Who Decided the Child Was Grown?

1. One child, several thresholds

William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) lists, in Book I, chapter 17, the ages at which English law treated a boy as able to do different things. At twelve he could take the oath of allegiance. At fourteen he was at "years of discretion", and could consent to marriage, choose his guardian and, if his discretion was proved, make a will of his personal estate. At seventeen he could be an executor. At twenty-one he was at his own disposal and could dispose of his lands and goods.

The list for a girl was different. She could be betrothed at seven and was entitled to dower at nine. At twelve she could consent to marriage and, with proved discretion, bequeath her personal estate. At fourteen she could choose a guardian, at seventeen she could be an executrix, and at twenty-one she could dispose of herself and her lands. An earlier handbook, The Law's Resolutions of Women's Rights (1632), gives a similar ladder with a further rung, sixteen, at which a woman was past the lord's tender of a husband. It sums up the legal position of women in one sentence: all of them were understood to be either married or to be married. The 1632 book is known here only from an anthology extract, so this account has limited verification. The ages are a composite of separate rules on marriage, dower, guardianship, wills and majority, several of which Blackstone traces in his notes to Coke's commentary on Littleton (Co. Litt. 88; Littleton §123) and, for apprenticeship, to 5 Eliz. I, c. 4. Coke's text has not been checked.

The criminal law used other ages again. A child under seven could not be guilty of felony. Between seven and fourteen the presumption was that the child lacked the understanding to be guilty, and it could be overturned if the evidence of understanding was strong. After fourteen a young person was as liable as an adult of twenty-one (Blackstone, Commentaries I.17 and IV.2). Blackstone, citing Matthew Hale, gives two cases from the uncertain years between seven and fourteen: a girl of thirteen burned for killing her mistress, and a younger boy hanged because his hiding showed that he knew he had done wrong (Commentaries I.17, citing Hale, Pleas of the Crown, vol. 1, p. 26). The passages seen do not name the children, and the girl was presumably a servant. These cases are known only through Blackstone's summary of Hale, and so rest on limited verification.

A single girl or boy was therefore a child for some purposes and an adult for others, and the lists differed by sex. The ages in Blackstone's list also describe the life of a person with something to leave or inherit: consent to marry, dower, executorship, lands. A child with nothing to inherit met other thresholds, set by employers, parishes and the economy of a household. Some of those were written into statutes. Many were recorded only when someone had a reason to inquire.

This essay follows thresholds for girls and for boys, and for those with property and those without. Its fullest evidence is English, with some from the rest of Europe. The cases from Athens, Rome, Jewish, Islamic and Indian law, and Japan are used to test points the English material raises, and are not a survey. Section 7 returns to who is missing.

2. Four ways a threshold was set

The same person is a child to one institution and not to another because each institution asks a different question, and each has its own way of answering. Four ways recur in the cases below.

Work and the household (section 3)
Asked by: households, employers, parishes.
The question: Can this person be set to work, leave home, be bound as an apprentice?

Marriage (section 4)
Asked by: families, churches, property law.
The question: Can this person marry, hold property, act without a guardian?

The body (section 5)
Asked by: religious and civil law.
The question: Has puberty come?

Declaration (section 6)
Asked by: states, registers, religious communities.
The question: Is this person recorded, named or counted as grown?

The first is a demonstration. The young person is judged by what he or she does, or can be made to do, and is treated as able for that purpose. The fourth declares a status by a number, a register or a ceremony. A ceremony is one form of declaration, and in the cases below it is not the commonest. In practice the ways overlap, and a society usually combined two or three of them. Who decided, and who answered when a threshold was set wrongly, runs through all four and is taken up in section 6.

3. Work and the household

Leaving home, and class

For much of the population in early modern England, the threshold that mattered most was possibly leaving the parental household to work for another, and the next was setting up a household of one's own. Both were thresholds of demonstration: a young person who could be put to service was treated, for that purpose, as able to work.

Ann Kussmaul's study of servants in husbandry found that they were typically between fourteen and twenty-five, and that service was a stage between childhood and independent adult life (Kussmaul 1981, pp. 3–4 and 71, as summarised in a review and in Mitterauer's notes; the book has not been read in full here). Accounts of apprenticeship in seventeenth-century autobiographies, in a study by Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, show that 22 of 26 writers who gave an age left home for apprenticeship between thirteen and eighteen, with the others at nine, eleven, nineteen and twenty. The same study notes that contemporary accounts of the stages of life put "youth" at fourteen to twenty-eight in some, nine to eighteen in others and nine to twenty-five in others (Ben-Amos 1988, as given in the article's footnotes; the full article has not been read here). The word had no fixed range.

