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The Custody of Children in English Manor Courts

Very little is known about the young and the orphaned in the villages of medieval England. The span of years constituting childhood as well as the social experiences peculiar to youth must be deduced from either literary sources, including the comments of chroniclers and priests, or legal records generated by coroners, jurors and feudal lords. The variety and scope of this evidence notwithstanding, certain questions about the care of children in the rural world remain unresolved. Did peasants view childhood as a period of protected dependency, and at what age did childhood cease? How did the change in status from child to adult take place? There was, it seems, no public proclamation, no elaborate ceremony or ritual. Instead it appears that children quietly entered the adult world as soon as they no longer were dependent on their mothers and nurses. Indeed the dependency of medieval children now has the semblance of brevity, neither prolonged by families nor subject to broader constraint. But does this appearance fully account for the passage of childhood in peasant society?