Italian churchmen from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries saw parents as playing a crucial role in forming new generations in the Catholic faith and thus as an indispensable support to the clergy. They stressed the importance of conditioning from the earliest years. They therefore emphasized parental, and more particularly paternal, authority. On the other hand, another major preoccupation was to prevent violation of the wills of young people with regard to religious vocations and marriage. A balance therefore had to be struck between paternal authority and the legitimate desires of young people who had attained the age of discretion. The matter of the all-importance of conditioning raises the question of our writers’ views of infant human nature. They emphasized to varying degrees the tractability of unformed infant nature and the need to curb unruly instincts, but by and large the emphasis was on nurture rather than on vitiated human nature, on formation rather than on repression.

In January 1581 a short black-letter tract in the tiny octavo format favoured by many Elizabethan publishers of sensational news appeared from the press of a London printing house based just outside the City in the Strand. Like other ‘three-halfpenny’ pamphlets of its ilk, this particular piece of ephemera was a pious tale of the prodigious and strange, but true. It described the ‘wonderfull worke of God shewed upon a chylde’ by the name of William Withers in the small Suffolk town of Walsham-le-Willows. On the previous Christmas Eve, the eleven-year-old boy had fallen into a deep trance for the space often days, ‘to the great admiration of the beholders, and the greefe of his parentes’. At the end of this time he regained consciousness and proceeded to deliver a series of vehement prophetic denunciations of contemporary sin and immorality, calling the people to ‘spedie repentance’—without which, he announced, the day of destruction was surely at hand. If amendment of life was not quickly forthcoming, the Lord would presently shake their houses on their heads and cause the earth to open up and swallow them alive.

Richard Hooker, in justifying the formula of the baptismal rite of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, objected to the Puritan preference for referring to godparents as witnesses ‘… as if they came but to see and to testify what is done’, adding,

Recovering the voice of the child in the Church is hard. Christians must reckon with Jesus’ instruction to be like a child, yet the Church usually measures faith by mastery of an adult vocabulary of religious experience. The historian has to dig past adult prejudices and silences. Recent research has done much to rescue the children of early modern England from anonymity. We know, for example, about the ideal of an ‘ordered society’, in which children and youths took their place as ‘inferiors’, and yet were valued and loved. We also know that the vision of order was rarely achieved, in a country swarming with juveniles. Attempts to make the vision outward and visible can be seen in arrangements for seating in church, where the young sat apart from their elders, and in the all-pervasive discipline of catechizing, where the assumption that age instructs youth is inherent in the pattern of proceeding by question and answer. Most of the sources that tell us about childhood, however, are heavily prescriptive, or rush past youth after listing a few predictable sins.

How children should be brought up is an everlasting question that vexed our forefathers just as much as ourselves. The most obvious difference between most of the thinking and writing that goes on about it today and that of the early modern period is that a largely secular approach has replaced a fundamentally and deeply religious one. So it is natural that the historian of this period should ask how and in what ways Protestantism changed things in this respect. What emerges in facing this issue, in a peculiarly acute form, is the common historical problem of relating prescription to practice. Patrick Collinson has remarked upon the ‘stark contradiction’ between ‘the austere severity of the conduct books and what little can be glimpsed of the real world outside these texts’. It is this contradiction that my paper addresses. I shall approach it as follows. First I will explore the conduct-book advice about parental duty and practice and about children’s obligations to their parents. This provides what we may call the Puritan way of upbringing. I shall relate this to some material from personal sources, like diaries and autobiographies, about what may actually have happened in the home. I will then turn to schooling, which, in its new scale and intensity, can be seen as a crucial social development in Elizabethan and Stuart England, fired in large part by the Protestant evangelizing impulse and its concomitant propaganda of social order. The burgeoning grammar schools, it will be argued, were the principal public instrument of a new and purposeful construction of masculinity.

Books for children have existed for centuries. Their contents range from instructional manuals to flights of fancy. In children’s literature, a variety of narrative forms have emerged, developed, flowered, and faded, but one genre, Bible stories for children’s use, has remained in existence as long as print itself.

The aim of this paper is to examine the evidence from a number of charity schools, for attitudes towards the childhood of the ‘poorer sort’ in the early eighteenth century. Conventionally it has been claimed that lack of affection, and even brutality, characterized the relationship between parents, especially fathers, and their children. Lawrence Stone, in particular, has promoted the view that, as a result of the very high mortality rate among children until the late eighteenth century, parents did not invest much affection in them in order to insulate themselves from the sorrow resulting from their likely deaths before reaching adulthood. This view was also taken by Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt. They pointed out the formality of address seen in letters between children and parents of the upper classes, and suggested that cruelty to children and flogging was commonplace at all levels of society. These views have been challenged by Linda Pollock, who has suggested that, when examined carefully, the evidence suggests that, from the sixteenth century at least, nearly all children seem to have been wanted, loved, and cared for. She claims that the majority of children were not subject to brutality, and that physical punishment was used relatively infrequently and as a last resort. Pollock suggests that from the eighteenth century onwards parents were much concerned with ‘training’ a child in order to ensure that he or she absorbed correct values and beliefs and would grow into a model citizen.

