The Ties That Bound

by Barbara A Hanawalt

  The first washing of an infant had a powerful sentimental importance in medieval culture that appears in poetry and ballads. Sympathy for the Christ child's poverty at his nativity is aroused in carols such as the famous "Cherry Tree Carol" by stating that he had to be washed in water rather than in milk or wine. In ballads fathers direct that their children be taken up and washed in milk and wrapped in silk. For a child born in the wilderness, a crystal-clear stream had to suffice.3

  The role of the father in the folkloric tradition was important and reflects pre-Christian ideas about an infant's survival. In the medieval Scandinavian tradition the father decided whether the baby would live. If he took it into his arms, put water on it, and gave it a name, its mother could suckle it. Until this ceremony was completed the child could be abandoned or exposed, but afterward it would be considered murder to do so. In the Roman tradition as well the baby was laid on the earth before the father and would be allowed to live only if he picked it up. In medieval literature such as the Breton lays, when a child is abandoned it is done immediately after birth, as is the case in both "Sir Degare" and "Le Freine."4 Such customs indicate that before the ritual cleaning and naming, the child was considered dispensable and perhaps less than s human.

  Christianity reinforced folklore in its insistence on rapid baptism, for the Church feared that the child would die in a state of original sin. Thus on the day of birth or the next day the child underwent the baptismal and naming ceremony. If a newborn baby appeared on the verge of death, the Church empowered lay people to baptize it so that it would not die in original sin. Preference was given to a layman, but the midwife could also perform the ceremony. Indeed, if the mother died in childbirth, the midwife was urged to cut her open, and extract and baptize the baby. The rudimentary baptism was to repeat, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. ,6

  After the midwife washed and bundled up the newborn child at home, it was ready for its spiritual cleansing. The baptismal ceremony was elaborate. The father sent off messengers to get the godparents to come to the church posthaste. The godmother or midwife carried the baby to the church, perhaps as part of a joyous procession. At the church door the priest inquired after the sex of the child and whether it had been baptized before (there was great concern about baptizing twice). The ceremony at the church door included blessing the child, putting salt in its mouth to symbolize the reception of wisdom, and exorcizing demons lurking in it. The priest read passages from the Bible and ascertained the child's name and the godparents' qualifications for their spiritual task.

  Following the ceremony at the church door, the party moved inside to the baptismal font where again the assembled party prayed and the priest anointed the child, immersed it in the font, and named it. The godparents raised the cleansed child from the font and the godmother put the child in a special white christening garment. The priest touched the infant on top of the head with chrism. A parish church window, now at Missenden Abbey, represents a child in its christening garment and with a bishop pronouncing a benediction over it.7

  Baptismal water was not always clean. Directions to the clergy cautioned against changing this holy water frequently and instructed that if the child defecated in the water it should be thrown out, but if it only urinated the water should be used again. After the godparents raised the child from the font, they washed their hands, not because of the filth of baptismal water but to avoid the possibility of an inadvertent second baptism.

  The ceremony was still not complete, for the new Christian was now taken to the altar for the profession of faith. The godparents, of course, made the responses for the day-old child. Finally, the party returned to the parents' house for the traditional gift giving and feasting.8

  Such a long ceremony was hardly a pleasant experience for a newborn child, who had to endure hunger, salt, drafts, and immersion in water. In the proofs of age for the nobility, witnesses sometimes recalled how miserable the child had been. One witness said that another baptism had delayed that of the baby he had come to see baptized and the girl had become very unhappy and cried through the ceremony. Another witness said that he saw the priest sprinkling water excessively on the infant's face so that the child became angry. In a bit of fourteenth-century psychologizing he attributed the subsequent hatred the young man bore for this priest to the baptismal ceremony.9

  The name a child received at the baptismal font was most often the name of his or her principal godparent, the one who raised the child from the font. The custom appears in priests' instruction manuals and was so ingrained that one godfather started a scuffle at the baptismal font when the child was named after someone else. In the various sources that name a godparent and godchild, this pattern predominates. In wills, for instance, one finds examples such as William Walle, vicar of Houghton Regis, who named three godchildren as beneficiaries, all of whom bear the name William; in two of these cases the father's name was Thomas. In the proofs of age among the nobility, 87 percent bore the name of the godparent. In the proof of English citizenship in York, 65 percent of the godsons bore the same name as one of their godfathers.10

  The simplicity of the English naming pattern has been overlooked bcause people failed to investigate the baptismal process. One historian confidently maintained, for instance, that it was customary to give the child the father's or grandfather's Christian name in Halesowen.11 Custom on this manor may have been different, but since no listing of godparents exists in manorial records, one cannot be confident that names descended from father to son. If one looks at serf lists, which are more reliable for naming patterns than are families reconstructed from manorial records, no strong pattern of naming children after parents appears. The coincidence of child's name with that of the parent is highly likely in a society such as that of late medieval England in which a relatively small pool of Christian names was drawn upon repeatedly. It was also possbible for parents to choose godparents who had the same first name as they themselves did.12 Thus the appellations of senior and junior appear in the court records with some degree of regularity as a distinction between father and son.

