Starting at the opening of the Civil War, parliament enticed young men into military service by encouraging apprentices to leave their masters and join the army, meanwhile promising to reward both masters and apprentices for their sacrifices. Parliament assured masters they would receive “reasonable satisfaction” in cash from the state to compensate for the labor lost on account of their apprentices having gone off to serve in parliament's military forces. Apprentices, on the other hand, were to benefit by deducting the time they spent in the army from their seven-year terms of obligation, and provisions for the same were placed in parliamentary ordinances. Parliament also stipulated that once former apprentices had been discharged from the military, masters were to receive them back for the remainder of their truncated terms.¹

Such an arrangement might have worked out well had the war been a short one, requiring apprentices to quit their masters for only a while. Like many wars, however, this one lasted much longer than predicted and by the time the royalists were defeated, a good number of soldiers had served out their entire apprenticeship terms while in the army. Therefore, those who served in the military long enough to have completed their apprenticeship terms with their masters (had they stayed with them) were put in a position to enter their trades right away and without additional training. Others who had fought in parliament's army for shorter periods expected to be able to rejoin their masters and complete their apprenticeships in good standing with the guilds. Parliament's intervention on behalf of workers during the 1640s and 1650s amounts to an early example of generous state-sponsored benefits provided, over the protests of guild masters, to apprentices at every skill level.

This work asserts three broad conclusions: 1) Apprentices were able to take advantage of their favored status and, with the help of the Parliamentary Committee for Indemnity, gained either outright freedom to practice their trades or reattachment to their masters to finish their seven-year contracts. 2) Indemnity Committee manuscripts indicate the need for a reassessment of the role apprentices played during the English Civil War period, since historians have mainly focused on them as a destabilizing social force, a volatile group prone to riot and disorder, sometimes damaging the royalist cause and sometimes the parliamentary regime. It is clear that during the 1640s and 1650s parliament came to appreciate apprentices who had served in its army and determined to repay their sacrifices on the battlefield by giving them the chance to achieve a good living in their trades as veterans resettled into domestic life. 3) The English Civil War marks a downturn in the history of the guilds. Parliament's soldier-apprentices were unpropertied people who, freed by parliament to set up shop, damaged the primacy of the guilds and helped move the English economy in a less restricted direction. The determination of these apprentices to achieve their freedom without the blessings of their masters indicates the possibility that scholars have too strongly associated the destruction of the guilds with the ambitions of middle class entrepreneurs, not to mention the origins of the modern ethic of individual economic gain, with bourgeois values.

English companies long opposed allowing young men who had served fewer than seven years under the tutelage of their masters to begin practicing their trades. Compounding this centuries-old problem of runaway apprentices was the tendency of many to set up rival shops in the hinterlands between urban centers and out of the reach of the guilds.²

It is not surprising, therefore, that companies responded to parliament's new ordinances with disregard and refused to grant freedom to apprentices who had spent less than their full terms receiving instruction in a craft before leaving for the army, especially since the “reasonable satisfaction” promised to masters by parliament was never forthcoming. For the soldiers' part, nonenforcement of the ordinances granting freedom to apprentices was prominent among the complaints against the government that developed once the First Civil War had been won and many prepared to return home to make a living. In fact, during the army disbandment crisis of 1647, five of the eleven regiments bringing lists of grievances to the army general council meeting in May at Saffron Walden insisted that ex-apprentices should be granted full freedom to set up their own shops once they returned to civilian life.³

Thus, despite protests such as these, the parliamentary regime at first clearly failed to override masters' objections and to carry through on its assurances to apprentices. Then in 1649, a few months following Col. Pride's famous purge of moderate and conservative MPs, a more radical parliament charged its Indemnity Committee to take on the additional responsibility of making sure that apprentices' valid claims were honored and that qualified former soldiers were made freemen who could practice their trades unmolested by the guilds. The Indemnity Committee had been instituted in 1647 with the main purpose of hearing appeals from parliamentary soldiers and government officeholders who sought protection against prosecutions at law for damages done to civilians during the war years. Several hundred soldiers petitioned the Indemnity Committee for relief from lawsuits lodged against them for damages to real and personal property. The Indemnity Committee manuscripts also contain at least ninety-five petitions brought to Westminster by soldiers who had left their apprentice posts to join parliament's army. These apprentices-turned-soldiers hoped for government intervention into disputes with their masters. At the time they initiated their petitions at the Indemnity Committee, most were under suit from their masters for breach of indenture contracts.

