The topic of ‘youth’ suggests a natural connection with good advice: the older generation seem to find it irresistible to advise the young. In romances, the giving of advice often takes a very specific form. The young person – most often male, and usually the hero too – has just reached the point where he is about to leave his own family, the familiar society in which he has been brought up. At the very moment at which he reaches the threshold, he is stopped and given what sometimes amounts to several pages of good advice on how to conduct himself in the outside world. The precision of the convention can be seen with particular clarity in a late but thoroughly familiar example: Polonius’s advice to the departing Laertes in Hamlet. The way in which the giving of advice disrupts the schedule for departure is here made explicit to the point of parody:

But despite this hurry, Polonius still insists on giving his son ‘these few precepts in thy memory’, which indeed make up one of the longer speeches of the play. As advice goes, Polonius’s is not at all bad: it amounts to a fairly comprehensive economic, social and moral survival kit for a young gentleman: don’t borrow or lend money; instructions on dress codes; ‘to thine own self be true’. As such, it constitutes a nice mix of the pragmatic and the ideal. Just the same kind of pattern is found extensively in romances, and especially in late romances.

The Hamlet example is also a reminder, however, that the giving of advice is not as straightforward a topos as it might appear at first sight. It is very rare, in fact, for there not to be something odd about it. In this instance, the whole episode invites the basic question of why the passage exists at all. Why, so far as Polonius is concerned, should he hold up the ship? Why, even more pressingly, should Shakespeare hold up the action, for a passage that appears completely irrelevant to the play?

Youth is not always an advantage, though the appearance of youth may be. Vikings, as fighting-men, should ideally be young and fit. Kings on the other hand, should ideally be older and wiser. But the warrior gains authority from experience, while youthful vigour makes for a more effective ruler. The late Viking Age is generally seen as the period when the Scandinavian countries developed a European style of kingship, under the influence of Christianity and continental political theories. But the most notable Scandinavian kings of the eleventh century began their careers as vikings, as roving fighting-men and as the leaders of such men. Having achieved royal power, they often died young, fulfilling the expectations of the proverbial expression that ‘til frægðar skal konung hafa, en ekki til langlífis’ (‘a king is for glory, not for longevity’).

In the medieval Scandinavian laws, the age of majority was normally fifteen. Yet in some Icelandic sagas, the hero is said to have embarked on his first viking voyage or to have otherwise proved his manhood at the age of twelve. This is particularly true of sagas that romanticize their heroes. Thus, in that quintessential viking saga, Jómsvíkinga saga (ch. 21), Vagn Ákason is given a ship and sixty men each by his father and grandfather, and sets out to join the Jomsvikings with a troop in which no man is older than twenty or younger than eighteen, except Vagn himself who is twelve. In the more realistic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (ch. 4), the twelve-year-old hero, who is described as precocious and unruly, asks his father to give him a ship so that he might go out and see the world, but his father is less enamoured of the idea and makes him wait until he is eighteen. Elsewhere, the hero is said to have been aged twelve at some other important event in his life. This motif is used a number of times in Laxdoela saga, notably when the twelve-year-old Bolli Bollason avenges the death of his father on his killer Helgi Harðbeinsson (ch. 64).

INTRODUCTION

Imagine the scene. A gentry girl of, shall we say, fifteen, is sitting with her family in their parish church, in a private pew near the chancel. It is during Lent, some time in the middle of the fifteenth century, and the priest has chosen for his sermon the well-worn theme of the seven deadly sins. He begins with the first mortal sin, pride, and among the admonitions our maiden hears this cautionary tale:

The dangers posed not only to a woman’s own soul but also to those of the men who might behold her fashionably dressed and adorned body are hammered home some minutes later when the priest, having been diverted onto other themes through discourses on wrath, envy, sloth, avarice, and gluttony, reaches his crescendo with lechery, which some called the sin ‘fyrþest … fro heuene’, because it damns two souls in one act. Again, our maiden and other female parishioners are urged to think on their carefully tended hair, their fine dresses, their eye-catching headdresses, and the desperate state of damnation which these could lead them, and others, into:

Such is a portrait of authority in contemporary western society painted by John Schaar, a political philosopher of our own day. In marked contrast, the general perception of authority in the late Middle Ages is of an authoritative framework grounded in a commonly accepted, traditional hierarchy: God over king, king over subject, man over woman, parent over child, age over youth, noble over commoner, lord over serf. However, in this essay I shall examine three narratives from the late fourteenth century where it appears that authority based on that traditional hierarchy was being questioned, where the hierarchy itself is represented as being either suspended or subverted. In these narratives, the customary structure of authority is brought into question because the protagonists are children, and the circumstances of the narratives demand that these children be constructed as figures of authority. The narratives are the late fourteenth-century English dream-vision poem Pearl, and chronicle accounts of the coronation of the boy king Richard II in 1377, and of incidents involving the king which occurred during the Peasants’ Uprising in 1381. This essay is an exploration of some intriguing parallels between Pearl and the Ricardian narratives, with the intention of discovering how customary representations of the hierarchy of power are contested in order to invest a child with authority. I shall also consider how the authorizing of a child in these narratives reflects a questioning of traditional patterns of authority in the larger culture. I hope not to wring from any of these narratives meanings that others cannot also discover, or to wrench them out of shape to fit my thesis. Nevertheless, I am aware that the risk is there.