  Another perplexing problem that the baptismal naming resolves is that of two children in the same family having an indentical Christian name. Because of high infant mortality, some historians have assumed that two children bore the same name because parents could thus secure the perpetuation of a favorite name.13 But with the limited number of popular names it was very easy for the godfathers of two brothers to have the same Christian name. While the practice confuses historians trying to reconstruct families, people at the time resolved the problem officially by calling the elder "major" and the younger "minor." In practice, however, nicknames probably distinguished the two.

  The name that a child would bear from the thirteenth century on would have been a Norman one rather than Anglo-Saxon, and usually that of a saint. The variety was rather limited. In late-thirteenthcentury serf lists only thirty-six different male names and twenty female names appeared in three villages. In tenant lists in a village in the fourteenth and fifteenth century there were only eleven male names and ten female names. Naming the child after the godparent tended to perpetuate the limited number of Christian names, keeping the pool of possible names small. John did not gain its predominance as a popular name until the fourteenth century, and even then shared its popularity with William, Thomas, and Robert. Favorite female names were Matilda, Margaret, Emma, Alice, and Agnes. They used other names as well, and some of the Anglo-Saxon ones, particularly Edward, continued in popularity. 14

  Surnames became common in England by the end of the thirteenth century, but it was not until the middle of the fourteenth century that a child would be expected to adopt the surname of its parent. The child might be identified by either the father's or the mother's surname, so that matronymics were not uncommon. The use of the mother's name was not reserved for illegitimate children, but, on the contrary, was common when the mother was chief inheritor of her fami
ly's land.15

  The named and baptized new Christian returned from church in a baptismal gown, but exchanged it for swaddling clothes, so that the godparents could take the gown back to the church. A thirteenthcentury Englishman, Walter de Bibblesworth, advised that the child be swaddled as soon as it was born and laid in a cradle to sleep.16 The child spent a considerable part of its first years of life in a cradle by the fire. Since a swaddled baby could not creep about, it could be left alone. When the child was out of swaddling clothes it might be tied in the cradle to keep it out of trouble when no adult was present to mind it. Robert, son of Walter, one and a half years old, was left tied in his 1 cradle. A fire started and he could not get out.7

  Swaddling and tying infants in cradles may have prevented some accidents, but cradle fires were the leading cause of accidental death among infants. Of the fifty-eight children under one year of age appearing in the coroners' inquests, 33 percent died in fires in their cradles. The percentage drops to 14 for one-year-olds and to only 1 percent for two-year-old children. Unattended babies who were not in cradles also died in house fires; 21 percent of their deaths occurred in this circumstance. These fires are frequently described as being caused by chickens. Chickens pecked about the open hearth for food and either picked up a burning straw or twig and dropped it into the cradle or perhaps their feathers caught fire and they flailed around, setting the cradle or house afire. Since the children were wrapped in linen, linseywoolsey, or wool, the fire was a smoldering one. The smell of burning cloth, if not the cry of the child, would call attention to the accident if an adult were in the house. The extent of the burns, in one case the child's entire legs, indicates that adults were far away. Cases sometimes mention where the parents were when their child died. In one case the father was in the fields and the mother had gone out to the well; other times the parents were at church.18

  The time and seasonality of accidental deaths for babies through one year of age illustrates when the babies were most likely to be left on their own because their parents were too busy with other chores to watch them. No one day predominated over another for accidental deaths, even though both parents were likely to be at church on Sunday. Babies were most likely to have fatal accidents during the busiest part of their parents' day: 21 percent occurred in the morning and 43 percent at noon. During these times women would be looking after animals and doing other errands while the men would be in the fields. The months of May through August, when all able-bodied adults had to turn their attention to the fields, were the most risky for infants: 47 percent of all fatal accidents suffered by babies occurred during these four months. Because of the necessity of ensuring a good harvest, babies often had to be left in less than optimal circumstances. It was common in many peasant societies for the parents to take swaddled children to the fields with them when they worked, where they were put in trees or laid on the ground. Although no coroners' inquests mention this practice, in the "Song of the Husbandman" the children are with the parents in the field:

  A typical family scene before the open hearth. The pot sits on a trivet, and a little boy uses a bellows to keep the fire hot. The mother has her hands full tending both the pot and the baby. [Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 6, fol. 22.]

  Babies taken to the fields may have had fewer accidents, but their presence interfered with work. The poor husbandman of the poem had to ask them to keep quiet while he and his wife got on with the plowing.

