Leading medieval historian Nicholas Orme draws together a vast range of sources and disciplines—history, literature, religion, and art—to create a picture of medieval childhood more comprehensive than ever before. Beginning with pregnancy and childbirth, Orme explores the succeeding stages of a child’s growth to adulthood. He discusses baptism, the significance of birthdays and ages, and family life, including upbringing, food, clothes, sleep, and the plight of the poor. He also chronicles the misfortunes of childhood, from disablement, abuse, and accidents to illness and death. In a fascinating review of the special culture of children, the author describes their rhymes, toys, and games; their religion and relationship to the Church; and their learning to read the literature for children. The final chapter of the book explains how adolescents grew up and entered the adult world.
In this vivid recreation of childhood in the middle ages, Orme underscores the importance medieval society attached to childhood. Childhood was clearly regarded as a distinct cultural period in life, and children were considered both special and different from adults.
Leading medieval historian Nicholas Orme draws together a vast range of sources and disciplines—history, literature, religion, and art—to create a picture of medieval childhood more comprehensive than ever before. Beginning with pregnancy and childbirth, Orme explores the succeeding stages of a child’s growth to adulthood. He discusses baptism, the significance of birthdays and ages, and family life, including upbringing, food, clothes, sleep, and the plight of the poor. He also chronicles the misfortunes of childhood, from disablement, abuse, and accidents to illness and death. In a fascinating review of the special culture of children, the author describes their rhymes, toys, and games; their religion and relationship to the Church; and their learning to read the literature for children. The final chapter of the book explains how adolescents grew up and entered the adult world.
In this vivid recreation of childhood in the middle ages, Orme underscores the importance medieval society attached to childhood. Childhood was clearly regarded as a distinct cultural period in life, and children were considered both special and different from adults.
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Overview
Leading medieval historian Nicholas Orme draws together a vast range of sources and disciplines—history, literature, religion, and art—to create a picture of medieval childhood more comprehensive than ever before. Beginning with pregnancy and childbirth, Orme explores the succeeding stages of a child’s growth to adulthood. He discusses baptism, the significance of birthdays and ages, and family life, including upbringing, food, clothes, sleep, and the plight of the poor. He also chronicles the misfortunes of childhood, from disablement, abuse, and accidents to illness and death. In a fascinating review of the special culture of children, the author describes their rhymes, toys, and games; their religion and relationship to the Church; and their learning to read the literature for children. The final chapter of the book explains how adolescents grew up and entered the adult world.
In this vivid recreation of childhood in the middle ages, Orme underscores the importance medieval society attached to childhood. Childhood was clearly regarded as a distinct cultural period in life, and children were considered both special and different from adults.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300097542 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2003 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.75(w) x 9.50(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Medieval Children
By Nicholas Orme
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2003 Nicholas OrmeAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0300097549
Chapter One
BIRTH
ONCE A YEAR, the world unites in praise of birth and babyhood. Christmas celebrates the story that God was born like the rest of us, as a tiny child. Yet the story as told today, by carols, Christmas cards, and Nativity plays, is more of a frame than a picture. We hear about the prelude to the birth, as Mary and Joseph travel to the inn. We encounter the sequel: the angels and the shepherds. But what went on between? How did Mary give birth? Who assisted her, and what did Joseph do? The gospel accounts do not tell us, because they expect us to know. Medieval people thought that they knew, and showed what they thought in their drama. In the great play cycle of York, Joseph leaves to get light and fuel, Mary stands modestly between the ox and ass, and when he returns the baby has been born. In the cycles of Chester and 'N-Town', the latter of which was acted in East Anglia (perhaps at Norwich), Joseph goes away to find two midwives. When they arrive, the birth has taken place. The midwives, Salome and Zelomye (or Tebell), are astonished to find that Mary shows no signs of her delivery; she is still a virgin.
These versions of the Christmas story grew out of two beliefs. One was theological. Not only was Mary's conception of Jesus a unique and miraculous event, but so was her pregnancy and delivery. Her baby did not grow in her womb like a normal child, and she did not suffer the labour of an ordinary mother; even her maidenhood remained unbroken. The other belief was rooted in everyday life. People assumed that men in ancient Palestine, like men in medieval England, were not allowed to be present when women gave birth. The only proper attendants were other women -- midwives, neighbours, or servants. Men may have helped with births in emergencies or in remote places, but even this was irregular. In the much-read medieval romance of Bevis of Hampton, Bevis and his wife Josian are travelling with one servant through a forest when she goes into labour. They take her to an empty lodge and Bevis prepares to assist, but she dismisses him abruptly:
For God's love go hence away ... And let me work, and Our Lady; Shall never woman's privity [private parts] To man be showed for me.
