Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture by Patrick Joseph Ryan (review)

From the perspective of a social historian this short study is a mixed package. The major theme is one of considerable insight, and it sheds a distinctly different light on our approach to childhood in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, Ryan is not a medieval historian; parts of the book take us into realms of theology and epistemology that seem but loosely linked to his more orthodox topic. Also, as a non-specialist he leans on some historiography that may not serve him to best advantage.

But, having begun with some caveats and reservations, I want to pay tribute to the way Ryan has dealt with the topic/problem of medieval children and childhood. It is most important to recognize that this book is a “history of the idea of childhood” (my emphasis). Words as labels and symbols are under close scrutiny in the argument, and many of Ryan’s bold insights come from the way in which he traces the etymology and evolution of some key terms. It is the idea of childhood as developed and set into the context of relationships and status, not the details of young lives or quantitative data about orphans or minor heirs that he explicates, that we will explore. As Ryan tells us (on page 13, and then a number of times thereafter), “Childhood was embedded in master-servant relations but this was something more than a hierarchy of labour.” His aim is to shift our view of childhood from an age-based and stages-of-life scenario to one that emphasizes superordination and subordination. We are in the realms of language and ideas rather than of behavior.

This is refreshing stuff—taking us well away from the rather tired arguments that still revolved around Philippe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life and its thesis that “childhood” only emerged as a distinct social, familial, and perhaps personal phenomenon in postmedieval European culture and thought. Ryan looks at what we can label as key words—family, matrimony, wench, master, child, bairn, among others—and argues that their early meanings and uses (in Old English and then in Middle English) had more to do with status than with age as such. Wealth, power, and sexual control, not just a sum of years, was what set the table. For example, “husband” “came to mean married man first, and householder secondarily . . . a land-sex-marriage word complex” (27). The word for the man in a married couple evolved so as to reinforce the essential link between holding property and being of a status to marry and to preside over the (patriarchal) household: “patrimony conferred stewardship” (39). Similarly, in early usage “wife” was not confined to “a man’s woman” (31), and such wider usages as fishwife or ale-wyff or midwife remind us that her marital (and sexual) status was just one definition of her multiple roles. Again, matrimony came from a French term that meant property inherited from one’s mother, an insight into a process of linguistic generalization and of socioeconomic institutionalization (and male appropriation).

Drawing on literary materials and (selected) record sources that run into the sixteenth and even the seventeenth centuries, Ryan recognizes the “shift toward age sensitivity” in usage (49). The Bible is a canonical source for this sort of investigation, as in such tales as that of the Holy Family—traced through various versions and then translations—we can follow this theme of the evolution of words and, consequently, of social relationships. Fourteenth century legislation, designed to suppress social unrest unleashed by the decimation of the plague, sought to impose sumptuary legislation and edicts against gaming, among others, “all [of it] designed to support the existing master-servant hierarchy” (56). The importance of asserting a hierarchy of power, wealth, authority, and inherited status was supported by the terminology of...