Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England by Kathryn Warner

Author:Kathryn Warner
Format: epub

Mortality Rates in Childbirth and Infancy

A Caesarean birth was a last resort as it was always fatal for the mother, and probably more than 10% of all births were stillbirths. The percentage of all confinements in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century which resulted in the mother’s death has been estimated at 2%, or one in fifty.²⁴ As Ian Mortimer states, this perhaps does not look too horrendous at first glance, but given that most married women gave birth more than once and some bore more than a dozen children, every pregnancy was ‘like a game of Russian Roulette, played with a fifty-barrel gun’. Giving birth a dozen times was akin to firing that gun a dozen times.²⁵

For a woman labouring in vain to bring forth an infant who had already died inside her, the Trotula recommended that she lie on a linen sheet and that four strong men each pulled at a corner, which would cause the woman to give birth immediately. The authors were aware that some women tear while giving birth, and recommended sewing the rupture in the perineum ‘in three or four places with silk thread’ and healing the wound with comfrey.²⁶ Another medieval medical text was the Sekenesse of Wymmen, ‘Sickness of Women’, a fifteenth-century translation of several chapters of a thirteenth-century work by Gilbertus Anglicus called Compendium Medicinae. Perhaps surprisingly, this work demonstrated more concern for women enduring a difficult labour than for the child: ‘for whan the womman is fieble and the chield may nat come oute, than it is better that the chield be slayne than the moder of the chield die’.²⁷

The infant mortality rate was also horrific, and as many as one in six children did not live to see their first birthday.²⁸ Even privilege and wealth made little difference. Three of Edward III and Queen Philippa’s twelve children – two of their seven sons and one of their five daughters – died at a few days or weeks old; three more of their daughters died as teenagers, and only four of the royal children outlived the king. Of the at least fourteen and perhaps sixteen children born to Leonor of Castile and Edward I, Leonor outlived all but six and Edward outlived all but four of them. At least five and perhaps seven of their children died when they were under two years old, and three others died at the ages of five, six and ten. Edward and Leonor’s daughter Elizabeth of Rhuddlan, second youngest of the royal offspring, died shortly after giving birth to her tenth child in May 1316, after surviving the birth of twins a few years earlier; she was thirty-three. Two of Elizabeth’s four older sisters who survived childhood, Eleanor of Windsor and Joan of Acre, died at the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-five respectively, and although it is not known for certain what killed them, given their ages and the pattern of their childbearing, it seems possible that their deaths were connected to pregnancy or childbirth.

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