age at which there was a sharp drop-off in the number of adults initiating prosecutions on behalf of minors. This was also the age at which most minors began their careers as servants or apprentices, often in faraway towns. To the extent that they were on their own for the first time, they were suitable targets, (53) and to the extent that they were friendless, few adults were prepared to go to court on their behalf. This same logic may help account for why there are so few older adolescents in our sample: not only were they bigger, and thus better able to defend themselves, they had also had the time to develop social networks of their own. They had, in other words, friends and allies who could function as capable guardians. That said, many junior plaintiffs would appear to have been locals, either living with their parents or living and working with neighbors. Young William Caught, for example, was the son of a local shipwright, (54) and young Robert Blake was the son of a local shoemaker (55); in neither instance, however, did either father initiate an action on behalf of his son.

The victims, where their sex can be determined, consisted of 47 girls and 73 boys. Among adult victims, by contrast, females actually outnumbered males by 4,115 to 3,704. (56) Underage females, in other words, would appear to have been less at risk than adult females, while underage males would appear to have been at greater risk than adult males. The reasons for this are open to speculation. One possibility is that boys who entered the world of work were at particular risk, especially when they were on their own for the first time and were as yet too small to defend themselves; girls, by contrast, had greater recourse to capable guardians: not only did they tend to leave home later, when they did leave, they typically worked as domestic servants. And as servants they presumably fell under the protection of the master or mistress of the household.

Of course, many of these "guardians" turned out to be motivated offenders. In 1696, for example, Elizabeth Trimlett complained that her mistress had beaten her with a pair of iron tongs, (57) while in 1738 Mary Williams complained that her mistress had struck her in the face. (58) And still other guardians proved incapable of protecting the adolescent girls in their employ from being sexually assaulted. In 1673, three men abducted Rebecca Rogers, who was then 19 years old. They managed to pin her down and bind her arms with a rope; her younger sister, who attempted to rescue her, was present at the time, as was "a little boy" by the name of John Palmer. (59) It is unclear whether the men actually raped her; at the very least, Rogers was "very much disquieted and troubled" by the incident. The second sexual assault on a minor female dates from 1750. The victim, Mary Waterman, was 15 years old, and worked as a servant in the house of James Hallett in Portsea. She alleged that Edward Andrews, a sailor, had twice forced himself on her, each time warning "her not to tell his wife or any other person." (60) There were doubtless countless other cases in which adolescent girls were raped or otherwise sexually molested. British soldiers, after all, had a reputation for molesting the young girls who lived in their barracks, (61) while the example of Lieutenant William August Jenkins suggests that the practice may not have been limited to the enlisted ranks.

Adult assailants

In only one instance was a parent reported for using excessive force in disciplining a child. That distinction goes to Robert Hewitt, and he was reported only after he had attacked several people, including his own wife, another child, and at least three adults. (62) All of the other assailants, with the possible exception of a case dating from 1766, (63) would appear to have been unrelated to their victims. And some would appear to have been complete strangers. In 1768, for example, young William Drayton complained that "a man named Thompson" had poured beer on him, (64) while in 1771, young James Murdoch complained that "a woman named Palmer" had hit him with a patten. (65)

The adult assailants, as outlined in Tables 3 and 4, consisted of 93 men and 47 women. The ratio is comparable to the overall distribution of all assailants on record, with 6,744 males and 2,943 females. The women who assaulted minors, as measured by marital status, show no significant variation from the town's overall population of female assailants. The occupations of the men who hit minors are too diffuse to invite aggressive comparisons with the overall population of male assailants, but would nonetheless appear to be roughly comparable. There is, however, one conspicuous exception: sailors. Our count includes relatively few sailors, quite possibly because they did not ordinarily take on apprentices, and were generally too poor to hire servants. These two factors, in turn, doubtless reduced their contacts with minors, although boys, most of them late adolescents, often served on ships. (66)