This article was originally entitled ‘Writing the History of Youth in the Early Middle Ages’. My concern was to think about the potentiality of the documentary source material for the study of youth: narrative historical sources, hagiography, the legal material and so on. I found it in practice impossible to write about youth without writing about childhood, and in the end I found myself concentrating on the writings of Gregory of Tours: a proper title for this article is thus either ‘Childhood and Youth in Merovingian Gaul’ or, more honestly, ‘Childhood and Youth in Gregory of Tours’. I concentrate on Gregory not just because I am working on a monograph on this author, but also because, in the 880 printed pages in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica edition, he presents us with a very large body of material, covering both the historical and hagiographical genres, which also includes probably more autobiographical material than we have extant from anyone else in the early Middle Ages – not expressed with the sophistication of Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, perhaps, but rich and interesting despite that, or because of that. The advantage of having such a body of material from one person is that, although it might only be one man’s view of the subject, it may at least provide some consistency of terminology and approach. Understanding one man’s view of childhood and youth would, after all, be a start, given the startling lack of research into this topic by early medieval historians, and given its inherent problems.

The first question to ask, of course, is what questions ought we to be asking? What are the issues that we should like to resolve about childhood and youth in the early Middle Ages? We should naturally like to know if our own concept of ‘youth’ – which is itself highly subjective, extremely fluid at the edges and not very stable at the middle – had any corresponding concept in the period, or whether people in the early Middle Ages used quite different categories.We should like to know how adults treated young people, and vice versa. We should like to know about adult understanding of child and youth behaviour, and the extent of adult tolerance of it.

At the beginning of World War II, in late 1941, American concern over the safety of Suriname's aluminum ore led to the occupation of the Dutch colony by 1,000 US troops (Baptiste 1988: 115–29). The main fear was of a possible commando raid out of Vichy-held (pro-Nazi) French Guiana to sabotage the bauxite mines at Moengo in eastern Suriname, or even the blocking of the narrow Cottica River leading to the mines at Moengo. Accordingly, a small concentration camp near Paramaribo in Suriname housed suspected German agents and also German ship crews for the duration of the war. In 1942, three Germans escaped from the camp and traveled overland in an easterly direction to the Maroni River separating Suriname from French Guiana. Upon attempting to cross the river, the Germans were recaptured by the men from a “Bush Negro” village and returned to the Dutch authorities in Paramaribo (Sharp 1942: 14).

The black villagers who captured the German escapees probably were members of the Djuka tribe, one of six Maroon (“Bush Negro” from the Dutch bosch neger) tribes inhabiting the forested interior of Suriname. These peoples, who until very recently represented over 10 percent of Suriname's human population, all descended from escaped African slaves. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries slaves fled inland from the coffee, timber, and sugar cane plantations on Suriname's coastal plain to establish clandestine encampments in the rainforest.

A few hours inland from the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince, a black rural cultivator named Nesmère controls a three-acre plot of land. Like other rural Haitians, and like thousands of other small-scale farmers throughout the islands of the Caribbean Sea, Nesmère produces a combination of cash and subsistence crops. The beans, yams, corn, breadfruit, guava, and citrus are for Nesmère, his wife, and their three children. The coffee that he cultivates in the shade of the breadfruit and citrus trees finds its way into an international commodity flow through a complex local marketing system (Grove 1981; Girault 1985).

Nesmère, his family, and his neighbors are, of course, vitally dependent on their immediate physical environment for life and livelihood. So when Hurricane Allen ravaged the southwestern peninsula of Haiti in 1980, rural Haitians went even hungrier than usual, and some survived only because of food relief supplies from the United States. But weather hazards, including hurricanes and droughts, are only ephemeral events. The fundamental ecological problem in Haiti is its soil erosion. Too many people for too little arable land has pushed Haitian subsistence cultivation onto ever-steeper hillsides, creating an all-too-familiar vicious circle in which the land's capacity to produce is continuously undermined by the necessity to cultivate marginal slopes.