  The deaths of infants in fires and other accidents, however, indicates that the babies spent much time alone and passive in the cradle. Five percent died from animal bites suffered when a pig wandered into the house and mauled the child, and in 4 percent of the cases walls or other objects fell on them as they were lying or sitting by them. A year-and-a-half-old boy was in his cradle by the fire when a red pig wandered into the house and mauled him; and a year-old girl was in her cradle by the fire when two small pigs who were in the house tussled and overturned the cradle into the fire. In both cases the parents were elsewhere.20

  Abundant evidence from the coroners' inquests indicates that parents did not like to leave their children alone and that villagers did not approve of the practice. Villagers' censure is apparent in the wording of inquests. For example, a child wandered outside its father's house and "was without anyone looking after him" when he drowned, or a two-year-old died when she was "left without a caretaker." Often, however, the caretaker was ill equipped to mind the child. Maude, daughter of William Bigge, was left in the care of a blind woman while her mother was visiting a neighbor. When her mother returned, she found her daughter drowned in a ditch. Parents often entrusted the care of their babies to other children. Thus a thirty-week-old child was left in the care of a neighbor's three-and-a-half-year-old son. The attention span of other children in tending to their young brothers and sisters was obviously limited. William Senenok and his wife went to church on Christmas Day 1345, leaving their infant daughter, Lucy, in a cradle and in the care of their daughter Agnes, who was three. Agnes went out into the courtyard to play and the younger child burned. In another case the villagers commented that a five-year-old boy who failed to take adequate care of his brother was a "bad custodian."21

  As the condemnations indicate, such negligence in arranging child care was not typical. Coroners' cases indicate that women tended each other's children or hired women or girls to baby-sit. On a February day when William Suger was at the plow, his wife wanted to bake bread in an oven in their close, so she hired a village girl, Maude, daughter of Ellis Bate, to sit with their daughter Rose, who was in the cradle. The mother drowned getting straw. In other cases the child was left with a baby-sitter in the sitter's house. John, son of John Bullok, was left with Anicia Porter, a neighbor, and William de Herford, one year old was left in the care of Cecilia de Wrynbe in the house of John Stanner.22 Overall, however, babies apparently did not spend the majority of their time in child care. Only 16 percent of male babies' fatal accidents (see Appendix, Tables 4 and 5.) and 12 percent of female babies' occurred at other people's houses. The overwhelming majority of fatal accidents involving infants up to one year old occurred at home: 60 percent of the boys' and 79 percent of the girls'.

  Accidents happened to children even when the parents were doing their best to attend to them. One mother had an epileptic fit and the child she was nursing slipped into the fire. The Church took a great interest in the care of children and spelled out in penitential literature the problems that were likely to arise in childrearing. They warned against cradle fires, scalding from hot liquids, and overlaying. They were certainly correct to be concerned with the first two, but only one case of overlaying appeared in the coroners' inquests. Robert, son of John Brown, was in the care of Isolda (possibly a wet nurse), who took Robert to bed with her and around 11 o'clock at night rolled over and crushed him.23

  Babies were not continuously swaddled. Even Bibblesworth recommended the child be allowed to creep about before it learned to get up on its feet.24 The mobility of one-year-olds shows up in both the type of accident and the place of accidents. All fatal accidents occurred to infants in the home, either of their parents' or that of another person, but the adventurous one-year-olds, particularly the males, often wandered into public streets and into their parents' work area. One little girl, aged one, crept into the street and was crushed by a passing cart.25 As soon as they could creep, the infants' curiosity led them to play with fire, fall into ditches, and be scalded in pots and pans of hot liquid.

  Although upper class women put their children out to wet nurses, the peasant women nursed their own, if they had milk. The image of Mary breast-feeding Jesus was a popular one in statuary and in literature. Folk poems express the earthiness of the scene:

  Children were nursed for two or three years, although baby girls might have been weaned sooner. Peasant babies were probably not fed on demand, since, as we have seen, they were left alone much of the time.27

  Peasants turned to wet nurses when the mother died
or when she had no milk. Johanna, daughter of John of Burgoyne, was six months old when she died of burns. She was in the care of Beatrice Paysele, who nursed and took care of her. Beatrice, however, went off to church with a neighbor and left the child in the cradle by the fire. Other cases also explicitly indicate that a child had a wet nurse and suggest that it was placed in the nurse's home. These children were not foundlings, for the father is always mentioned, and in one case the father seems to have initiated the inquest because he suspected foul play on the nurse's part.28

  Some lullabies sung to medieval children have been preserved. Traditionally, we think lullabies are supposed to reassure the baby, singing of good things that will happen and protective people and surroundings; but not so the medieval versions. The songs put into Mary's mouth, as she comforts the Christ child, are grim predictors of his eventual death on the cross.29 Similarly, peasant children first learned of the world's cruelties as their mothers rocked them. As a descendant of Adam, the world could only be a vale of tears:

  Unlike American lullabies that place the child in a separate fantasy environment, the medieval version integrated it immediately into the common worries of survival of both individual and family.

  From the mother's viewpoint, such songs seem to have two functions: they express the mother's mixed feelings about childrearing and the time and trouble it takes.31 They also speak of the extreme sorrow and frustration of raising a child who might be carried off by disease or accident before maturity. In lullabies and, as we shall see, in other songs about motherhood, a very strong emphasis is placed on the gratitude the child should feel to its mother for having reared it. The relationship betwen Mary and Jesus was a powerful and consoling social ideal and was held up for ordinary people to imitate.