Further differences start to emerge when we compare the types of weapons that adults commonly used in assaulting minors to those that they commonly used in assaulting other adults, as highlighted in Table 5. The weapons used on minors were for the most part non-lethal, suggesting that their purpose was not so much to maim as to correct or chastise the victim. Hence the presence of seven horsewhips, 15 sticks, and four ropes among the various weapons used on minors. Hence, too, the absence of firearms, knives and swords, although there was one incident, dating from 1704, in which an ax was used. (67) Under "other" are included four ropes and six pots filled with water or excrement. That said, many of the weapons typically used on minors also had the potential to inflict serious bodily injury. This was especially true of ropes, sticks, and whips, all of which were routinely used to lacerate the backs of sailors and soldiers. (68) When, for example, a Portuguese sailor assaulted a Jewish boy with a stick he mana ged to "break" his victim's head and make him "very bloody." (69) In another incident, dating from 1740, a group of sailors armed only with sticks succeeded in beating a grown man to death. (70)

And finally, there were five incidents in which adults either poured water on children or doused them with the contents of a chamber pot. In 1754, for example, Mary Kelly complained that Jane Hayter had assaulted her with a broomstick, and had then assaulted her two young children "by throwing a chamber pot of filthy water and other nasties over them." (71) And one year later, in 1755, Sarah Burgess stood accused of pushing a two-year old girl to the ground and dousing her with water. (72) This was by no means a punishment reserved for children. On at least 15 other occasions adults doused other adults with the contents of a chamber pot, and on countless other occasions they tossed either water or beer at each other.

It was only in a minority of cases, or 43 out of 130, that adults used weapons on minors. Instead, they typically resorted to kicking, punching, or shoving, just as they did with other adults. Even these attacks, however, had the potential to inflict serious harm. This was especially true of very small children. When, for example Catherine Ford hit a toddler several times on its back "it was breathless and without motion for several minutes," prompting a horrified Rachael Hill to take "the said child up in her arms," after which "it recovered in about two minutes." (73) And when Robert Hewitt lost his temper with his five-year daughter he picked her up and flung "her with great violence against the threshold of the door whereby she was greatly hurt and bruised and bled exceedingly and was in great danger of being killed." (74)

One other point stands out: when adults struck minors, they typically did so on their own. In their fights with other adults, by contrast, they frequently ganged up on their victims, whether male or female. There were only two incidents in which two or more people beat up a single boy, and in one of these one of the assailants was himself a boy. (75) And, with the exception of a sexual assault dating from 1673, (76) there were no incidents in which two or more people ganged up on a single girl.

It is impossible to say whether adults who hit other people's children were themselves exceptionally violent. The data in Tables 3 and 4 would suggest that they were virtually indistinguishable from the town's overall population of assailants, which, of course, begs the question of whether assailants as a group differed from the overall population. That said, there is at least one bad apple in our records: Robert Hewitt. Hewitt is known to have struck two children- a boy in 1776 (77) and his own daughter in 1780. (78) The first was 10 years old, the second five. He is also known to have beat his wife Betty on at least three separate occasions, briefly abandoning her in 1777 (79); in May of 1779, he hit Mary Walker; a few months later, he hit William Tarrant; and a few months after that he hit Robert Martin. (80) Then there is the case of Mary Tutton, who lashed out at young Collin Squibb in 1729. When the boy's mother asked "the reason of her so doing she fell on this deponent and shook her several blows on t he jaw." (81) But again, the question is whether people like Robert Hewitt and Mary Tutton were the exception or the rule.

