Servants as Educators in Early‐Modern England

This paper will address the role of early‐modern (1550–1800) English servants in the training and education of the children residing in the households in which these servants worked. Some resident servants were employed primarily, if not solely, to educate the children of their masters and mistresses. These tutors, governesses and chaplains are more visible to the historian than their ubiquitous fellow servants and apprentices, who also played an important, if more obscure, role in the education and training of children. The duties of both servants and apprentices, who to their contemporaries were another form of servant, were seldom recorded. Instruction that such servants provided was certainly only one of their many functions. Evidence for their teaching role appears incidentally in diaries, letters and other personal accounts, few of which servants themselves wrote. The paper will discuss the two groups of resident servants: the relatively small group of professional teachers and the much larger group of servants who were occasional teachers and whose educative function was reported sporadically in both pre‐literate and literate English society

Apprenticeship · Civil servants · Function (biology · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Servant · Sociology · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Psychology