This book is an investigation of youth and adolescence in pre-industrial England. It concentrates on young people from the middle or lower groups of society, who, between 1500 and 1800, left home to work as apprentices, agricultural labourers or in domestic service. Drawing on municipal, ecclesiastical and parish records, and over 70 autobiographies, Ben-Amos focusses on aspects of youth as they related to maturation: the separation of adolescents from their parents; their working lives and relationships with their employers or masters and mistresses; the relative independence and autonomy exercised by younger women; the role of the young in religious affairs; and the question of whether there was such as thing as a youth subculture.

As you read this book, you will see how Bruegel's scenes capture the universal conditions of conflict, work, play, folly and chaos, as well as innumerable pieces of biblical and folk wisdom."--BOOK JACKET.