Only rarely do adults tell us why they assaulted minors. This is in fact consistent with the overall distribution of our records, which contain only a handful of statements from defendants. When Samuel Baning was asked why he had assaulted "a little boy," he explained that he had at first asked the boy to leave the courtyard to the Crown and Thistle. Baning was employed there as an hostler, and to that extent he was entirely within his rights. The boy, he added, "said he would not and bid the examinant kiss his arse upon which the examinant took the said boy by his ears and the said boy slipt through his hands and fell on the ground and cried out and then the examinant went away and hid himself." (82) Then there was the case of Alice Cozens, who in 1685 stood accused of scalding a boy by the name of Andrew Mills. Cozens naturally blamed the child. She had, she explained, come "from Mr Selden's with a saucepan of water in her hand in which she had boiled eggs. There were several children at play together by th e stable wall and they thrust her against the wall and some water spilled and scalded John Mills' son, but it was against her will." The quarrel did not stop there. Shortly after this incident Cozens' employer, Mary Olding, spotted another of the Mills' children outside her house, upon which she "came out and bade her son to beat that chuckle-headed boy (meaning Thomas Mills); then Alice Cozens, Mrs Olding's servant maid who was at the door, went and beat Thomas." Cozens, it seems, got the better of the boy, chasing after him as he attempted to flee and throwing a stone at him "when she could not overtake him." (83) And in 1679, Matthew Footes, a soldier, went outside to disperse some boys who were busily "taking great clods of earth" from the town's fortifications "and throwing them at each other." He was armed with a stick, and was about to strike one of the boys when another man, John Adams, used his own cane on Footes. According to one witness, the boys had been taunting Footes, "saying that if the son of a whore came out they would thrash his bones." In his defense, Adams claimed that he had intervened only after "seeing his neighbours' children beaten." (84)

The picture that emerges from these three accounts is necessarily sketchy, not to mention incomplete. It is also contradictory. Baning "went away and hid himself," suggesting that his was no ordinary crime. Cozens and Footes both claimed to have been provoked, as, for that matter, did Baning, suggesting that they made no distinction between badly behaved adults and badly behaved children. Moreover, Cozens' quarrel with the Mills' children would appear to have been part of a larger quarrel between two families, and in this quarrel, as in attacks on mothers with children, all members of the family were fair targets. But then there is the example of John Adams, who intervened upon "seeing his neighbours' children beaten." Did he intervene because they were children or simply because they were his neighbors' children?

Juvenile assailants

In a handful of cases, or 12 out of 144, the assailants were themselves minors. And here, amplifying on the maxim that "big people hit little people," (85) we find that little people hit little people, but only rarely do they hit big people. Of the latter, we have only three examples, none of which is especially compelling. Elizabeth Sparrow, as we have already seen, came out from behind her mother's skirt to join in punching Elizabeth Boyes. (86) In 1737, John and Charity Goudge threw stones at Anne Hoyle as she rode past them on a horse; (87) obviously, they were at a safe distance when they staged their attack. The same is true of the boy who threw a tile at a shoemaker. (88) Instead, when minors chose to brawl, they typically--and wisely--chose to brawl with their peers. Girls, moreover, would appear to have targeted other girls, just as boys would appear to have targeted other boys. Elizabeth Dunton and Frances Anderson, both teenagers, came to blows in 1732, (89) just as two other teenagers, Sarah Matth ews and Mary Francis, came to blows in 1743. (90) Two boys, one 16 years old, the other 17, got into a fight in 1699, and by the time it was all over the younger of the two was dead. (91) A schoolboy got into a fight with another schoolmate in 1728. (92) Young Henry Colyer is supposed to have repeatedly attacked young John Ross, quite possibly because the latter was the son of the local schoolmaster, (93) while one year later, in 1770, William Ryebrand, "a boy about 14 years old," was caught striking "another boy, George Megson, about 11 years old, with a blow which knocked him down and made him senseless." (94) As the above examples suggest, not only were juvenile combatants typically matched by sex, they were also roughly matched by age, which is to say that when little people hit little people they hit little people who looked very much like themselves.

