Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [49]
Children were usually named for their principal godparents. Variety of Christian names was limited in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, usually Norman rather than Anglo-Saxon, the most popular in Elton being John, Robert, Henry, Richard, William, Geoffrey, Thomas, Reginald, Gilbert, Margaret, Matilda, Alice, Agnes, and Emma. Less common were Nicholas, Philip, Roger, Ralph, Stephen, Alexander, Michael, Adam, and Andrew, Sarah, Letitia, Edith, and Beatrice. There were as yet no Josephs or Marys.
Unlike the lady of the castle or many city women, the peasant mother normally nursed her own children. Only if the mother had no milk, or if she died, was a wet nurse employed. The evidence of the coroners’ rolls indicates that during the first year of life, infants were frequently left alone in the house while their parents worked in the fields, looked after the animals, or did other chores. Older children were more likely to be left with a sitter, usually a neighbor or a young girl. Although neglect on the part of busy parents might lead to tragedy, little evidence exists of infanticide, a commonplace of the ancient world.54
Medieval parents have been accused by certain modern writers of a want of feeling toward their children, but even in the comparative poverty of the kind of literary expressions—correspondence and memoirs—that have recorded such sentiments for more recent times, the charge scarcely stands up. Between the lines in the accounts of the coroners may be read again and again the anguish of parents over a lost child: one father searching for his son, drowned in a ditch, “found him, lifted him from the water, could not save him, and he died”;55 another, whose son was struck by lightning in a field, “came running toward him, found him lying there, took him in his arms to the house…thinking to save him”;56 a mother dragged her son out of a ditch “because she believed she could save him”;57 a father whose son fell into the millpond “tried to save [him] and entered the water but could do nothing.”58 Sometimes peasants gave their lives for their children, as in one case when a father was killed defending his young daughter from rape.59
A fourteenth-century sermon pictures a mother and her child: “In winter, when the child’s hands are cold, the mother takes him a straw or a rush and bids him warm it, not for love of the straw, to warm it, but to warm the child’s hands [by pressing them together].” When the child falls ill, “the mother for her sick child takes a candle, and makes a vow in prayers.”60
The coroners’ rolls yield rare glimpses of children at work and play: the baby in the cradle by the fire; little girls following their mothers around, helping stir the pot, draw water, gather fruit; little boys following their fathers to the fields, to the mill, or fishing, or playing with bows and arrows. A sermon pictures a child using his imagination, playing “with flowers…with sticks, and with small bits of wood, to build a chamber, buttery, and hall, to make a white horse of a wand, a sailing ship of broken bread, a burly spear from a ragwort stalk, and of a sedge a sword of war, a comely lady of a cloth, and be right busy to deck it elegantly with flowers.”61
A child, said one preacher, did not bear malice, “nor rancor nor wrath toward those that beat him ever so sorely, as it happened for a child to have due chastising. But after thou hast beaten him, show him a fair flower or else a fair red apple; then hath he forgotten all that was done to him before, and then he will come to thee, running, with his embracing arms, to please thee and to kiss thee.”62
Small children played; older ones did chores. In their teens, both boys and girls moved into the adult work world, the girls in and around the house, the boys in the fields. Contrary to what was formerly believed, in this period village children were not ordinarily sent away to become servants in other people’s households or to be apprenticed