This chart shows a fairly balanced distribution of trades from elite drapers to a humble wood monger. Community needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, repair, medicine, etc., also seem to be represented in proportions appropriate to the times. Lowly watermen, who provided transport up and down the Thames, figure prominently in the group. Watermen were notoriously royalist in their leanings, perhaps due to a drastic slump in trade brought on by the war against the king. Ordinances providing relief from apprenticeship service singled out watermen as a way of pulling their apprentices into parliament's camp.

The ninety-five initiated their apprenticeships over a range of time from the late 1630s to the early 1650s, with their sponsors, usually their fathers, paying fees to their masters at the time the indenture bonds were signed. Many of these young men could write, as indicated by the frequency of their signatures in the records, which substantiates recent scholarly assertions that apprentices should not be characterized as a group drawn from the illiterate poor.⁴

Forty were apprenticed in London and the rest in towns and cities throughout England. The ninety-five apprentices examined here left their masters during the Civil War to join the army after having served on average 3.27 years of what was usually a seven to eight year contract. Parliament's ordinances, enforced at last by the Indemnity Committee, allowed apprentices at various states of preparedness to enter their trades as independent freemen when they returned home from the military. Since, as a general rule, apprentices who failed to achieve freedom seldom found ways to recover financially, the Indemnity Committee must have saved many from unemployment and poverty.⁵

Apprentices used the Indemnity Committee to overcome an array of stumbling blocks put in their paths by masters endeavoring to prevent them from gaining freedom. Masters typically used one of three methods to oppose granting independence to soldier-apprentices: 1) Most sued their apprentices for breach of the apprenticeship covenants that both parties had signed upon the young man's entry into his master's household. Entry fees due to masters were paid up front; therefore, suits were usually made for losses of labor sustained when apprentices deserted their masters for the army. Typically, a clause penalizing young men who failed to serve out their full terms was included in apprenticeship contracts, making it easy for abandoned masters to substantiate claims in court. Just one-tenth of the apprentices found for this study were imprisoned as a result of suits their masters made against them, and some were incarcerated for a few years.⁶

2) Masters often refused to accept apprentices back into service when their former wards had served insufficient time in the army to finish out their terms of apprenticeship. Apprentices who returned voluntarily to complete their years of obligation were turned away and left homeless. 3) Apprentices were rejected from their guilds and their names stricken from companies' books when, while in the army, they had broken their covenants by taking wives.⁷ Prohibitions against marriage were among the most consistently enforced guild restrictions put on apprentices.⁸

Despite these formidable obstacles, state intervention under the auspices of the Indemnity Committee tipped the scales in favor of apprentices. When presented with sufficient proof of military service, the Indemnity Committee did not hesitate to declare apprentices freemen, routinely overturning suits at law made against them and intervening on their behalf at proceedings in company courts.⁹

Petitions from soldier-apprentices make up only a small fraction of the several thousands of cases heard by the Indemnity Committee. Nonetheless, apprentices petitioning the Committee were far less likely to have their cases dismissed as invalid than in other cases where soldiers and officeholders made petitions for different reasons.

The Indemnity Committee was very scrupulous about requiring firm evidence to make cases and apprentices most likely had an easier time bringing in proof of both an apprenticeship bond and military service than soldiers who, for example, attempted to show the Committee that the damages they had done to civilian property was perpetrated for the benefit of parliament.¹⁰

Only six of the ninety-five apprentices were turned down by the Committee.¹¹ But in other types of cases, dismissal rates were much higher, which indicates a favored status for apprentices making petition. For example, parliament's officeholders, who petitioned the Indemnity Committee in great numbers seeking shelter from lawsuits for actions they had taken during the Civil War, were over three times more likely than soldier-apprentices to have their petitions turned down.¹² Instead of facing the real possibility of dismissal, formerly apprenticed war veterans making petition were all but assured of an indemnification order issued by the Committee to companies, masters, law courts, and law enforcement officials.