Then there is the exception that proves the rule. Male apprentices, many of whom would have been in their late teens or early twenties, were on at least 11 occasions charged with striking or otherwise abusing their masters or their masters' wives or widows. On seven occasions they hit their masters, suggesting that they were now big enough to pick fights with grown men. The most revealing of these cases dates from 1719, when an apprentice by the name of Thomas Hawkins struck his master "for no other reason but because the deponent gave him a box in the ear for neglecting his work." (95) On four other occasions, male apprentices or servants struck or otherwise abused their masters' wives or widows, proving, once again, that big people hit little people. The count includes two separate complaints by Sarah Jacobs, a widow. On September 23, 1710, she complained that her apprentice, James Bannister, had "threatened to knock her brains out with a maul" (96) a few days later, Bannister made good on his threat, and t his time was sent to cool his heels in the local jail. (97)

Variations over time

Obviously, the data are too thin to support sweeping generalizations. And any spikes in assaults on minors raise a larger question: did these spikes occur because more minors were being victimized or because fewer adults were prepared to tolerate the use of force on people smaller and younger than themselves? Figures 1 and 2 offer some clues, none of them conclusive. As detailed in note five, most of the gaps in the series are clustered in the 1760s. That said, even if we were to double the number of assaults for any one of those years they would at best approach 300, or the peak reached just after the War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748). In the meantime, the town's population had continued to grow at a very brisk rate, (98) which is to say that the overall incidence of interpersonal violence had in fact decreased. This was true even when the Seven Years War (1758-1763) unleashed a fresh wave of sailors and soldiers on the town. Assaults on minors, like assaults on adults, increased during the War of Austr ian Succession, but unlike assaults on adults, remained high in most of the years that followed, suggesting (but by no means proving) that assaults on minors were well on their way to becoming special crimes because they were committed against special people--and were thus likelier to be reported to local authorities.

Of course, these same years also witnessed a dramatic growth in the nation's population, and with it, decreases in real wages. (99) This, in turn, leaves open two additional possibilities: (1) more minors were assaulted simply because there were proportionately more minors in the overall population; and (2) more minors were assaulted because they were competing with adults for scarce economic resources. The latter possibility seems less plausible, if only because the increased incidence of war in the second half of the eighteenth century almost certainly benefitted the town's economy by adding to the number of men employed at the royal dockyard; publicans, too, profited whenever war brought in large numbers of sailors, soldiers, and marines with change in their pockets.

Today, of course, children ate simply assumed to be special people, and we assume--without any real evidence--that the taboos are so strong that almost nobody hits or molests children other than his or her own. Indeed, such is our faith in the sanctity of children that they fall under only the broadest of categories in modern surveys of crime. Thus in the National Crime Victimization Surveys conducted by the US government, only children 12 years of age or older are interviewed; these data, in turn, are collapsed into two broad categories: victims between the ages of 12 and 15, and victims between the ages of 16 to 19. The upshot is that we know surprisingly little about non-sexual assaults on minors, (100) and whether the non-family members who assault them are adults or other minors. The evidence, such as it is, suggests that the majority of these assaults are in fact committed by other minors, typically between the ages of 12 and 20. (101)

The real question, of course, is whether adults were at one time likelier to assault minors (other than their own children) than they are today. If they were, then the social constructionists will have won the argument; if they were not, then the psychologists will have won. Unfortunately, this is a very difficult question to answer, especially since modern data-sets effectively exclude younger children and thus preclude any comparisons with our own data. Moreover, out of a total of 7,658 assaults we have only 144 assaults involving minors. That by itself suggests two possibilities: either (1) assaults on minors were neither remarkable nor unacceptable, and thus went under-reported; or (2) assaults on minors were in fact unusual, even in a town as spectacularly violent as early modem Portsmouth.

There is a third possibility: assaults on minors were both acceptable and unacceptable. That is, we are looking at two very different moralities that managed to exist side by side. Some people felt free to hit, kick, and punch other people's children, and other people took exception when they did. Obviously, if children had enjoyed anything approaching the special status that they enjoy today fewer people would have felt free to batter them in public places; on the other hand, at least some adults felt that assaults on younger children were qualitatively different from assaults on adults--hence their willingness to take it on themselves to report offenders to justices of the peace.