The ages were tied to class. In the Upper Austrian parish of Pennewang in the nineteenth century, which Mitterauer calls a particularly striking case, children of the sub-farmer strata left home at an average age of 12.7 and children of the rural middle class at 34.8 (Mitterauer 1990, p. 20 n. 25, citing an unpublished Vienna dissertation by B. Gruber, 1989). Mitterauer's wider argument is that children generally did not leave home as early as some historians had claimed, so the figure shows the range within a parish more than a rule for Europe. In southern Sweden in 1829 to 1866, a very large majority of landless and semi-landless children left home at about sixteen, and children of landed peasants left considerably later (Dribe 2000, from a university summary of the book, so on limited verification). A child whose family had land to pass on probably stayed until the land was available. A child whose family had none left when a place was found.

Law, apprenticeship and the mines

Law and institutions then set the length of the passage. Blackstone notes that an infant under twenty-one could make no deed or contract that bound him, with exceptions: he could bind himself apprentice by indentures for seven years, and could bind himself to pay for necessaries and for his schooling (Commentaries I.17). The London guilds in 1556 fixed twenty-four as the minimum age for finishing an apprenticeship, with the stated aim of preventing over-hasty marriages and the setting up of households by the young too soon, and the Statute of Artificers of 1563 later wrote the same age into law (Snell 1985, ch. 5). The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 allowed parish overseers, with two justices of the peace, to bind the children of parents judged unable to maintain them as apprentices, a boy until twenty-four and a girl until twenty-one or the time of her marriage, and the Act made the binding as effective as if the child were of full age and had bound himself or herself by indenture (43 Eliz. I, c. 2). An Act of 1767 limited the term for parish children in London to seven years or until twenty-one for both sexes (7 Geo. III, c. 39; London Lives, registers of pauper apprentices). The Act's own text has not been checked on whether seven years was a cap or an alternative to twenty-one, and one secondary page gives 1777/8 for the change. The institutions of work set the end of dependence at an age that suited the employer and the parish, and in the guilds' case also the community's interest in delaying marriage.

The nineteenth-century coal mines show a threshold being set from outside, after children were already at work. A government commission questioned children who worked underground in 1841 and reported in 1842. The record for Sarah Gooder, aged eight, who worked as a trapper in the Gawber pit, states that she began work around four in the morning, was frightened because she had to work without a light, and would far rather be at school (Children's Employment Commission, Appendix I, evidence no. 116, from transcriptions; the printed Parliamentary Paper has not been checked here). The Mines and Collieries Act of that year forbade the employment of any female underground from 1 March 1843, and of any male under ten, other than boys who had reached nine and were already employed when the Act passed. It also barred the apprenticing of anyone under ten, or for longer than eight years, and made indentures void once the apprentice reached eighteen (5 & 6 Vict. c. 99, ss. 1, 2 and 4). Sarah Gooder would have been excluded by her sex whatever her age. The National Coal Mining Museum's notes on the commission state that children went on working illegally, sometimes with the knowledge of owners (a museum's educational notes, a secondary source).

4. Marriage, and what it did for women

For many women, the passage was marriage, and marriage ended the status of child without ending dependence.

The Laws of Manu give the sacred-thread initiation for boys of the three upper classes, and then state that for women the marriage ceremony is the equivalent sacrament (Manu 2.67, trans. Bühler). In Japan of the Edo period, among samurai families, a girl's first marriage, marked by the shortening of her kimono sleeves, signified her transition into social adulthood, while boys did not need to marry and went through the public ceremony of genpuku (Jolliffe). English parish law bound a pauper girl until twenty-one or marriage, whichever came first, and a boy until twenty-four. The Mishnah makes a girl's bodily maturity decide whether a marriage made for her as a minor, by her mother and brothers after her father's death, could still be refused: she might refuse it until she had reached the age of puberty and grown two hairs, and not afterwards (Niddah 6:11). Mitterauer, in a note, cites the ethnologist Richard Thurnwald (1932) for the observation that in European rural society marriage rites mattered more than initiation rites, which suggests that full adulthood was not reached until marriage (Mitterauer 1990, n. 66). Thurnwald's own text has not been consulted.

