 |
Childhood and Adolescence
Date: Saturday, 27th April 2019
Progamme
2019's Local History Section Spring Symposium comprised the following talks:
-
Dr Fiona McCall, Children and Trauma in Loyalist Accounts of the English Civil War in Hampshire
-
Dr Rosalind Johnson, Children and Young People of Dissenting Families in Early Modern Hampshire
-
Professor Nicholas Orme, Display, Ceremony, and Performance in Medieval English Schools
-
Dr Mary South, The Inoculation of Children in Eighteenth Century Southampton
-
Barbara Large, The Children of Basingstoke Workhouse.
The Symposium was held in the Cinema at the Hampshire Record Office, Sussex Street, Winchester.
A pdf of the programme is also available for download. (0.4 mb)
The Speakers & their topics:
Dr Fiona McCall
D Phil (Oxon, 2008) is an early modern historian
specialising in sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious and social
history. Her work focuses on anti-clericalism, religious conflict, family
and memory during and after the English Civil war and interregnum.
Her first book on the experiences of loyalist clergy and their
families, Baal's Priests: the Loyalist Clergy and the English
Revolution (Ashgate Press, 2013) was commended by judges of the
2013 Samuel Pepys Prize. She has also published papers on childhood
trauma amongst loyalist families, charges of scandal against the loyalist
clergy, and clerical humour. She is currently editing a collected edition
for Palgrave, Church and People in Interregnum Britain, as well as
researching and writing a book on religious conflict in English parishes
during the Commonwealth period. She is a lecturer in early modern
history at the University of Portsmouth and a departmental lecturer in
local & social history at the University of Oxford Department of
Continuing Education.
Early seventeenth-century clerical families were
social exemplars, with a particular need to
demonstrate family order and adherence to
patriarchal values. In conduct guides and
sermons clergy promoted ideals of family
discipline, and advocated chastisement and
control of children as a religious imperative and
an act of love. This was challenged by the threats
to the social order which came with Civil Wars in the 1640s, not least
amongst the families of clergy ejected from their livings. Using
memories of the Civil Wars collected by clergyman John Walker in the
1700s, probate documents, and other contemporary sources, this talk
considers the impact of civil war on the children of Hampshire loyalist
clerical families.
Dr Rosalind Johnson
Rosalind Johnson read history at the University of York. She returned
to study with an MA in history and archaeology and then a PhD at the
University of Winchester. Her doctoral thesis was on Protestant
dissenters in Hampshire in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is a visiting
research fellow at the University of Winchester, an associate lecturer
at the University of Chichester, and a contributing editor for the
Wiltshire Victoria County History. She has published several articles on
Protestant dissenters and has recently completed a book chapter on
Quakers and marriage in the 18th century. Her current project is a study
of the celebration of banned religious festivals during the Interregnum.
The records of Hampshire’s early modern
Protestant nonconformists focus on the adults
who had leading roles within the congregations, or
who suffered persecution for their faith. Yet
children and young people were as much part of
these religious groups as their parents. Accounts
of dissenting ‘conventicles’, or illegal religious
meetings, mention that children were attending. In times of
persecution children witnessed the arrests of adult members of their
congregation, and parents were separated from their children. Isaac
Watts senior, father of the famous hymn writer Isaac Watts, was forced
to leave his wife and children behind in Southampton when he fled to
London to escape persecution. Youth was not a protection against
arrest; some young people in Portsmouth were themselves imprisoned
alongside the adults.
Despite persecutions, Hampshire’s nonconformists established schools
to educate their children. After the Act of Toleration in 1689 allowed
most Protestant dissenters to worship freely these school continued,
alongside the education of young men for the nonconformist ministry,
and the placing of young people as apprentices with suitable
employers.
Professor Nicholas Orme
Nicholas Orme is emeritus professor of history, Exeter University, and
the author of some thirty books on religious, educational, and social
history. These include Medieval Children (2001); Medieval Schools:
From Roman Britain to Tudor England (2006); Fleas, Flies and Friars:
Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages (2011); English School
Exercises: 1420-1530 and Medieval Pilgrimage: With a Survey of
Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Bristol (2018).
Medieval schools, like modern
ones, projected themselves
through their buildings and
activities. The classroom was a
kind of theatre of exposition,
questioning, discussion, and
punishment. Masters and pupils
became involved in the
development of the English
drama, organising and taking
part
in plays especially in religious houses and
great households, including Winchester
Cathedral.
Dr Mary South
Mary South trained as a biologist and ecologist, and was head of
Science in a girls’ comprehensive school in Southampton, before
returning to laboratory work in the NHS. She then trained as a Blue
Badge Guide and studied a post-graduate Diploma in Local History
from Portsmouth University. She has worked in tourism and as an
Education Officer. She undertook a part-time MSc at London South
Bank University, and after retirement followed up the investigation of
smallpox inoculation in Southampton, uncovered during her Diploma
research. This was achieved by gaining a PhD with the University of
Winchester in 2010. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University
of Winchester; a member of the Local History Section Committee for
the Hampshire Field Club; on the Editorial Boards for the Southampton
Records Series (SRS) and Hampshire Papers and is Treasurer for the
Friends of Clarendon Palace. Her fingers have managed to write three
books; Titanic Threads; Southampton Book of Days and as part of the
SRS, The Inoculation Book 1774–1783. Chaotic career path? Maybe -
but it’s been fun!
During the long eighteenth century there was
ambivalence in attitudes towards children,
well-to-do families were encouraged to
cherish their offspring, whilst the children of
the poor often were seen as a resource to be
exploited. The mass inoculation of the poor in
Southampton may have had significant value
to the poor families themselves, but the authorities saw it as a means
of protecting the future workforce and armed forces i.e. it was of
national significance. What the records show is the gratitude and trust
that parents had for the surgeons’ skills, bringing babies as young as
two weeks to be inoculated. That the surgeons were skilled there is
no doubt - no child died as a result of the operation.
Barbara Large
Barbara Large grew up in Walsall in the West Midlands. Qualified in
Business Studies she became a local government officer for
Staffordshire County Council and retired in 2007. With a lifelong
interest in local history, in her spare time she studied at Keele
University for the Certificate in Post-Medieval Archaeology and the
Certificate in Local History, mainly concentrating on Staffordshire.
Moving to Basingstoke in 2009, she joined the VCH research group for
Hampshire as a volunteer. She has a particular interest in the lives of
the poor and is currently researching the pre-Poor Law records for the
parish of Old Basing for a future VCH publication. She also edits and
produces the bi-annual VCH Hampshire newsletter.
In the political, economic and
social turmoil of early 19C England
and the advent of catastrophic
and pervasive poverty, children
were often not considered to be
significant, despite contributing to
the workforce. Inevitably, they
were caught up in the poor law
system, both before and after the
passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834. This Act established
the universal workhouse system in the country, which has now
become a dark part of our national idetity. The talk will examine the
state of childhood at the time, the workhouse system and practices,
and then look at the experience of children in this very typical early
rural workhouse – a relatively humane and progressive organisation
by the standards of the time. We will see how children were
accommodated and treated, educated and encouraged to move on in
the world. Then how attitudes changed over the course of the period,
leading to more modern ideas and approaches to destitute and
orphaned children into the early 20C.
|
