Underage. This is a difficult problem because people became capable of
assuming different kinds of responsibilities at different ages. We normally
presume that you had to be 21 years old to practice law or serve on the
county court (being a commissioner of the peace means being named in the
commission of the peace means being appointed a justice of the peace), but
there are documentable instances of persons 19 and 20 practicing law.

There was NO legal minimum age for serving in the House of Burgesses until
the 1690s (the assembly copied an act of Parliament that had just for the
first time set a minimum age of 21), and the legal minimum age for serving
on some kinds of juries, according to the Common Law, was 14.

A great many approximate birth dates appear in old family histories and
genealogies and notes to historic documents based on the assumption that a
person was a certain age as of the time his or her name appeared in a
certain kind of document. That's a very slippery kind of deduction.

I recommend the chapters on age of consent in Holly Brewer's 1994 doctoral
dissertation, "Constructing Consent: How Children's Status in Political
Theory Shaped Public Policy in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts
before and after the American Revolution."

$0.02 worth from one who is certainly old enough,

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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