We cannot expect to find any coherent or uniform action on the part of
parents. But there have been at different historical periods different
general tendencies in the attitude of parents towards their children. Thus
if we go back four or five centuries in English social history we seem to
find a general attitude which scarcely corresponds exactly to either of
Ellen Key's two groups. It seems usually to have been compounded of
severity and independence; children were first strictly compelled to go
their parents' way and then thrust off to their own way. There seems a
certain hardness in this method, yet it is doubtful whether it can fairly
be regarded as more unreasonable than either of the two modern methods
deplored by Ellen Key. On the contrary it had points for admiration. It
was primarily a discipline, but it was regarded, as any fortifying
discipline should be regarded, as a preparation for freedom, and it is
precisely there that the more timid and clinging modern way seems to fail.

We clearly see the old method at work in the chief source of knowledge
concerning old English domestic life, the _Paston Letters_. Here we find
that at an early age the sons of knights and gentlemen were sent to serve
in the houses of other gentlemen: it was here that their education really
took place, an education not in book knowledge, but in knowledge of life.
Such education was considered so necessary for a youth that a father who
kept his sons at home was regarded as negligent of his duty to his family.
A knowledge of the world was a necessary part, indeed the chief part, of a
youth's training for life. The remarkable thing is that this applied also
to a large extent to the daughters. They realised in those days, what is
only beginning to be realised in ours,[1] that, after all, women live in
the world just as much, though differently, as men live in the world, and
that it is quite as necessary for the girl as for the boy to be trained to
the meaning of life. Margaret Paston, towards the end of the fifteenth