“Good faith, before I came to this ripe groath,
I did accuse the labouring time of sloath;
Methought the yere did runne but slowe about,
For I thought each yeere ten I was without.
Being foreteene and toward the tother yeere,
Good Lord, thought I, fifteene will nere be heere!
For I have heard my mother say that then
Prittie maidens were fit for handsome men.”
A Venetian noble who accompanied an ambassador from Venice to the English court in the sixteenth century writes—
“The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards their children; for after having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years.”
On the other hand, we find children described as—
“most ongracious grafftes, ripe and redy in all lewd libertie,” through the fault of the parents and schoolmasters, “which do nother teach ther children good, nother yet chastice them when thei do evill.”
In the following century people looked back with regret to the time when daughters were—
“obsequious and helpful to their parents,” when “there was no supposed humiliation in offices which are now accounted menial, but which the peer received as a matter of course from ‘the gentlemen of his household,’ and which were paid to the knights or gentlemen by domestics chosen in the families of their own most respectable tenants; whilst in the humbler ranks of middle life it was the uniform and recognized duty of the wife to wait on her husband, the child on his parents, the youngest of the family on his elder brothers and sisters.”