Marriage did not confer independence. In Roman law the guardianship of a boy ended at puberty. In the words of Gaius it continued for a female "however old", even when she was married, because the older jurists had thought women of full age to be scatterbrained. Gaius himself did not find the reason convincing: he observed that women of full age managed their own affairs and that the guardian's authorisation was often a matter of form and could be compelled by the praetor (Gaius, Institutes 1.144–145 and 190). In English common law, marriage did the opposite of ending dependence: Blackstone, summarising the doctrine of coverture, says that by marriage husband and wife become one person in law, and that the legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or incorporated into the husband's (Commentaries I.15).

The legal ladders also did not fit the lives they described. The same law that gave a girl of twelve the capacity to consent to marriage met a practice in which women married late. Family-reconstitution studies of English parishes put the mean age at first marriage in the seventeenth century at about 26 for women and 28 for men (Wrigley et al. 1997, as compiled in teaching tables; the volume itself has not been checked), and the pattern of marrying late, after years in service, is the one Hajnal (1965) described for north-west Europe. A girl could be a legal bride at twelve and, on average, a servant or a daughter at home until her mid-twenties.

For girls, then, the threshold that mattered in practice was possibly marriage, and the passage it marked led into a dependence of another kind.

5. The body

Three legal traditions took puberty as a threshold, and none used the body alone. Each paired it with an age, and they differed on which governed.

Rabbinic law treats the body the same way for both sexes. A girl who has grown two pubic hairs after the age of twelve years and a day, and a boy who has done so after thirteen years and a day, is an adult under the commandments (Mishnah, Niddah 5:6 and 6:11). Both have a stage before the threshold: a girl of eleven years and a day, or a boy of twelve years and a day, has her or his vows examined to see whether the meaning of the vow is understood. The sayings that close the tractate Avot list the stages of life and give thirteen as the age for the commandments and eighteen for the marriage canopy (Avot 5:21). A child who reaches the ages without the signs remains a minor until about twenty (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Marriage 2). Age and body are both required, and each can delay the other.

Roman jurists disagreed about which should rule. Gaius and Ulpian report a dispute between two schools over when a boy became pubes. The Sabinian school held that a pubes was one who showed it in the condition of the body, that is, who was able to procreate. The Proculians held that a pubes was one who had completed fourteen years (Gaius, Institutes 1.196; Ulpian, Regulae 11.28). Justinian in the sixth century settled it for fourteen for boys and twelve for girls, and in doing so recorded that the older authorities had judged males by the condition of the body as well as by years, a practice he thought indecent to continue (Justinian, Institutes 1.22 pr). This account of the text comes from a secondary report, and the Latin has not been checked here. One recent study argues that Antoninus Pius had settled it earlier, in the second century (Kosior 2021). A nineteenth-century reference work says that there is no evidence that inspection of the body was ever carried out, and that the age of twelve for girls rested on long custom, since Roman girls wore the child's bordered toga until they married (Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, "Impubes"). Smith's work is a secondary source, and the point has had limited verification against Gaius, the Digest and the Code. For girls, the Roman threshold was a number tied to marriage and not a bodily event.

Islamic law takes puberty as the main threshold and supplies a number for cases where the body is silent. A summary of the field states that puberty is defined by signs of physical maturity, or by the age each legal school sets in their absence, and that a minor's capacity grows gradually through childhood (a journal abstract, Annals of the Japan Association for Middle East Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, whose author has not yet been identified). The age is reported as fifteen lunar years in the Shafi'i and Hanbali schools and eighteen in the Hanafi and Maliki schools, with some Hanafi authorities holding fifteen; the Imami Shi'i view gives nine for girls and fifteen for boys. These positions come from secondary summaries and have been checked against no classical legal text, so they rest on limited verification. For girls the range of positions, from nine to eighteen, is wider than a single bodily event would suggest.

The body is also an unstable threshold. It is not fixed for the species. In western societies the average age at menarche fell from 16.5 years in 1880 to about 12.5 (Hochberg, Gawlik and Walker 2011), and the timing of puberty responds to energy supply and other conditions (Hochberg and Belsky 2013). A study of skeletons from medieval England found puberty later than in modern populations: menarche delayed by up to three years, at about fifteen, and as late as seventeen in London, with the final stage of boys' growth continuing, in some cases, to about twenty-one (Lewis, Shapland and Watts 2016, as reported in summaries; the paper has not been read in full here). A rule keyed to the body moves the threshold for a whole population when its food, disease and work change. The YFL essay The Real Cost of Children sets out the biology of puberty and why the juvenile period exists. Plain-language accounts of what the adolescent years do are in In Other Words... what three significant hormones in adolescence are doing at the front door and Hey!, Want To Know: why your teenager can reject closeness? And it looks like disrespect., and In Other Words... What Long Childhoods Are For covers why humans have a long juvenile stage.