The Caribbean plantation is a global, not a regional, enterprise, and it has always been so. The economic historian Richard Sheridan, in describing the British West Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, points out that factors of production from throughout the world were united in Caribbean settings, and the unique sum of these introduced parts resulted in the Caribbean plantation: the original domestication site of the principal cash crop (sugar cane) probably was southern Asia; the labor supply and some food crops were of West African origin; building materials, livestock, and food came from eastern North America; and the capital, managerial expertise, and technology were from western and southern Europe (1973: 107).

The warm climates and virgin soils of the Caribbean islands and rimlands underpinned the production of tropical plantation products for the mid-latitude European market. This production was of modest scope under the Spanish in Hispaniola in the early 1500s, but it began in earnest with the English, French, and Dutch colonization of the Lesser Antilles one century later. The trade circulation of plantation products eventually was interlinked with the movement of global inputs for the Caribbean plantation in a complex shipping network often described as the “triangular trade,” involving Europe, West Africa, and Atlantic America from the Guianas to what is now Canada.

At the end of the twentieth century, and also at the end of a half millennium of external political control, most Caribbean societies have achieved political independence. The principal exceptions are Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, the French overseas departments, and a small number of tiny islands that continue to maintain formal links with Britain and the Netherlands. All Caribbean societies, whether formally independent or not, retain strong relationships with their previous colonial rulers as well as complex ties with the outside world in general through the necessity to trade and migrate. And all Caribbean societies, on the basis of location alone, remain geopolitically dominated by the United States.

The region's fragmented insularity, combined with its relative proximity to the North Atlantic metropoles, helps to explain why the Caribbean has been so intensely colonized and recolonized over the centuries. Beginning in the late fifteenth century “the Caribbean became a center of activity as direct sea mobility … was the key to empire and riches” (Maingot 1989: 259). In the centuries thereafter the region's direct accessibility to ocean transport and travel and the closeness of all Caribbean locales to the sea together suggest that a certain geographical inevitability may have helped to predetermine the Caribbean's long-standing colonial role in history.

The interest in the United States expressed by the Cuban slaves of the mid-nineteenth century was reciprocated by the interest that US slaveholders had in Cuba. To some Americans, Manifest Destiny meant moving not only west but also south (May 1973). In 1854 United States President Franklin Pierce authorized an emissary to offer Spain $130 million for Cuba, resulting in the famous Ostend (Belgium) Manifesto that declared the geopolitical inevitability of the US domination of Cuba. Some expansionists went even further, proposing an eventual “golden circle” of US slave states along the Mexican Gulf Coast, Central America, and then north through the Antilles, forming altogether an economic colossus of subtropical agricultural production (McPherson 1988: 103–16).

United States-Caribbean economic ties had, of course, predated US political independence, Yankee traders often penetrating illegally the controlled commerce between European nations and their Caribbean colonies.

If you were to say “1992” to a resident of the eastern Caribbean's Windward Islands (Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada), the reaction would almost certainly have nothing to do with the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's epic voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Rather, the peoples of the Windwards associate 1992 with their immediate economic circumstances. That is the year for which full economic integration of the European Community (EC) is scheduled. Accordingly, the EC's imminent economic coalescence, as far as Windward islanders are concerned, throws open to serious question the existing economic agreements that, since mid-twentieth century, have allowed bananas from the Windward Caribbean to enter Britain under preferential market conditions (Thomson 1987).

On the eve of the 1992 changes for the EC, bananas from the Windwards are not assessed import duties upon entering the British market. They are further protected by a limitation that the United Kingdom has imposed on so-called “dollar” bananas from Central and South America. Although Windward islanders are by no means wealthy, they have prospered in a relative sense because of these special trade arrangements. During a recent period when most world commodity prices were slumping, banana exports from Jamaica and the Windwards increased five-fold, from US $39 million in 1977 to US $195 million in 1986 (Elliott 1988: 10).

Most of the narcotics passing through Jamaica then smuggled into North America for the United States market apparently are distributed by a clandestine network of US drug pushers already in place. But, late in the 1980s, along with the increase of marijuana and cocaine brought from and through Jamaica to the US, a new breed of Jamaican criminal also has entered the United States. Joseph Vince, an agent of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, who is based in Miami, asserts that the Jamaicans are “the most rapidly growing organized (criminal) group in the United States.” Within a very few years, these Jamaican men and women – whose numbers are estimated in the thousands – have organized a drug-based crime network on US soil that has extended itself well beyond Miami and New York into the American heartland. During 1987, profits from Jamaican-run “crack houses” operated in Dallas alone were estimated at US $400,000 per day. The Jamaican criminal groups, apparently obsessed with brandishing weapons, refer to themselves as “posses.” US drug enforcement authorities attribute the fearless character of members of the newly arrived criminal group as rooted in the impoverishment of their home island, conditions that have given these men and women the attitude that they have, literally, nothing to lose (Cohen 1988).

The stereotypes produced by these Jamaican criminals distress the long-term Jamaican residents of the United States.