Evidence from the London Guildhall manuscripts goes on to suggest that, at times, merely initiating a plea at the Indemnity Committee was sufficient to make masters back down and withdraw their lawsuits. For instance, in May 1649 Peter Venour petitioned the Indemnity Committee complaining that the masters and wardens of the company of apothecaries in London had denied him his freedom in defiance of parliamentary ordinances. No entries of this case follow the initial petition in the Indemnity Committee papers, but guild records show that Venour was freed by his company in July. He then followed custom by making a gift to his company of “a silver cup of about an ounce and [a] quarter.”¹³

Other cases taken from the Indemnity Committee records also reflect the extent to which the state was willing to side with apprentices. John Winslowe was apprenticed to Samuel Giles, a London felt maker, for seven years beginning in August 1642. After serving Giles only six weeks, Winslowe joined the army and was posted at the garrison of Windsor, where he stayed for four months. He then went on to serve as a dragoon in Waller's brigade of troop for four years, and lastly in Capt. Henry Cromwell's regiment of cavalry from May 1647 to December 1649. In July 1650, Winslowe petitioned the Indemnity Committee, complaining that Giles refused to grant him his freedom. He substantiated his military record of just over seven years with three notes (all written on a single sheet) signed by his various commanding officers. Based on this evidence, the Indemnity Committee declared Winslowe a freeman.¹⁴

The Committee does not appear to have been troubled about the kind of felt maker Winslowe would be after having learned his trade for only a month and a half.

Lewis Roberts was apprenticed on a bond of £40 to William Alley, a surgeon who refused to deduct the two years Roberts served as a parliamentary trooper and who sued him “to an outlawry” at common law. Roberts brought his case to the Indemnity Committee in March 1649, just as it assumed cognizance over apprenticeship matters. The Committee ordered Alley to surrender the bond of indenturement and, when he refused to do so, had him arrested for contempt. A jailed Alley released Roberts from his apprenticeship obligations and by 1652 had paid him £10 in costs, as the Indemnity Committee ordered.¹⁵

Edmond Norcott served Samuel Thompson as a wheelwright's apprentice for four years before joining parliament's army. After two years of military service, he “being sick was ordered to come home.” Thompson accepted Norcott back on the condition that he sign a bond of £10 to cover the time lost while he was a soldier. Frustrated, Norcott then set up trade on his own as a wheelwright. Thompson responded by using the “extorted bond” to have him arrested and incarcerated. Norcott claimed at the Indemnity Committee that his arrest had kept him from providing for his wife and “two female children who are not likely to survive through want.” The Committee granted him indemnification and in June 1653 awarded him costs of just over £51 due from Thompson.¹⁶

In 1649 William Jennifer was bound for eight years to Isaac Vivian, a London merchant, upon a bond of £60. Jennifer served Vivian for a year, then went into service as a trooper under Col. Cole against “those bloody barbarous . . . enemies” in Ireland. Following military service, Jennifer returned to Vivian, hoping to serve out his apprenticeship. Instead of allowing Jennifer re-entry into his household, Vivian sued Jennifer on the £60 bond. In July 1652 Jennifer was indemnified of the suit and awarded £15 in costs due from Vivian.¹⁷

Before deciding on a military career, Richard King apprenticed himself to Raph Stradwick. King claimed that he left Stradwick to join the army because of Stradwick's royalism. While King was in the army, his master died and Hester Stradwick, Raph's widow, sued King at common law for breach of contract and had him placed in jail for three years. King's friends eventually raised the £10 in bail needed to release him from prison; afterwards, he pressed his case at the Indemnity Committee, which ordered Mrs. Stradwick either to find King another “fitting master” or set him free. The Committee freed King also from the lawsuit seeking £60 from him.¹⁸

Following the fates of the soldier-apprentices to find out how well they flourished in their trades once freed by parliament would be a difficult if not impossible task. The Indemnity Committee records do not reach beyond the time apprentices were either put back with their masters or freed. These manuscripts do strongly imply, however, that masters and companies routinely acquiesced to its decisions. The Committee resorted to physical force, or at least to the threat of it, carried out by the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons and his deputies, as one means of enforce compliance on defendants reluctant to obey its orders. The ninety-five apprenticeship cases stand out in this regard due to their being only three instances (including Roberts v. Alley described above) of the Committee having to resort to force against masters.¹⁹

This remarkable consistency from case to case over several years hints at a scenario where masters and guilds gave in and let freed apprentices make a living, as parliament commanded.

