APPRENTICESHIP AND SETTLEMENT

The reigning theories of discipline, together with the growing tendency to regard him as an actual wage earner, made the lot of even the independent labourer's child no easy one from the late seventeenth century onwards, and it may be that the life of the pauper apprentice in rural parishes was but little worse than that of his non-pauper fellow.

The medieval system of apprenticeship had been adopted by Elizabethan legislators as the best mode of affording a national scheme of technical education which would prevent poverty by providing each child with the tools of a livelihood. Whilst it was no part of the Elizabethan aim to offer industrial training which should raise the labourer's child out of the ranks to which he supposedly belonged, pauperism was a sore in the body politic. Sufficient training, industrial and moral, to avoid collapse below a certain level of efficiency must therefore be secured. If such were the purpose of apprenticeship, perhaps over the country as a whole no branch of the Elizabethan Poor Law departed, during the eighteenth century, more widely from the original conception, as a result of pressure upon the rates and of the loophole which apprenticeship seemed to offer to the parish officer under the Settlement Laws.

It has been shown that the apprenticeship clauses of the Poor Law had from the outset encountered opposition, and that much stimulation by the Privy Council had been necessary before masters could be induced to accept undesirable children.