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The Medieval Child, Part 3 |
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Death came in many guises for the littlest members of medieval society. With the invention of the microscope centuries in the future, there was no understanding of germs as the cause of disease. There were also no antibiotics or vaccines. Diseases that a shot or a tablet can eradicate today claimed all too many young lives in the Middle Ages. If for whatever reason a babe could not be nursed, his chances of contracting illness increased; this was due to the unsanitary methods devised for getting food into him and the lack of beneficial breast milk to help him fight disease.
Children succumbed to other dangers. In cultures that practiced swaddling infants or tying them into a cradle to keep them out of trouble, babies were known to die in fires when they were so confined. Parents were warned not to sleep with their infant children for fear of overlaying and smothering them.
Once a child attained mobility, danger from accidents increased. Adventurous toddlers fell down wells and into ponds and streams, tumbled down stairs or into fires, and even crawled out into the street to be crushed by a passing cart. Unexpected accidents could befall even the most carefully-watched toddler if the mother or nurse was distracted for only a few minutes; it was impossible, after all, to baby-proof the medieval household.
Peasant mothers who had their hands full with myriad daily chores were sometimes unable to keep a constant watch on their offspring, and it was not unknown for them to leave their infants or toddlers unattended. Court records illustrate that this practice was not very common and met with disapproval in the community at large,1 but negligence was not a crime with which distraught parents were charged when they had lost a child.
Faced with a lack of accurate statistics, any figures representing mortality rates can only be estimates. It is true that for some medieval villages, surviving court records provide data concerning the number of children who died from accidents or under suspicious circumstances in a given time. However, since birth records were private, the number of children who survived is unavailable, and without a total, an accurate percentage cannot be determined.
The highest estimated percentage I have encountered is a 50% death rate, although 30% is the more common figure. These figures include the high number of infants who died within days after birth from little-understood and wholly unpreventable illnesses that modern science has thankfully overcome.
It has been proposed that in a society with a high child mortality rate, parents made no emotional investment in their children. This assumption is belied by the accounts of devastated mothers being counseled by priests to have courage and faith upon losing a child. One mother is said to have gone insane when her child died.2 Affection and attachment were obviously present, at least among some members of medieval society.
Furthermore, it strikes a rather false note to imbue the medieval parent with a deliberate calculation over his child's chances of survival. How much did a farmer and his wife think about survival rates when they held their gurgling baby in their arms? A hopeful mother and father can pray that, with luck or fate or the favor of God, their child would be one of at least half of the children born that year who would grow and thrive.
There is also an assumption that the high death rate is due in part to infanticide. This is another misconception that should be addressed.
Next Page > Infanticide > Page 1, 2, 3, 4
Notes
1. Hanawalt, Barbara, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 177. [back]
2. Hanawalt, Barbara, Growing Up in Medieval London (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 61. [back]
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