Even the offenders themselves would appear to have assimilated bits and pieces of their critics' moral standards. Yes, they felt free to hit people younger and smaller than themselves. And yes, they felt free to use weapons such as sticks and horsewhips. As a rule, however, they refrained from using lethal weapons; nor did they typically gang up on minors, suggesting either that they were confident in their ability to overpower their victims, or that other adults disapproved of their actions, and as such were unwilling to join them. These distinctions, crude though they may seem, do suggest that ordinary men and women reacted in different ways to badly behaved children and badly behaved adults.

The story of Lieutenant William August Jenkins and young Betsy Robertson underscores the essential ambiguity regarding children and their status in relation to adults in early modern Portsmouth. Jenkins, by his own admission, "considered her as a Child." This, however, did not prevent him from handling "the Child in a very unbecoming manner." No less ambiguous was the behavior of the three servants chaperoning Betsy and her younger sister Ann. One servant, Mary, provided Jenkins with the information that he needed, namely, that he could enter the house without being detected by Mr. and Mrs. Robertson. Another servant, Ann, interrupted Jenkins just as he was kissing and fondling Betsy, warning him that Mrs. Robertson was on her way. The servant's action at this juncture does not necessarily imply disapproval of Jenkins' attentions--or of Betsy's role in encouraging them. For his part, Mr. Robertson chose to regard the whole incident "as an high insult offered to himself and family & of such an alarming Nature as could not be silently endured," suggesting that what was really at issue was not so much his daughter's safety as his own honor. Then there is the unrepentant Lieutenant Jenkins, who, far from regarding himself as a pedophile, chose instead to regard himself as an officer whose honor had been impugned by a social inferior. "I cannot," he wrote to the girls' father, "help expressing my great astonishment at so much presumption in a man I think so beneath my notice, and whom I hold in the utmost contempt." What had started as a sexual game between a grown man and a young girl had become something far more serious: a contest of honor between two grown men. That by itself should give us some idea of where children stood in the moral and social hierarchy of the time.

The entire episode was in fact one of enormous moral complexity, with elements of morality that look very much like our own, and others that most decidedly do not. The latter are arguably of greater interest, if only because they place our findings squarely in the camp of the social constructionists by showing that attitudes toward children can and do change over time. The only real issue, we would argue, is one of timing, and here we must most emphatically side with Cunningham, which is to say that in the eighteenth century only a handful of England's children happened to live in Stone's proto-modern families, and that few, if any, of these children happened to live in early modern Portsmouth.

And finally, what can we say about routine activities theory? The first thing that stands out is that its conventional categories do not entirely work in an early modern context. Mothers, for example, might be assumed to be capable guardians of their young children, and yet in many instances they were in fact suitable targets, thus increasing rather than decreasing the odds of harm to their children. And many of the people who employed minors, far from being capable guardians, turned out to be motivated offenders, beating and otherwise abusing their young dependents.

These paradoxes, in turn, tell us a little something about the status of ordinary children in early modern Portsmouth. Many assailants clearly viewed children as an extension of their mothers--hence their willingness to attack mothers and children alike. And many other children were probably attacked as part of a larger feud between two families or households. Sadly, once a child left home to go work in someone else's house, the odds of being victimized would seem to have increased still further, especially if the minor happened to be a boy in his early teens. This suggests that their parents had functioned to some extent as capable guardians, whether because their own honor was at stake or because they really did love their children--or both.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Table 1

