Abstract

This paper aims to offer the first systematic analysis of the role that violence played in the management of apprentices, and the gendered dynamics of violence in English apprenticeship more broadly. Based on an examination of over 500 surviving petitions that apprentices or their supporters submitted to the Westminster and Middlesex sessions, it examines the proportion of that featured allegations of violence; the terms and level of detail in which violence was described; and violence’s relationship to apprentices’ other stated grievances. It moves on to reconstruct the factors that could prompt masters and mistresses to mete out correction (as well as their commentaries on their perceived right to do so) and the tactics that petitioners used in crafting their complaints to legal authorities. Although female apprentices complained about violence at a disproportionate rate to their male peers, this paper suggests that their petitions did so in comparatively formulaic and restricted terms. It considers what implications this might have for both our understandings of violence, gender, and apprenticeship, and a genre of document — the petition — that provides access to these issues.