Civil War historians traditionally have had too narrow an interest in apprentices, giving them a close look mainly insofar as they constituted an unsettling force which often intruded into the political arena. London, the frequent site of popular tumults, has drawn our attention as a capital destabilized by the war between the king and parliament. London's popular disturbances involved and were sometimes led by apprentices, whose riots breached the very chambers of parliament in 1647 and caused a militia crackdown that included curfews in 1648.²⁰

Survey social histories of the period also portray apprentices throughout England as an implacable segment of society, since cities drew many adolescent workers from outside their walls who, once inside, formed rowdy, boisterous male groups.²¹ The unattached young with time on their hands constituted a serious concern in early modern England where perhaps one half of the people were under twenty years old.²²

This specter of out-of-control youth was particularly ominous during 1647, as the victorious army refused parliament's persistent attempts to disband it and to send soldiers home without paying them their egregiously overdue wages. An anonymous pamphlet published in that year, The Case of the Army Soberly Stated, cautioned soldier-apprentices not to think of themselves as fully emancipated. The author reminded apprentices that English patriarchy was still in force as young men moved from the oversight of fathers, to masters, and then parliament.²³

Another anonymous 1647 tract, The Honour of London Prentices, placed apprentices in a more favorable light, as it depicted how the brave deeds of former apprentices done in battle made courageous men of them. The actions of the Indemnity Committee complement this second pamphlet, since they indicate government alignment with the interests of soldier-apprentices and give no hint of acting on a need to placate a habitually problematic social group. Instead, they tell of a parliament willing to set aside traditional considerations favoring patriarchy and to recognize growth into mature and valuable citizens brought on by military experience.

Parliament's generosity is somewhat surprising given the longstanding, mutually beneficial arrangements in England between the guilds and the central government. In 1649, when the Indemnity Committee began enforcing legislation assisting apprentices in re-entering their trades, parliament was still an institution dominated by the gentry class. But due to war and revolution, it now worked without a king or House of Lords and, generally speaking, was led by men drawn from lower positions on the social scale than had been the case under royal rule. For whatever reason, government without a prince or peerage was inclined to lend a hand to soldier-apprentices and the Indemnity Committee records document a group of MPs determined to make good on assurances parliament had given to apprentices, regardless of the interests and concerns of the guilds.

Hence, Indemnity Committee manuscripts reveal not a parliament threatened by apprentice mob violence but a grateful parliament determined to reward those who had put in service to their masters and to the army, who had employed manufacturing skills especially needful to winning the war, or who had been wounded while fighting against the King's forces. For example, John Bell apprenticed himself for eight years to Giles Harding, a London baker, and served seven of them with his master before joining parliament's army. Following his return from the military, Bell put in a few more years waiting for parliament to enforce the ordinances making him free, and in 1649 the Indemnity Committee did so by direct order to the masters and wardens of the company of bakers. The Indemnity Committee also awarded Bell £5 3s in damages.²⁴

Others serving a long apprenticeship prior to entering military service include Edward White, who worked for a Barnstaple cordwainer almost nine years and John Wilson, who performed as a waterman for seven.²⁵

A few were deemed worthy of parliament's protection due to their contributions as suppliers. For example, in 1645 the Parliamentary County Committee of Shropshire ordered John Folliet to “set aside other employment forthwith” and to start making barrels for muskets, pistols and carbines. He was also directed to employ in this endeavor others in Shrewsbury “who are skilled in these works,” which essentially transformed Folliet at once from an apprentice to a master. The offended company of gunsmiths sued Folliet for lost business at the Court of Exchequer, a move that turned out badly for the company, since the Indemnity Committee freed Folliet and awarded him £30 in damages from his suers.²⁶

Parliament's grace also extended to soldier-apprentices who had suffered bodily injury in battle, even when the wounds were severe enough to impair work. A young man from Leeds, Thomas Pease, was a tailor's apprentice in London before joining parliament's army, where he served under Gen. Browne and Col. Payne for about three years. In 1646 he helped defend the garrison of Abingdon during a royalist assault, “where he was shot in the arm.” After the war, Corporal Pease returned home to Leeds, “where his friends abide,” to make clothing “when his shot do not too much trouble him.”²⁷

