Pauper Apprenticeships in C18-19th Rural England: The Decline of a Labour Institution

This paper re-examines the decline of pauper apprenticeship in the early nineteenth century. Most narratives have focused on the batches of children sent to textile factories from the 1780s, and their decline from the 1820s, partly due to protective legislation in response to perceived abuses. This overshadows the far greater number of poor children bound as apprentices in agriculture, many of whom were part of distinct local systems. In the South West, children were systematically allocated to local landholders in rotation or by lottery, and masters were compelled to accept them with little or no premium. As they were not bound to meet short-term labour demands and they were kept within the parish, many of the arguments regarding factory apprentices have little relevance.
 
This paper argues that we need a different explanation for the decline of the compulsory apprenticeship schemes most prevalent in the west and north of England until their abolition in 1844. It focuses on the debates about its advantages and disadvantages as a system of labour in the 1830s and 1840s. It suggests that the criticisms of compulsory apprenticeship were, in some sense, the inverse of those directed at factory apprenticeships. Rather than a form of labour requiring regulation, contemporaries believed that it was an excessive interference with the labour market. Ultimately, compulsory pauper apprenticeship was abandoned as it was no longer viewed as the best way to prepare young people for a life of wage labour.