Quoted section:
Of course, in the European Middle Ages, when economic matters fell under the jurisdiction of church law, no one really pretended these questions were not theological. Still, that period introduced a further element, not explicitly theological, the importance of which for later conceptions of labor can hardly be overstated. This is the notion of “service.” It is very much a Northern European idea.
In theory, feudal society was a vast system of service: not only serfs but also lower-ranking feudal lords “served” higher ones, just as higher ones provided feudal service to the king. However, the form of service that had the most important and pervasive inuence on most people’s lives was not feudal service but what historical sociologists have called “life-cycle” service. Essentially, almost everyone was expected to spend roughly the first seven to fifteen years of his or her working life as a servant in someone else’s household. Most of us are familiar with how this worked itself out within craft guilds, where teenagers would first be assigned to master craftsmen as apprentices, and then become journeymen, but only when they achieved the status of master craftsmen would they have the means to marry and set up their own households and shops, and take apprentices of their own. In fact, the system was in no sense limited to artisans. Even peasants normally expected to spend their teenage years onward as “servants in husbandry” in another farm household, typically, that of someone just slightly better off. Service was expected equally of girls and boys (that’s what milkmaids were: daughters of peasants during their years of service), and was usually expected even of the elite.
I didn't realize David Graeber wrote about the history of service - I really enjoy a lot of his theoretical work, so I'll have to check out how he uses life-cycle service to build his arguments.
Although I'm not familiar with Graeber's specific take, I am familiar with women's late medieval and especially early modern life-cycle service in England. And he's essentially right about the scope of life-cycle service, although it seems that he does a bit of a lax job at historicizing the phenomenon. Life-cycle service wasn't just the "way things were" - it brought together medieval ideas about service as a metaphor for nearly everything along with post-Black Death economic shifts to create an enduring legacy in ideas about gender and labor that set the scene for post-Industrial Revolution service.
Historians have analyzed demographic data from poll taxes in the wake of the fourteenth century Black Death and found a disproportionate percentage of young, unmarried women in larger towns and cities, particularly in England. They sought economic opportunities as wages rose in response to the lack of workers post-plague working in households; as a result, women married later, contributing to the distinct northern European marriage pattern that Graeber indicates.
Life-cycle service and the northern European marriage pattern also had purposes other than economic; between 1550-1599, there was a 24% chance a child would lose both parents by the age of 25. Going into service meant that you had a new household that could provide you with food, lodging, and support, even if you were so unlucky as to lose your parents at a young age. Plus, networking - you could serve in a household of similar or even greater social status, meet people your age, and maybe even find your own future spouse to start your own household. Lots of stories about servants exist in contemporary diaries, like that of Samuel Pepys, an administrator in the court of Charles II.
There are countless causes for the end of life-cycle service as a strong phenomenon in early modern England in favor of lifetime service. Sheila McIsaac Cooper lists, for instance, Industrial Revolution and the loss of jobs that servants could fill, an increase in literacy inducing young elite men to travel or study rather than serve, the rise of wage labor, increasing inequality between rich and poor, and even increases in consumption of goods due to England's economic expansion that meant servants had even more to do.
Sources:
Maryanne Kowaleski, "Medieval People in Town and Country: New Perspectives from Demography and Bioarchaeology," Speculum 89:3 (July 2014): 573-600.
Sheila McIsaac Cooper, "Service to Servitude? The Decline and Demise of Life-Cycle Service in England," History of the Family 10 (2005): 367-386.