Prosecutions initiated by adults, 1953-1781

                               Prosecutor
Victim's age  Mother  Father  Other female  Other male  Totals

"Infant"       --        1          5           --         6
"Child"         2       --          4           --         6
2               1       --          1           --         2
3               1       --         --           --         1
4               1       --         --           --         1
5               1       --          1            1         3
6               1       --          1           --         2
7               1       --         --            1         2
8              --       --         --            2         2
9               3       --          1           --         4
10              1       --          2            1         4
11              2       --          3            1         6
12             --       --          1            5         6
13             --       --          1            2         3
14             --       --         --           --        --
15             --       --         --            1         1
16             --       --         --           --        --
17             --       --         --           --        --
18             --       --         --           --        --
19             --       --          1           --         1
Unknown         3        1          5           --         9
               17        2         26           14        59

Table 2

Prosecutions initiated by minors, 1653-1781

Victim's age  Females  Males  Totals

 9               1      --       1
10              --      --      --
11              --       2       2
12               1       2       3
13               4      10      14
14               4       5       9
15               3      10      13
16               5       3       8
17              --       1       1
18               1      --       1
19               1      --       1
                20      33      53

Table 3

Male assailants, 1653-1781

                          Men who                All male
                     assaulted minosrs          assailants

Occupation        Number       Percent   Number    Percent

Blacksmith           2             2.1      105       1.5
Butcher              2             2.1      124       1.8
Carter               3             3.2       33       0.5
Laborer              7             7.5      585       8.7
Sailor              15            16.1    1,671      24.8
Shipwright           3             3.2      269       4.0
Unknown or other    50            54.0    3,384      50.2
Victualler           4             4.3      378       5.6
Waterman             7             7.5      195       2.9
                    93           100.0    6,744     100.0

Table 4

Female assailants, 1653-1761

                     Women who              All female
                 assaulted minors           assailants

              Number       Percent   Number    Percent

Single women    17            36.1    1,005      34.1
Wives           27            57.4    1,711      58.1
Widows           3             6.4      227       7.7
                47           100.0    2,943     100.0 *

*Rounded up from 99.9

Table 5

Choice of weapons, 1653-1781

                        Assaultson minors         All assaults

                       Number     Percent   Number    Percent

Ax                       1          2.6       23        1.6
Dog                      --         --        6         0.4
Firearm                  --         --        29        2.0
Food                     --         --        18        1.3
Hammer                   --         --        12        0.8
Horsewhip                7         18.0       56        3.9
Household implement      1          2.6      118         83
Knife                    --         --       137        9.7
Mug or tankard           --         --        60        4.2
Other                    14        35.9      338       23.8
Poker                    --         --        63        4.4
Shovel                   --         --        21        1.5
Stick                    15        38.4      343       24.2
Stone or brick           --         --        98        6.9
Sword                    --         --        89        6.3
Unknown                  1          2.6        7        0.5
                         39       100.0 *   1,418     100.0 **

*Rounded down from 100.1

**Rounded up from 99.8

ENDNOTES

Funding was provided by grant 410-2000-0467 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors are profoundly grateful to the gracious and highly capable staff of Portsmouth's Museums and Records Service, including, most notably, Michael Gunton, Diana Gregg, Donna Malcolmson, and Sarah Speller. Special thanks also go to the team of volunteers who transcribed the town's sessions papers, thus greatly facilitating our entry of the same into a database. They were, in alphabetical order, Kate Beatty, Barbara Gower, Ursula Heinrich, Pam Honeysett, George Hothersall, Marjorie Hothersall, Una Lowe, Betty Richardson, Marjorie Ripper, and Brenda Whorton. There was one other volunteer: an inmate at the Kingston Prison just outside Portsmouth. He did very good work, and must have been more than a little amused at the prospect of recording the deeds of past transgressors. Back in Toronto, several more people assisted in entering the records into a database. They were, in alphabetical order, Jo anne Cordingley, James Hewitson, Allyson Lunny, Yvonne Pelletier, and Victoria Vaag. The use of routine activities theory was suggested by Rosemary Gartner and Bonnie Erickson, both of the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

(1.) National Maritime Museum, Portsmouth Dockyard Officers' Reports to the Navy Board, POR/D/16, 1764-1768, no pagination.