She gives birth alone to twin boys -- a piece of fiction, but a reflection of popular views and customs.
Before birth, there was pregnancy about which medieval people thought that they knew a good deal. Their notions of human development were based on ancient science, going back to Greece and the Near East in pre-Christian times. One of their chief authorities was Aristotle. He believed that the human embryo, after conception, developed in three stages matching the three kinds of life in the world. At first, the embryonic matter was like a vegetable, with the power merely to feed itself and grow. Next, it added the characteristics of an animal: the ability to feel, desire, and move. Eventually, it became recognisably human in shape and gained a rational or intellectual soul. A male embryo acquired this final shape and soul at about forty days. A female embryo grew more slowly, and took about three months to do so. For Aristotle, a soul was merely the life-force possessed by a living thing, so that the early embryo had a vegetable soul, then an animal one, and finally that of a human being. He and other ancient writers therefore made a distinction between the pre-human embryo, which was not human in appearance or soul, and the developing foetus which was. They regarded the latter as human and the former as not human, and imposed different penalties on those who injured a foetus or its mother before and after this point.
More detailed accounts of the timetable of embryonic development were produced by classical writers on medicine like Hippocrates and Galen, and these were well established in western Europe by the time of St Augustine, in about AD 400. Augustine considered that the male embryo grew to human shape in four stages. During the first six days, its matter consisted of a milky fluid. This was converted to blood in nine days and consolidated into flesh in a further twelve. The last stage, in which the flesh acquired the shape and members of a human, took another eighteen; a total of forty-five days. Augustine saw a Christian parallel here. In the Gospel of John, Jesus compared his body to the Temple in Jerusalem, a Temple that had taken forty-six years to build. On the assumption that the Virgin Mary conceived him on 25 March (the feast of the Annunciation of her pregnancy by the Archangel Gabriel) and gave birth on 25 December, his time in her womb lasted exactly 276 days: six times forty-six, a significant number. True, Jesus was not a typical man. He was believed to have been unique in possessing his whole shape and organs from the moment of his incarnation by the Holy Spirit in the Virgin Mary. After ail, he could not have gone through a period (like other human beings) when he was merely vegetative and animal. Some medieval pictures of the incarnation of Jesus showed him passing from the Spirit to the Virgin in the form of a tiny, complete man, needing only to grow. But his time in the womb seemed to confirm the fact that forty-six days was the perfect period for an embryo to gain human characteristics.
Christianity laid a stronger emphasis on the human soul and its immortality than Aristotle had done. This did not change the earlier distinction between the pre-human embryo and the human foetus, but reinforced it. Medieval Christians came to believe that God put the soul into the foetus when it took human shape, at about forty-six days for a male and ninety for a female; until that point, the embryo was not human and had neither human life nor human soul. This was universally held to be so in the middle ages: by popes like Innocent III and theologians like Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and Giles of Rome. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the Catholic Church began to assert that the human soul existed from the moment of conception, with all that this implies for the treatment of embryos. Lawyers took the same view as theologians: both canon lawyers of the Church and common lawyers of the English legal system. Thomas of Chobham, writing his manual for confessors in 1216, observed that it was worse to destroy a formed foetus than an unformed one. The law of Moses, he believed, imposed a fine for the latter but the death penalty for the former. Later in the thirteenth century, the great English lawyer Henry Bracton defined the killing of an unborn child in a similar way. It counted as homicide only if the foetus was already formed and 'animated', possessing a soul.
The scientific understanding of the embryo in late-medieval England was a similar one, based on Aristotle, Augustine, and their counterparts. A good place to read about it is the encyclopaedia of the Franciscan friar Bartholomew the Englishman, or Bartholomew Glanville as he is sometimes known (Fig. 7). His work, De Proprietatibus Rerum, 'On the Properties of Things', was probably written on the continent in about the 1240s, and is a survey of creation, beginning with God and traversing mankind, animals, plants, geography, and geology. It was widely read in its original Latin form down to the sixteenth century, and reached a large lay public through translations into English, French, Dutch, and Spanish. The English version was produced by John Trevisa for Lord Berkeley' in 1398, and was still in sufficient demand to be published when printing began. Wynkyn de Worde brought out an edition in 1495 and other printers did so in 1535 and 1582. This kept it as a main source of popular information on human generation and birth until Shakespeare's time.
