The Ties That Bound by Barbara A Hanawalt

Author:Barbara A Hanawalt [Hanawalt, Barbara A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-18T01:49:00+00:00

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.

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