(2.) Lawrence E. Cohen and Marcus Felson, "Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: a Routine Activities Approach," American Sociological Review 44 (1979): 588-608.

(3.) Start with Philippe Aries, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime (Paris, 1973). Also see John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); J. H. Plumb, "Children, the Victims of Time," in In the Light of History (London, 1973), 153-165; Jean-Louis Flandrin, Familles. Parente, maison, sexualite dans l'ancienne societe, ed. Jean Delumeau, Le temps & les hommes (Paris, 1976); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York, 1977); John Harold Plumb, "The New World of Children," in The Birth of a Consumer Society. The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John Harold Plumb (London, 1982), 286-315; Ludmilla L. Jordanova, "Conceptualizing Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: the Problem of Child Labour," British Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies 10, no.2 (1987), 189-199; and Eric Hopkins, Childhood Transformed. Working-class Children in Nineteenth-century England (Manchester, 1994).

(4.) See, among others, Vivian C. Fox, "Is Adolescence a Phenomenon of Modern Times?," The Journal of Psychohistory 5, no. 2 (1977), 271-290; Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Childrearing among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8, no. 1 (1977), 1-22; Adrian Wilson, "The Infancy of the History of Childhood: an Appraisal of Philippe Aries," History and Theory 19, no. 2 (1980), 132-153; Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450-1700, ed. John Stevenson, Themes in British Social History (London, 1984); Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing up in Medieval London. The Experience of Child hood in History (New York, 1993); Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, 1994); and Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560-1640 (Oxford, 1996).

(5.) Each year there were two general sessions, each covering approximately six months. Spring sessions included the last two or so months of the preceding year plus the first four or so months of the current year; fall session always fell within the current year. The following sessions are lost: the spring of 1708; the spring of 1727; the spring of 1733; the fall of 1735; the spring and fall of 1751; the fall of 1760; the spring of 1761; the spring and fall of 1762; the spring of 1764; the fall of 1765; the spring of 1766; the fall of 1767; and the fall of 1778. All dates from before 1752 have been harmonized with the Georgian calendar.

(6.) Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols., vol. 2 (New York, 1982), 246-247.

(7.) Ted Robert Gurr, "Historical Trends in Violent Crime: a Critical Review of the Evidence," Crime and Justice: an Annual Review of Research 3 (1981), 295-353.

(8.) Lawrence Stone, "Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300-1980," Past and Present 101 (1983), 22-33. For a lively dissent, see James A. Sharpe, "The History of Violence in England: Some Observations," Past and Present 108 (1985), 206-215.

(9.) Lawrence Stone, "A Rejoinder," Past and Present 108 (1985), 219.

(10.) John M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (Princeton, 1986), p. 139.

(11.) John M. Beattie, "Violence and Society in Early-modern England," in Perspectives in Criminal Law. Essays in Honour of John LL.J. Edwards, ed. Anthony Doob and Edward L. Greenspan (Aurora, Ontario, 1985), 50-51.

(12.) Peter King, "Punishing Assault: the Transformation of Attitudes in the English Courts," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27, no. 1 (1996), 43-74.

(13.) Plumb, "The New World of Children," 286-315.

(14.) E.H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, "Seven Centuries of the Price of Consumables, Compared with Builders' Wage-rates," in Essays in Economic History, ed. E.M. Carus-Wilson (London, 1962), 179-196; L. D. Schwarz, "The Standard of Living in the Long Run: London, 1700-1860," Economic History Review 38, no. 1 (1985), 24-41.

(15.) Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor. Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter Laslett and Michael Anderson, Family, Sexuality and Social Relations in Past Times (Oxford, 1991).