Studies of apprentices specific to the seventeenth century are rare. About twenty years ago Steven Smith published an article that describes London apprentices as an adolescent subculture. Smith argues that apprentices thought “their subculture to be permanent rather than transitory” and uses contemporary popular literature to show that they were characterized alternately as abused victims, riotous youth with weak morals, or heroes “possessing the manly virtues displayed on the battlefields of France and of the Holy Land (as well as those of the civil wars).”²⁸

This study takes up where Smith left off by uncovering evidence that the Civil War resulted in increased official regard for apprentices who had fought for parliament's cause. In fact, Smith's adolescent subculture was diffused and complicated by apprentices leaving urban centers to join the military. They returned home as real heroes, rather than fictional or legendary ones in the distant past as depicted in popular literature. Thanks to the Indemnity Committee, they were recognized as flesh and blood war veterans ready to begin their lives as free, emancipated adults. Historians have long been aware of many low-born men who took parliament's side in the Civil War partly as a means to rise in society.²⁹ Apprentices should be included in this group.

The final conclusion discussed here regarding the Indemnity Committee apprenticeship cases is that the guild system has too easily served to symbolize an old-fashioned rival to cottage industry in the “putting out system,” ostensibly the true precursor of the coming Industrial Revolution. In such a scenario, the guild system is destroyed by a developing capitalist ethos, played out by entrepreneurs moving manufactured goods through various stages of production from cottage to cottage. The stories of Civil War soldier-apprentices, on the other hand, suggest a different set of causal links accounting for the decline of guilds. They tell of the strains of war leading to a breakdown in the cozy and longstanding cooperative arrangements between the state and the guild companies. This breakdown was fueled in part by a growing government awareness that skills required to perform many trades, from cooper to shoemaker, could easily be mastered in from one to four years, while only a few, like shipbuilding, required seven or more.³⁰

Up until the Civil War, guilds routinely and unfairly exploited apprentices by keeping them in bondage far longer than needed to learn their trades³¹ and used paid informers and their own court systems to keep wayward apprentices in place. By freeing apprentices of their service obligations to masters, parliament in effect sided with workers it believed deserved to practice their trades—whether they were fully trained or not—thereby denying the guilds the authority to manage their own work force.

Parliament's stance in favor of apprentices does not hint at a budding free trade ideology but implies that government in Westminster had come to agree with complaints against the Statute of Artificers of 1563, which set a uniform minimum of seven years in training, regardless of the amount of time actually needed to learn a specific trade.³²

The Statute of Artificers was meant to assist companies in curtailing the chronic problem of precocious apprentices making business contacts while in training under their masters, then fleeing their posts to set up rival shops outside the guild structure.³³ Renegade apprentices-turned-shopkeepers may have been just as important in moving England closer to a modern capitalist economy as cottage industry entrepreneurs. Of course, an important difference between apprentices breaking out of the guild system to practice their trades before 1642 and after is that the earlier group did so illicitly and did not enjoy the sanction of parliament to quit their masters.

Thus the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers, designed in part to help control the adolescent population, was reversed eighty years later by MPs in the parliamentary Civil War government who wished to repay the young who had shown remarkable maturity by their service to the state as soldiers and sailors, in the process demonstrating as well their readiness to join adult society as free citizens. The cases of soldier-apprentices validate an observation in a classic study written in 1912 by Jocelyn Dunlop and R.D. Denman, who asserted that from 1650 to 1720 there was nationwide an “increasing disregard for the Statute of Artificers . . . the first step in the breakdown of the apprenticeship system.”³⁴

And as Christopher Hill noted four decades ago, a Cromwellian measure allowing disbanded soldiers to practice trades for which they were not fully trained was reenacted at the Restoration in 1660, after which restrictive guild apprentice regulations were “never again effectively enforced except in agriculture.”³⁵

The Civil War period should be seen as a pivotal moment in the unraveling of the English guild system, in part because parliament obliterated old restrictions and promoted the freedom of its ex-soldiers to compete in the marketplace with their former masters. The rise of the capitalist spirit in England may have been more closely tied to a drive among Civil War apprentices to better themselves financially—a drive similar to that of the more famous cottage industry bourgeois entrepreneurs—than has heretofore been recognized. Given the causal link usually assumed between the development of free enterprise and the decline of government restrictions on trade, it is ironic that this same spirit was condoned and supported in the mid-seventeenth century by the parliamentary state.