Leaving Home in Preindustrial Europe

The Industrial Revolution, which began as early as roughly 1750 in Britain and as late as the early twentieth century in parts of eastern Europe, caused social changes throughout Europe as factory work replaced older forms of labor. For children, factory work often meant leaving home for distant locations. Yet historians long believed that European children commonly left home for work even before the Industrial Revolution. In 1974 the historian John Gillis proposed that in preindustrial Europe children often left home by the age of seven or eight, and by the age of fourteen, most were living semi-independently away from home as servants, apprentices (workers learning a specialized trade), or students. Yet research since the 1970s has modified the picture considerably. To begin with, there were parts of Europe where the young rarely left home before marriage. In Mediterranean culture it was not considered appropriate for a young, single woman to work outside her own household.

Keeping children at home until marriage was often associated with large extended family structures, where working away from home was comparatively rare. The logic for such families in France, Italy, or Russia was to assemble a large number of unpaid workers from their own ranks to farm land owned by others. A noted case study from Russia investigated an estate composed of many large, multigenerational families where nearly half the male children could expect to pass their entire lives not only within their village of origin but also within their household of birth. Female children married early, usually under the age of twenty, and it was generally the bride who left the parental household at this point to live with the groom.

Slightly different was the case of tenant farm families in a village in the grand duchy of Tuscany (modern Italy), between 1819 and 1859. Here it was not uncommon for male children in their teens to leave home temporarily to become a farm servant or to take up an apprenticeship, but as in the Russian example, they would later remain in the household with their new brides. Female children, by contrast, usually left home definitively upon marriage during their twenties or early thirties.

Secondly, it is now clear that leaving home as early as the age of seven or eight would have been very much the exception in northern Europe, rather than the rule. Instead, the movement was a very gradual one. Studies in a number of regions suggest that only the very poorest children left home this early.Fritz Pauk, born in northern Germany in 1888, was a case in point. He first left home at the age of eight to work on a neighboring farm over the summer months, to help his impoverished single mother.Although many parents might have been eager to have one less mouth to feed, they had to contend with the general reluctance of farmers to hire small youngsters unsuited to most of the work on the land.The movement away from home therefore did not start in earnest until the young reached their early or even mid-teens.

Thirdly, the semi-independence of young people who left home mentioned by Gillis is now better documented than before. Above all, it is clear that it was often a protracted process, rather than the clean break with the family that the term might suggest. Children who went off to another village or to a town usually remained in contact with their parents, sometimes sent their wages home, and often made more than one move before finally setting up their own household upon marriage. This was possible because of the short distance and temporary nature of most migrational movements, including those of young male children and female children in their teens and early twenties. The outstanding exception was the big cities of Europe, which could attract migrants over long distances. Recent research reveals that during the nineteenth century, nearly as many migrants left cities and towns as entered them. Migration to the city worked more like a complex two-way current than a simple one-way movement. This meant that for young people who left home in villages there was the possibility of an emotional break from parents and some personal autonomy. Such a step from childhood to youth, and ultimately to adulthood, could be psychologically difficult, but it was evidently tempered in most cases by the maintenance of close family ties.