When one realizes how small a percentage of eighteenth-century pulpit literature consists of sermons to, or about, children, one may wonder whether the much-vaunted new ‘awareness of childhood’ ever influenced preachers in the Augustan age. The most prominent minister to address the theme being Philip Doddridge of Northampton, the influential Dissenter, it seems worth investigating how he and his contemporaries chose to represent children.

Juvenile associations in aid of foreign missions made their appearance both in the Church of England and in the Nonconformist churches in the wake of the successful campaign in 1813 to modify the East India Company charter in order to open British India to evangelical missionary work. The fervour which the campaign engendered led to the formation of numerous local associations in support of the missionary societies. In some cases these associations had juvenile branches attached. However, until the 1840s children’s activity in aid of foreign missions was relatively sporadic. Children’s missionary literature was almost non-existent. Such children’s missionary activity as did take place was confined largely to the children of church and chapel congregations; before the 1840s there was little perception of the vast potential for missionary purposes of the Sunday-school movement.

This paper considers the reward books given to children as Sunday-school prizes in the north-west of England between 1870 and 1914. From the titles presented and from the authors considered to be suitable, it was possible to select a number of books which were representative of these prizes. An examination of these stories showed that there were themes which were repeatedly stressed, and that those for boys and girls were noticeably different. In the light of what is already known about the organization and purposes of Sunday schools, the choice of a particular genre of books for prizes suggests that their contents were seen as one way of socializing children into appropriate attitudes and behaviour.

In addition to those who could bear arms, the crusade armies included numerous camp-followers. They came in a variety of forms—the old and infirm, women (who posed a different set of problems), the clergy, and children. It is the latter who are the subject of this paper. In the first part I will examine the evidence for children on the crusades in contemporary sources— histories of individual expeditions written by participants or drawing upon eyewitness accounts. I will then go on to examine how the image of children on the crusades has been passed on to subsequent generations. I do not intend here to offer a comprehensive survey of children’s literature about the crusades. I will merely try to highlight some themes, in particular, from British historical novels and adventure stories written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Revd Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., after two months’ residence in Glasgow wrote that though repulsive to live in yet there are alleviations, the streets and buildings are fine and the people lively. The poor Irish among whom my duties lay are mostly from the North of Ireland…. They are found by all who have to deal with them very attractive; for though always very drunken and at present very Fenian, they are warm hearted. … I found myself very much at home with them. [Their horrific lives gave] a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of town life to the poor and more than to the poor, of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation of our race, of the hollowness of this country’s civilisation: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw.

Although the roles played by children in recent centuries in English church music have varied enormously, it is probably fair to say that choirs with at least some boys’ or girls’ voices have proven more important in musical, ecclesiastical, and social developments than those with none. The most obvious example of this is the choir of men and boys, which has constituted a conspicuous feature of cathedral and some collegiate music since the Middle Ages, except, of course, during the Commonwealth. As women and girls have until very recently been regarded as inappropriate in such music, it is difficult to imagine that the breadth of achievement in musical composition and performance standards associated with these choirs would have been possible if they had contained only men and no boys.

The Sunday school was an art form. Its classical age has been explored by T. W. Laqueur and its totality by P. B. Cliff. Like those of great art, its creative moments were the simultaneous issue of evolution, system, and individual genius. Those moments were intensest in their Nonconformist aspect, for Nonconformists, though often thwarted, were born educationists. Their buildings reflected this: theological colleges, for instance, which grew from overgrown houses to imitations of Oxford, and eventually to Oxford itself; or proprietory schools, strait-jacketed between the financial constraints and social aspirations of an enlarged middle class trying to reconcile Manchester’s values with those of Thomas Arnold. And there were the Sunday schools themselves, complexes of hall, parlour, and classroom, enfolding the chapel, reflecting the activity, mentality, and spirituality of a particular society, encompassing therefore a concept of the Church, and designed with considerable ingenuity to meet the needs of a rounded yet carefully graduated community. By the turn of the twentieth century they housed daily activities for all ages. Their influence reached far. Fuelled by the Word proclaimed from the pulpit, and empowered by the decisions of representative meetings taken in hall or vestry, the Sunday school broke chapel bounds to teach more people than could be met with in chapel pews.

Child abuse sometimes seems to be a discovery of the closing decades of the twentieth century. Academic attention was focused on the problem by a conference sponsored by the Royal Society of Medicine, chaired by the Health Minister Dr David Owen, in 1976. Among the twenty-six contributors was a member of our society, Professor Gordon Dunstan, and Dom Benedict Webb. The publicity for the published proceedings claimed that ‘Child abuse and neglect provide some of the most important and difficult problems in Western Society.’