"Working as a servant was as much a rite of passage for young people in the late Middle Ages and early modern era as going off to college is today. In contrast with other societies around the world, where servants were usually a class of people doomed to servitude for their entire lives, in northwestern Europe large numbers of young people passed through a phase of service before forming their own households and working their own lands or trades. In northern Europe, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all young people put in time as servants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the early 1700s, according to one study, 60 percent of all English youths aged fifteen to twenty-four worked as servants at some point in their lives."
--Stephanie Coontz:
Marriage, a History.
Topics in this post: military history, orders, leather history, service, protocol, schedules, family hierarchy, religious hierarchy, business hierarchy, support networks for hierarchy.
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