History of Childhood: Babyhood pt. 1

'Tell me daughter Juliet
How stands your dispositions to be married?'
Shakespeare:  Romeo and Juliet Act 1 sc. 3

Early records of the lives and doings of children in early British history begin to appear from around the 14th and 15th centuries.  Children appear briefly in romances written for adults; there were no story books written specifically for children.  Children appear in idealised lives of the saints.  Upper class children appear as stiff little figures in formal portraits and as more lively figures in books for teaching young children proper manners.  They appear in the records of schools and they appear in legal records of births, baptisms, deaths, marriages and divorces.  If marriageable age is considered as childhood's end these records place it as around 12 for girls and 14 for boys.  This in medieval times was the age at which they could consent to or repudiate marriages arranged for them.  It would be misleading to conclude from this that most people married around the age of 14 but   an Elizabethan audience would have seen nothing unusual in Juliet's mother saying to her thirteen year old daughter:

  'Younger than you
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers
By my count
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid '
 (Shakespeare:  Romeo and Juliet Act I sc.3.)

Marriage, then is childhood's end.  What other landmarks were there in the lives of children at this time?  The 13th century poem Ratis Raving divides childhood intro three periods; babyhood, infancy, from three to seven, and seven to fourteen.about childhood's beginnings? (Ratis Raving and other moral and religious pieces in prose and verse, edited by J. Rawson Lumby, EETS,1870)

Many people have pointed to the practise of apparently dressing children in scaled down versions of adult costume as evidence for the theory that they were regarded as miniature adults, but this is an over-simplification.  It seems clear that children, appart from the children of the poor, did undergo a period of training for adult life during which they were not treated or regarded as adults were.  The apprenticeship period extended from about the age of seven to fourteen, bug could vary considerably, especially for children destined to receive some kind of academic training.  Although people frequently went to university much earlier than they do now the age at which they attended also varied widely.  hugh Latimer, later Bishop of Worcester, went up to Cambridge at fourteen in 1504, John Holles, later Earl of Clare, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, both went up at the age of twelve, one to Cambridge in 1579, one to Oxford in 1595.  On the other hand, William Paston was writing Latin hexameters at Eton at the age of nineteen in 1479. (Paston Letters, 1422-1509, ed. James Gairdner, 1910, letter 827, William Paston junior to John Paston, 23 Feb. 1479)

It is common knowledge that upper class children, especially boys, were usually sent away from home aged about seven as part of their education.  New-born babies could also be sent away to the care of a wet nurse; upper class mothers did not usually nurse their own children.  From the late 16th century doctors began to recognise the connection between wet nursing and high child mortality.  They often condemned non-nursing mothers but the practise continued right up to the 19th century, maybe even till the invention of powdered baby milk, though in the 18th century it became more common for the wet nurse to live in where she could be kept under closer supervision.  Just how many stories of changeling children were based on wet-nurses substituting another baby for their charge?

Parents then as now often found themselves with a howling, puking, crapping, apparently uncontrollable infant who would not conform to early theories of proper behaviour.  One solution was to rationalise the his saying the child was a changeling, left in place of their own sweet baby which had been spirited away by fairies or witches.  The Mallem Maleficarum, 1487, says that changelings could be recognised because they 'always howl most piteously and even if four of five mothers (wet nurses) are set to suckle them they never grow.'  According to Martin Luther 'They often take the children of women in childbirth and lay themselves in their place and are more obnoxious than ten children with their crapping, eating and screaming' (Quoted in DeMause, History of Childhood)

The practise of hiring wet-nurses goes back to antiquity.  One of the Roman Gracci family, returning to Rome from the Punic Wars in the 2nd century BC, is said to have greeted his nurse with more affection than his mother, saying: 'I know that you bore me nine months in your womb, yet that was out of necessitie, because you could do no otherwise, but when I was borne you forsooke me, and my Nurse-mother willingly entertained me, carried me three years in her armes, and nourished mee with her own bloode' (milk was believed to be re-constituted blood:  Jacques Guillemeau.  Childbirth, or the Happy Delivery of Women. 1612)

The wet nurses were usually peasant girls living in comparative poverty.  such girls might have just lost a baby of their own or, if they had plenty of milk, they might try to support two babies.  Of course they would be expected to put their little charges before their own babies and many peasant babies may have been deprived and died like Susan, child of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet:
'Susan and she - God rest all Christian souls!
Were of an age.  Well, Susan is with God;
She was too good for me...'
Romeo and Juliet Act 1 sc. 3

About a third of all infants generally died in their first year and two thirds before growing to maturity.  In periods of plague the rates must have been far higher.  So normally infants would be baptised as soon as possible as unbaptised babies would not go to heaven if they died.  Often two children would be given the same Christian name, as in the Paston family the two eldest boys were both called John after their father, in this case both survived childhood.