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Anne Lombard, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Page 508, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486263
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Political historians tend to regard the history of childhood as a quaint, subsidiary aspect of social history, one unimportant to big historical questions. Holly Brewer's highly original and powerfully argued book about the treatment of children in English and Anglo-American law and legal theory from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries turns this perspective on its head. Brewer shows that questions about the nature of childhood and the powers and obligations of parents were central to the great debates among early modern religious, political, and legal thinkers over religious and political authority. Her approach yields important new insights into the origins of modern ideas about children and families, as well as the sources of modern Anglo-American political and legal thought and the limits inherent in its promise of political equality for all.
Brewer takes us first to the unfamiliar conceptual world of sixteenth-century England, where authority was understood to originate in birthright or inheritance and laws did not sharply differentiate children from adults. Children possessed surprising legal capacities. Thirteen-year-old boys became kings or stood for election to the House of Commons. Seven-year-olds testified in criminal trials; twelve-year-olds were legally married against their parents' wishes. Nine-year-olds committed (and were hanged for) burglary, and impoverished four-year-olds consented to be transported to Virginia as indentured servants. Parental rights were few. Fathers' authority over their children was hemmed in by restrictions that enhanced the powers of lords over their tenants and masters over their apprentices and servants. Parents had no clear right to the custody of their children.