(16.) Batty Stapleton, "The Population of the Portsmouth Region," in The Portsmouth Region, ed. Barry Stapleton and James H. Thomas (1989), 94-96. Wrigley puts the town's population at about 5,000 to 7,000 in 1700, and at about 10,000 in 1750. It is unclear whether his estimates include Portsea or Gosport. See E. Anthony Wrigley, "Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent during the Early Modern Period," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15, no. 4 (1985), 686.

(17.) Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500-1700 (London, 1976), 86.

(18.) Barry Stapleton, "The Population of the Portsmouth Region," in The Portsmouth Region, ed. Barry Stapleton and James H. Thomas (1989), 100.

(19.) Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York, 1977), 88-101.

(20.) J.D. Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins. The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy (Oxford, 1991), 227.

(21.) Margaret R. Hunt, "Women Against the Navy: Military-industrial Cultures of Late Seventeenth-Century England," in British Imperial Culture in the Early Modern Period, ed. Kathleen Wilson (forthcoming).

(22.) In 1778, for example, a shipwright by the name of John Baker complained that "Joseph Edgart, a midshipman belonging to one of his Majesty's ships, did assault this deponent by making several strokes at him with a cutlass and dangerously cutting him on his right hand with the same whereby this deponent lost much blood ... "See Portsmouth Museum and Records Service [hereafter referred to as PMRS], S3/177/94, 14 April 1778.

(23.) Robert Wright, Life of Major-General James Wolfe. Founded on Original Documents and Illustrated by his Correspondence, Including Numerous Unpublished Letters Contributed from the Family Papers of Noblemen and Gentlemen, Descendants of his Companions (London, 1864), 418.

(24.) Peter Stuart Christie, "Occupations in Portsmouth 1550-1851" (M.Phil., Portsmouth Polytechnic, 1976), 108, 141.

(25.) Daniel A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), 316.

(26.) Michael Mitterauer, A History of Youth, ed. Peter Laslett and Michael Anderson, trans. Graeme Dunphy, Family, Sexuality and Social Relations in Past Times (Oxford, 1992), 2-5.

(27.) Daniel A. Baugh, ed., Naval Administration 1715-1750, vol. 120, Publications of the Navy Record Society (London, 1977), 310.

(28.) Richard B. Felson, "Big People Hit Little People: Sex Differences in Physical Power and Interpersonal Violence," Criminology 34, no.3 (1996), 433-452.

(29.) Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century. A Study in Social and Administrative History (London, 1926), 185-201; Pamela Sharpe, "Poor Children as Apprentices in Colyton, 1598-1830," Continuity and Change 6, no. 2 (1991), 253-270; Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor. Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1991), 21-25.

(30.) Arthur J. Willis and Margaret J. Hoad, eds., Borough Sessions Papers 1653-1688, Portsmouth Record Series (Chichester, 1971), 18.

(31.) PMRS, S3/78/86, 16 January 1722. All told, there were 24 cases in which masters were charged with assaulting their apprentices. In only two of these cases, however, was the victim identified as a minor, leaving open the possibility that the other victims may have been in their early twenties.

(32.) As a rule, records from later in our series are likelier to state the ages of minors, suggesting quite possibly, a change in the way adults categorized minors, or, just as plausibly, a greater attention to detail on the part of the clerks who recorded what people said about each other.

(33.) PMRS, S3/74/24, 10 September 1720.

(34.) PMRS, S3/76/40, 14 February 1721.

(35.) PMRS, S3/83/84, 8 June 1724.

(36.) PMRS, S3/171/43, 30 December 1774.

(37.) Keith Thomas, "Age and Authority in Early Modern England," Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976), 205-248.

(38.) Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, "Service and the Coming of Age of Young Men in Seventeenth-century England," Continuity and Change 3, no. 1 (1988): 59.

(39.) Ira Dye, "Physical and Social Profiles of Early American Seafarers, 1812-1815," in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, ed. Colin Howell and Richard J. Twomey (Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1991), 225; Mitterauer, A History of Youth, 4-5.

(40.) Jessica F. Warner, "Historical Perspectives on the Shifting Boundaries around Youth and