Medieval children who attended school were the lucky ones with stable families and upwardly mobile futures. Even boys who later became apprentices usually went to enough school to learn to read, write and do basic math; sometimes school was a formal requirement of their apprenticeship contracts. The boys who didn’t go to school were the poor of either country or city. If country, they were busy with farm work. If city, they often became servants around the same age that other children went to school. And while only boys went to school or began apprenticeships, both boys and girls became servants.
Child servants were popular with the city households who could not afford better help. All work was labor-intensive, so all but the poorest homes had servants of some kind. Obviously, children are not the best workers, but they are just as obviously the cheapest. They came from the poorest homes, the ones that could not afford any servants at all, and their parents were glad to get them any sort of paying work. There wasn’t much bargaining power for child servants.
One popular strategy was to pay child servants minimally for a few years, with a lump sum at the end. This is recorded most frequently in Italian cities, where girls needed dowries to marry. By promising to provide the girl with a dowry that her family could never afford, the employer could keep her working cheaply for six or seven years. If she ran away or quit before she was old enough to marry, they were off the hook for the dowry. Hard work and harsh treatment made it difficult for many of these poor girls to stick it out.
In England, child servants were usually ten years old. Going into service was not always a bad deal for a child. It depended on what sort of household they went into. Doing well in the right place could mean an invitation to work in a more prestigious place. Boys who had learned to read, and who found work in aristocratic households, could be promoted to positions as clerks or managers. On the dark side, going into service in the wrong place could mean ending up in prostitution or crime. A low-class tavern that needed children to run errands might be a dangerous place to work.
Servants, including children, usually lived at their place of work. They may have had no more than a mat on the floor or a small bunk at the back of the kitchen. In better places, they lived in an upper room with other servants, crowded into communal beds and owning no more than their clothes. They worked long days.