Following Aristotle, Bartholomew wrote that a child was formed by the father's seed together with matter contributed by the mother (he does not use the word 'egg'). If the resulting embryo grew on the woman's right side, it became a male; if on the left side, a female. The relative virtue or power of the father's seed and the mother's matter determined the child's characteristics. If the father's was dominant, the child inherited his attributes, and so on. The account of the growth of the male embryo resembles that of Augustine, except in ascribing seven days to the first stage of development. This enabled the perfect period of growth to be calculated as that of Jesus: forty-six days. Bartholomew, like Aristotle, was careful to point out that human beings grew at different rates, rather than in one standard way. Those who were born early also achieved their basic shape early on, as quickly as thirty days from conception rather than the ideal forty-six. Babies developed their members one by one, not equally and all together.
Time in the womb varied from eight to ten months. Girls took longer to grow than boys, because the elements that formed a boy were hotter, as were its surroundings in the womb. Only with the formation of a human figure, however, did the embryo take human life and soul -- for Bartholomew as for other medieval writers. By the eighth month, the ability of the child to move in the womb showed its wish to be born. Sometimes, this moving enfeebled it and was the explanation why some babies, when born, did not live long. Much could be learnt about a forthcoming child from the condition of its mother's breasts. Firm breasts presaged a healthy child, drooping ones a feeble child, and small or lean breasts a still-birth or premature baby. The expression of milk by the nipples was a further sign of weakness. If the right breast was larger than the left, the child would be a boy, and if the left was greater, a girl.
Reading Bartholomew reminds us that birth in the middle ages was a hazardous process. It was recognised as such, and there was a craving for reassurance about the outcome. Churches owned relics which, they promised, would ensure a safe delivery. Many of these were girdles or belts, perhaps because they symbolised undoing and could be laid on or around a woman's abdomen before she gave birth or while she did so. Canterbury Cathedral lent St Anselm's belt to women in childbirth by the early twelfth century. A holier girdle still, that of the Virgin Mary, reposed at Westminster Abbey and was loaned to pregnant ladies in the royal family. It was dispatched to Gascony for Henry III's queen Eleanor of Provence, to Knaresborough (Yorks.) for Edward I's daughter Elizabeth, and was probably the same as 'Our Lady girdle' which a monk brought to Queen Elizabeth of York in 1502. Other religious houses claimed relics of similar virtue. There was a second girdle of the Virgin at Bruton Abbey (Som.), part of a third at Dale Abbey (Derbs.), a lace of her smock, girdles of St Ælred, St Bernard, and St Francis, the chains of St Peter, and (at Burton-on-Trent, Staffs.) the staff of St Modwenna for pregnant women to lean on. Even parish churches made such claims, as Kelham (Notts.) did with the finger of St Stephen.
Women unable to reach a relic, or to have one brought to them, turned to other forms of supernatural aid. One of these, by the later middle ages, was a scroll of parchment or paper, containing a cross one fifteenth of the height of Jesus or a reproduction of the wound in his side. Scrolls, like girdles, could be laid across the belly during childbirth, and contained written promises that whoever viewed or wore them would have an easy delivery. Certain mineral stones were believed to be helpful as well. These included iris (rock crystal), jasper, malachite, and best of all aetites or eaglestone. The last (a form of iron ore) was believed to be taken by eagles to their nests to assist them in breeding. It was found in lumps with hard shells and soft cores, part of which sometimes broke loose and rattled inside, suggesting the marvel of a hollow stone and an analogy with the baby within the womb. Poor women, lacking scrolls or eaglestones, had to make do with humbler precautions. Reginald Scot tells how, at the end of the sixteenth century, they would tie their girdles or their shoe latchets to a bell, and strike on the bell three times. This too was believed to smoothe the process of birth.
Spiritual preparation was also encouraged. John Mirk, canon of Lilleshall (Shropshire), who wrote a simple set of Instructions for Parish Priests in about 1400, urged them to tell pregnant women to come to confession and receive communion, 'for dread of peril that may befall', in other words death. A prayer used in York diocese in the later middle ages invited listeners to pray for all women with child in the parish or other parishes,
that God comfort them and deliver them with joy, and send their children christendom [baptism] and the mothers purifying of Holy Church, and release of pain in their travailing.
There is more in this than meets the eye. We are praying not only for successful deliveries and healthy children. We are asking that babies may survive long enough to be baptised, in other words for just a few minutes, and their mothers long enough to be purified in church after forty days. The situation where a mother died in childbirth with the baby still inside her was common enough for Church leaders to rule that a caesarian operation should be done in such cases. Ælfric of Eynsham, writing soon after 1000, recalled that Julius Caesar was born in such a way, and said he had known another such person who lived into old age. Several later clergy repeated the call, and Mirk told the midwife not to spare herself in using a knife. If her courage failed her, she should call in a man to do the work instead -- a last resort indeed.
