Definition
The act of placing a minor into an apprenticeship by formal contract. Binding out created a legally enforceable relationship in which a child — typically through a parent, guardian, or public authority — was contracted to serve a master craftsman or tradesperson for a defined term. In exchange, the master undertook to teach the minor a trade and, frequently, to provide basic necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter. The term refers both to the act of executing the apprenticeship arrangement and to the resulting contractual status.
Common Confusion
Binding out is sometimes used interchangeably with indenture or apprenticeship. These are related but not identical: apprenticeship is the broader legal relationship; an indenture is the instrument by which that relationship is typically formalized; and binding out describes the act of entering a minor into that relationship. A child who has been bound out is an apprentice; the document recording the transaction is the indenture; the process is binding out.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost entirely to the pre-industrial and early industrial legal world. Researchers encountering it in historical records — court files, probate inventories, poor law records, or municipal accounts — should understand that binding out was both a private contractual arrangement and a public welfare mechanism. Courts of orphans' jurisdiction, overseers of the poor, and guardians all had authority to bind out minors in various circumstances, which means the term appears across a wide range of record types beyond pure contract disputes.
The formal requirement that the minor be a party to the deed — not merely the parent or guardian — was a live issue in American courts through the nineteenth century. Sources disagreeing on this point should be read with attention to jurisdiction and date; the rule was not uniformly applied.
Binding out of pauper children by poor law authorities is a distinct use that overlaps with public law and early child welfare history. Researchers working in that area will find the term in overseers' account books and town records rather than in court reports, and the contractual formality expected in private apprenticeships was often reduced or ignored in the pauper context.
The term is effectively obsolete in modern legal practice. Compulsory education laws, child labor regulations, and the general decline of formal apprenticeship as a legal institution displaced binding out over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A researcher who finds the term in a source dated after approximately 1920 should treat it as either a historical reference or an archaism.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Rapalje & Lawrence are in close agreement: both treat binding out as synonymous with, or as the operative mechanism of, the contract of apprenticeship. Bouvier adds the procedurally important requirement that the infant be a party to the deed, citing a cluster of American and English authorities spanning the early nineteenth century. This requirement was doctrinally significant because it determined whether the apprentice was actually bound — a minor who had not executed the deed could not be held to its terms.
Neither source addresses the poor law variant of binding out in any depth, which reflects the limitations of treatise-style dictionaries when the relevant practice was administrative rather than litigated. Researchers who rely only on these sources will have an adequate picture of the private contract but will miss the public-authority dimension that was common in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
Apprenticeship law and the formal requirements of binding out varied by state in early American law. Some jurisdictions required court approval; others permitted the transaction by parental deed alone. Poor law binding out was governed by local and state statutes that differed considerably in their procedural requirements and the authority granted to overseers of the poor.