Clothes and toilet training for infants in Tudor times

At about one year children were unswaddled.  Guillemeau says:

'About the eighth or ninth month, or at farthest when the childe is a yeare old, he must have coats, and not be kept swathed any longer....And chiefly the Nurse must let him have a hat.'
(Jacques Guillemeau, Childbirth, or The happy deliverie of women...To which is added a treatise of the diseases of infants and young children.  London 1612)

However, children were still quite restricted, either with leading strings or with walking frames:

'...there are stools for children to stand in, in which they can turn around any way, when mothers or nurses see them at it, then they care no more for the child, let it alone, to about their own business, supposing the child to be well provided but they little think on the pain and misery the poor child is in...the poor child ...must stand maybe many hours, whereas half an hour standing is too long...I wish that all such standing stools were burned...'
Felix Wurz, 1563, quoted in Lloyd deMause History of Childhood, 1974

Walking frames were something like a prototype baby bouncer.  They kept the child off the floor or rushes and out of mischief. Since the medieval house was neither particularly safe nor particularly clean this may have been quite necessary.

In medieval times it was normal for a child to be weaned about the age of two or when its teeth appeared.
Some advice on weaning from the second century AD suggests using morsels soaked in honey or other flavouring, or infused with milk, or moistened grits or pap made of wheat.
(Sorani gynaeciorum vetus translation Latina...Valentino Rose, 1882, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Gynecorum et Romanorum Teubrieriana p. 43)

The 16th century French Paedotrophia,advises weaning straight onto wine:

'Nore is it ill to cheer its heart with wine
For of all cordials 'tis the most divine'

This treatise also includes some interesting remedies for teething troubles:
'The sweat that from a goat or cattle's hoof distills is good'
Is this calves' foot jelly?
Also recommended:
'In a hare's brain his little finger dip'
(M. Saint-Marte, Paedotrophia, or The Art of Bringing up Children, translated into English 1718)

Some sort of loose tunic seems to have been normal every day wear, for boys and girls.
Although portraits of infants in the late Middle Ages and Tudor period show little aristocrats very richly dressed, and household accounts show that a great deal might be spent on their clothes, this is probably not a reliable guide to their every day clothing.  Being captured for posterity was a very important formal occasion, and at this date portraits were not intended to show the sitter as he or she really was but to record their position in life, a particular occasion, or even their symbolic value.  Sitters were dressed as richly as possible to show their wealth and power.

Boy aged two Marcus Gheeraerts the younger Compton Verney 1608

Variants of the smock were used for boys and girls at the toddler stage right up to recent times when romper suits and leggings became popular.  When all clothes were made by hand smocks probably lasted a growing child longer, and were easier to keep reasonably clean till children were toilet trained.

There is not much evidence on toilet training but it was probably rather haphazard since adults were not too particular about where they relieved themselves and only large important buildings had any kind of permanent toilet.

At about age seven, when a child's formal education began, boys went into breeches.  This was a quite important occasion, marking the transition from infancy. The dialogues of Claudius Hollyband and Peter Erondell, two Huguenot refugees teaching in Elizabethan London have a nice description of a noble lady preparing her two sons to go visiting.  They are about nine years old:

'Come hether both of you, doe you weare your cloathes Gentleman like?  Where is your hat-band?  Why have you taken your wast-coates?  Is it so colde? Button your Dublet, are you not ashamed to be so untrussed?  Where is your Jerkin?  For this morning is somewhat colde...(to Servat) Goe fetch your Master's silver hatched Daggers.  Put on your garters embroidered with silver...where are your Cuffes and your falls?  Hafve you clean handkerchers? Take your perfumed gloves...Put on your gownes untill we goe, and then you shall take your cloakes lyned with Taffeta, and your Rapiers with silver hilts.  Tye your shooe-strings.  Well, take your boot-hosen, and your gilt spurres.'
(From M. St. Clare Byrne, The Elizabethan Home discovered in two dialogues by Claudius Hollyband and Peter Erondell, 1949)

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