Bartholomew thought that young women with small limbs were particularly at risk in childbirth; he wrote at a time when aristocratic girls married and gave birth in their teens. Some noble girls and young women did not survive the crisis, despite the utmost care that the age could provide. Mary Bohun, countess of Derby, the first wife of Henry IV, died at or soon after childbirth in 1394, despite having borne several children. So did Jane Seymour, queen of Henry VIII, twelve days after giving birth to her first child, Edward VI. A pathetic memorial survives to Anne a Wode, wife of Thomas Asteley, esquire, in the church of Blickling (Norfolk). A monumental brass, it depicts Anne holding two swaddled babes in her arms (Fig. 8). An inscription explains that 'on the day of St Agapetus the martyr [in 1512], she bore a boy and a girt when giving birth, and after the peril of giving birth she suddenly passed to the Lord'. So apparently did her children. Lady Margaret Beaufort, although she gave birth successfully to Henry VII when she was thirteen, had a difficult labour because of her small size, and seems to have been left infertile.
It followed that birth needed expertise, and this was anciently provided by a woman rather than a man, a midwife rather than a male doctor. 'Midwife' means somebody 'with the wife' at the birth or (less certainly) who is 'amid the wife' to deliver her. The Latin equivalent, obstetrix, signifies 'a woman who stands by'. Bartholomew defines her, in Trevisa's translation, as 'a woman that hath craft to help a woman that travailcth of child, that she bear and bring forth her child with the less woe and sorrow'. He tells how the midwife anoints the mother's womb with soothing balm to ease the birth. She takes the child out of the womb, and ties the navel-string four inches long. She washes away the blood on the child with water, anoints him with salt and honey (or salt and roses, pounded together) to dry him and comfort his limbs and members, and wraps him in clothes. His mouth and gums should be rubbed with a finger dipped in honey to cleanse them, and to stimulate the child to suck. The midwife would usually be assisted by other women: servants in a big household, family or neighbours in a small one. Even great people might help with their presence or in supplying comforts for the occasion; Anne countess of Warwick (d. 1492) was remembered for her willingness to be with women in labour, and her generosity in giving material aid.
Bartholomew's description of the midwife's duties in a medical one, but other sources suggest that the sometimes resorted to religious or superstitious devices to soothe her patients and ease their deliveries. During the pains of labour, the midwife and her assistants would pray to saints and urge the mother to do so. Henry III's queen called for help on St. Margaret, Edward I's on St. Thomas Becket. The scrolls already mentioned advised those who used them to invoke St. Cyr, the child-saint martyred with his mother Julitta, presumably because, as a child, he would be sympathetic to problems of childbirth. Writers of the mid sixteenth century talk of Our lady and St. Margaret as popular choices for prayer. By that time, Church Reformers had come to disapprove of such practices. In 1535, they began to destroy the childbirth relics, beginning with the Virgin's girdle at Westminster Abbey. Nicholas Shaxton, bishop of Salisbury, told his clergy in 1538 to warn midwives not to cause women in labour to make vows to go on pilgrimage, but only to pray to God. They should not use 'any girdles, purses, or measures of Our Lady' during the labour. In 1551-2, John Hooper, bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, sought to prevent midwives employing prayers to saints, or 'salt, herbs, water, wax, cloths, girdles, or relics' in superstitious ways. Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, a good Reformation Catholic who had no objection to saints, condemned midwives in 1554 for using witchcraft, charms, sorcery, invocations, and prayers not approved by the Church.
The midwife probably learnt her skills by assisting an older, established practitioner. She was not of high social status, and a reference to one who visited the Lestranges, a gentry family of Hunstanton (Norfolk) in 1520, calls her merely 'Mother Midwife'. Equally, her role gave her prestige and importance, both secular and religious. The term for her in medieval French was sage-femme, 'wise woman', and a midwife appearing in a Church court in 1523 talked of 'the authority of mine office'. That office included the duty of giving emergency baptism. Midwives with good reputations were in demand. John of Gaunt ordered Ilote, the midwife of Leicester who had attended his first wife Blanche, to be brought to Hertford to deliver his second wife Constance in 1372. Katherine Tiler, midwife of Bristol, was summoned twelve miles to Thornbury Castle (Gloucs.) in November 1520 to minister to the daughter-in-law of the duke of Buckingham. The midwife, however, was a transitory figure unlike the nurse, and the rewards for her work were less great. When Gaunt's sister-in-law, the countess of Buckingham, had a baby daughter in 1382, he gave the midwife 20s., less than a third of his gift to the nurse, and Katherine Tiler received only 10s. The best-paid midwives were those of the royal family. Alice Massy, who attended Henry VII's queen, Elizabeth of York, at her first birth, earned £10 for this, the successful delivery of Prince Arthur in 1486. She may have been retained to assist with the queen's later births, for in 1504, when these were all over and Elizabeth herself was dead, Henry awarded Alice a modest annuity of £5 a year as 'midwife to our dearest wife, the queen'.