6. Declaration: registers, numbers and ceremonies

The fourth way declares a status. Some societies declared it for some young people with a ceremony. The ceremonies described in the surviving texts mostly concern people who held, or would hold, a status that other people needed to see.

At Athens in the fourth century BC a young man was enrolled in his deme at eighteen. The members of the deme voted on oath, first on whether he appeared to be of the age the law required, and second on whether he was freeborn and of the parentage the laws demanded. A candidate judged too young was dismissed back into the ranks of the boys. The Council then examined the enrolments and fined the demesmen who had enrolled anyone it found to be under eighteen. The enrolment was followed by two years of training and garrison duty (Aristotle [attributed], Athenaion Politeia 42). The system concerned freeborn men of citizen parentage. Women, slaves and others were outside it. The deme voted on how old a candidate looked because no register of birth would settle it.

Tacitus reports that among Germanic peoples a young man bore arms in public only after the community had judged him able to use them, and was then given a shield and spear in the assembly, so that he counted afterwards as part of the state and before as part of a household; he gives no ages and says nothing of girls (Tacitus, Germania 13).

In the Laws of Manu the initiation of a boy of the three upper classes falls in the eighth year counted from conception for a Brahmin, the eleventh for a Kshatriya and the twelfth for a Vaishya, with later limits of sixteen, twenty-two and twenty-four, which Hermann Oldenberg suggested derive from the syllable counts of the metres linked to the three classes; the ages follow class and purpose and not any bodily development (Manu 2.36 to 2.38, trans. Bühler; Oldenberg, notes to the Grihya-sutras).

In Japan, the court and warrior ceremony of genpuku ("wearing the cap") marked the passage of a boy by a change of clothing and hairstyle and, at times, a new name. It was recorded from the Nara period (710 to 794) and was linked to the court and warrior ranks (Blomberg; this article has been seen only in part, so the account has limited verification). In the Edo period a related rite, the first wearing of the hakama, was reserved for boys of aristocratic and warrior families, and the samurai genpuku itself usually took place at sixteen or seventeen by the East Asian count of age. From the seventeenth calendar year a young samurai also had the legal right to adopt an heir. Rites of this kind that began as upper-class markers were taken up by commoners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the shichi-go-san celebration for children of three, five and seven, and there may have been local markers in the countryside that the sources do not record (Jolliffe).

In Jewish law the status followed the age and the body, and the ceremony came later. The phrase bar mitzvah appears in the Talmud for one who is subject to the commandments, and early rabbinic literature gives no rite under that name. A rabbinic text of about the fifth century has Rabbi Eleazar say that a man must attend to his son until thirteen and then say a blessing for being released from responsibility for him (Genesis Rabbah 63:10). A boy became obligated at thirteen and a girl at twelve whether or not anyone marked the day, and the ceremony familiar today developed over the Middle Ages and later (Hilton 2014, known here only through a summary of the book). A ceremony for a girl was held for Judith Kaplan, born on 10 September 1909, on 18 March 1922, when she was twelve and a half. She read a passage from a printed Humash and not from the Torah scroll. Earlier synagogue celebrations for girls are reported from Italy, France and Poland in a Jewish-education article; no scholarly source has yet been found for the claim.

The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1909) described rites of passage in many societies as having three phases, separation from the old status, transition, and incorporation into the new, and held that their significance is social and not biological (as summarised in encyclopaedia entries; the book has not been consulted at page level). A ceremony makes a change of status public, and where others have to treat a person differently, it gives them one shared account of it.

A number applied by law is a thinner form of the same declaration. A date of birth can be checked without ceremony, and it divides a population into two groups without any individual being looked at, which is what the Proculians wanted in Rome. It requires that age be counted and proved, which the YFL essay Counting a Child's Age examines.

A threshold set by a number or a register needs someone to answer for it. At Athens the demesmen who enrolled a candidate under eighteen were fined. The Mines Act made parents or guardians who misstated a child's age liable to a penalty (5 & 6 Vict. c. 99, s. 6; taken from the Act's section headings, with the full text of the section not yet read). In the rabbinic saying, a father answered for his son until thirteen. In each case the duty and the penalty fell on adults. The young person was the subject of the threshold and not the one who set it.

