At the age of nine, Nehemiah Wallington and his step-brother Philip stole a shilling from their family’s parlour table, ran off to an alehouse in Finsbury Fields, and there spent the lot on cake and ale. “When I did come forth into the air, my head was light, and I fell over the rails into the fields, and I could not rise,” he would later recall.
Two years earlier, the boys had been stealing carrots from the carts in Leadenhall Street on their way to school. Definitely a case for an Asbo, except we are talking very early in the 17th century, and these were no street urchins, but the sons of a respectable artisan, a woodturner.
I often find myself maintaining, against most of the rhetoric of politicians and the media, that kids are just kids, much as they’ve always been – the details of misbehaviour might have changed but the standard of it, could you find a neutral measure, remains about the same level.
And there’s some modern evidence for that, in a study this week that found the youth of today are actually better behaved than their parents were.
The research, by Colin Pritchard, of Bournemouth University’s Institute of Health and Community Studies, and Richard Williams, a social inclusion co-ordinator for the university, is published in the book Breaking the Cycle of Educational Alienation. They repeated a survey in 2005 that was originally conducted in 1985 with year 10 and 11 secondary students.
“The good news and, perhaps, unexpected, is that 2005 youngsters have less problematic behaviour than the 1985 cohort.”
But it won’t surprise you to hear this was not the details of the research that made most of the headlines – this was that girls are behaving “worse” than boys. The smoking, sex etc aren’t great news, but perhaps are an inevitable side-effect of girls getting mixed messages of empowerment and the repression of pressures to be “ladylike”, and their kicking against the latter.
(Account from P.S. Seaver Wallinton’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth Century London, Metheun, 1985 p. 28 This has been on my “to read” list for some time – the Puritan religion gets a bit heavy, but it is a fascinating account of the rare survival of extensive papers from a person of this class. Unfortunately there are no female equivalents that I know of!)
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