Descriptions of royal and noble births and baptisms survive from the middle of the fifteenth century. By that period, when so much of aristocratic life was highly regulated, a noble lady was expected to give birth in a style and dignity appropriate to her rank. Ordinances for the lying in and delivery of a queen may have been issued in the reign of Edward IV, and others were certainly approved by Henry VII in 1493. A further set, inspired by those of the royal family, was drawn up in about 1500 for the Percy countess of Northumberland and adds some details not found in the royal ordinances. The procedures laid down in these documents are elaborate, and it is not certain how far they were copied by lesser nobility and gentry, but they may well have had an influence. The queen or countess (let us call her the lady) was allowed to choose the chamber where she would give birth, and this had to be carpeted. Rich cloth of arras was to be hung across the roof, walls, and windows, leaving one window available to give light if the lady so wished. A darkened room was therefore visualised. Lamps were to be made ready and furniture provided in the form of a cupboard and a bed, appropriate in splendour to the lady's rank. The Percy family planned to have a portable altar, so that mass could be said. One or two chambers beyond the bedchamber were also to be richly furnished: an antechamber and a great chamber with a 'chair of estate' or throne.
The lady entered these rooms a month or so before she expected to give birth, and remained inside them for about six weeks after the event until she was purified or 'churched'. Her entry to her suite was marked by a rite of passage, carried out in the chapel of the house in which she was staying. The Percy regulations, which have most to say about the chapel, assume that it will contain a high altar, two lesser altars, and a fourth in the 'closet' or gallery above the chapel, in which the lady sat during worship. The household steward, clergy, and gentlemen conducted the lady to the closet, when the dean of the chapel had made all ready for the service. While she watched from her closet, high mass was celebrated at the chapel high altar in honour of the Holy Spirit, and low (simple) masses at each of the other three altars -- four masses going on at once, to give her as much spiritual benefit as possible. During high mass, she descended to the chapel by a stair and, as a special favour, went through the screen and into the chancel. She knelt, made an offering, and kissed the pax (the small metal or ivory disk kissed by the priest after consecrating the bread and wine of the mass). Then she was given communion or, as it was expressed, 'received her rights' (Fig. 9).
Receiving communion was unusual for lay people before the Reformation. It normally happened only on Easter Day and on occasions of great peril, of which childbirth was one. Following usual practice, a towel was held beneath the lady's chin by two gentlemen. This was to catch any crumbs that might fall from the consecrated wafer of bread as it was put into her mouth by the dean of the chapel. Household yeomen then brought wine from the cellar, which was inspected for quality. It was poured into the lady's own cup, from that into a chalice, and presented to her to drink. This wine, in late-medieval usage, was not consecrated. The consecrated wine of the eucharist was too holy to be given (what if it were spilt?), so those who received communion were given ordinary wine to cleanse their mouths and wash the wafer down. After communion, the lady returned to her suite of chambers. In the Percy household, she was given a 'voidee' or cup of spiced wine to sustain her, because she would have fasted before she took communion. Then she was ceremonially taken to her chambers by lords and ladies.
At this point, the men left the suite, and the outer door was fastened. Women alone were left inside. Food and wine were delivered to them when required, and they undertook the normal male duties of serving the lady and attending to her needs. Arrangements were made to bring the news of the labour and birth to the lord and his household, and the chapel clergy were warned to pray throughout the period of labour. If the lady was successfully delivered, it was their role immediately to sing the Te Deum, the hymn of praise and thanks for the joyful outcome.
Continues...
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Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | vi | |
| Acknowledgements | xi | |
| Preface | xii | |
| Introduction | 1 | |
| 1. | Arriving | 11 |
| 2. | Family Life | 51 |
| 3. | Danger and Death | 93 |
| 4. | Words, Rhymes, and Songs | 129 |
| 5. | Play | 163 |
| 6. | Church | 199 |
| 7. | Learning to Read | 237 |
| 8. | Reading for Pleasure | 273 |
| 9. | Growing Up | 305 |
| List of Abbreviations | 342 | |
| Notes | 343 | |
| Bibliography | 367 | |
| Index | 375 |