7. Whose thresholds were written down

The sources used above were written by men, mostly in legal, religious or official roles: a Roman jurist, a rabbinic compiler, the compilers of the Laws of Manu, a Roman historian describing foreigners, an Athenian constitutional writer, an English judge, parliamentary commissioners. They record the thresholds that mattered to institutions. The thresholds set by a farm, a parish or a household for the people who were not in positions to write are recorded mainly in the statutes that regulated them, in registers kept by overseers and clerks, and in the evidence of the few who were asked. The YFL essay Children's Own Words in the Record follows the few records of children's own words and the channels that carried them.

That evidence is itself mediated. Sarah Gooder's account was taken down by an adult commissioner, in answer to questions. A mine-owner, Lord Londonderry, argued in the House of Lords that the commissioners had questioned the children in ways that suggested the answers (HL Deb 24 June 1842, vol. 64, cols. 538–44, at col. 539). The objection came from an interested party, and the record is still among the few of a working child's own account.

The record is therefore weighted towards male, propertied and institutional lives, and the claim to follow "the whole population" holds only within limits. The class evidence is English and central European, rural, and mostly male, with pauper girls and Gooder as the main exceptions. Enslaved children appear only as people outside the Athenian register: none of the sources used here describes a threshold for them, and that absence is itself a feature of the record. Outside Europe, the cases here are the court and warrior ranks of Japan and the upper classes of Manu's law, and little is recorded about ordinary young people.

The same limit applies to the argument about ceremony. Because the sources were written by and for people with status, the observation that ceremonies cluster among them cannot be used as evidence that others had none. It stays a hypothesis.

8. What "child" has covered

The evidence here concerns thresholds, and it supports a narrower claim than one about the meaning of a word. Terms differed by language and by institution. Latin law has impubes and pubes, rabbinic Hebrew katan and tinok, and English law called anyone under twenty-one an infant (Blackstone, Commentaries I.17), while "youth" in seventeenth-century English ran from nine to twenty-eight. What the cases show is that a person's status as a child ended at different points for different purposes, and that the point was set by the institution asking: a household, a guild, a parish, a religious community, a state. Whether the words themselves bound youth to service has been argued the other way, and the question is a separate one (Mitterauer 1990, challenging Ariès and Gillis).

One person could be a child to the household that employed her, a minor to the law of property, an adult to the commandments of her religion, and a bride, without any of these answers matching. For a boy, the ladder of Blackstone, the register of Athens and the cap of the Japanese court gave other answers. For a pauper girl, the answer might be the end of a term of service, or a marriage.

Modern law uses numbers, and it uses several of them. In England and Wales the Family Law Reform Act 1969 lowered the age of full legal capacity from 21 to 18, and other age limits for other purposes sit at other ages. A multinational study found cognitive capacity reaching adult levels around sixteen and psychosocial maturity, the capacity to restrain oneself in the face of emotional or risky stimuli, beyond eighteen, and its authors argued that different age boundaries for different legal purposes are therefore reasonable (Icenogle et al. 2019). The single sharp threshold that modern states set for many purposes is a declaration by number, the fourth way above. It sits beside work, marriage and household formation, which for much of history set the practical threshold. Legislation moved some of those thresholds as well: the minimum age for a boy to work underground was ten in 1842 and twelve from 1860 (Mines Act 1860, as summarised by the UK Parliament). The Act allowed exceptions for boys of ten to twelve on conditions that have not been checked here.

The title's question has no single answer in the cases examined. The household and the employer decided when a young person could be set to work. The family, the church and the law decided what marriage did. Religious law and civil law decided what the body meant. States, registers and communities declared a status, and adults answered for the declaration. The young person's own say was the least recorded part of it. The YFL essay Carving the Me describes capacity and room as two parts of a person's autonomy, and a declared age limit is one way a society states how much room it will allow at a given age. The YFL piece In Other Words... Who Governed When the King Was a Child? tells how kingdoms were run when the king was a child, and the YFL essay How the Law Moved the Line follows the age limits of United Kingdom law.

9. A note on the evidence

The essay draws on translations of primary texts where these could be read (Blackstone, the Poor Law of 1601, the Mishnah, Manu, Gaius, Tacitus, the Athenian constitution, Hansard) and, for other points, on reviews, abstracts and summaries. Claims that rest on secondary sources only, or that have had limited verification, are marked as such where they appear. Some page numbers, editions and statutory texts remain to be confirmed. The cases are chosen to show how varied the thresholds were and are not a survey. The conclusions are provisional until the open items are closed.

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References

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