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Childhood in Medieval and Early Modern Times

Very little is known about child-rearing practices and childhood in the early centuries of the Middle Ages because the historical sources for this period are very scattered and fragmentary. But it is known that children were valued.
Among the Visigoths, for example, a male baby had a blood price (wergild ) of one-tenth that of an adult male. As the
child aged, the wergild increased.

Female children had a CHILDREN  blood price half that of male children, but adult women’s wergild was five-sixths that of an adult male. There was some schooling in this period; scattered references attest to schools in palaces and monasteries, although the practice of taking in small boys as oblates by monastic orders was already declining.

For much of the population the process of maturation involved a long apprenticeship with children working alongside adults and thereby learning adult roles and responsibilities. Literary references suggest that adults treated young  children in a kindly fashion but that they had little regard for young people in their teens. Laws set the age of criminal responsibility (when a child could be charged with a crime) at seven and the age of majority (when a person could make a binding contract) at eighteen or older. As in the ancient world, medieval parents clearly mourned the deaths of their
children.

Medieval commentaries on childhood saw three stages in place of the ancient world’s five (again expressed in
modern terms):

1. Infancy, up to the age of two;

2. The preschool period, from age two to age seven;

3. Puerility, from age seven to age fourteen.

There casino en ligne francais were texts that stressed the importance of breastfeeding  (and by inference pointed to the dangers of wet nurses), but the use of wet nurses was common among the upper classes. An English bishop wrote of the importance of cradles (which would prevent infant deaths resulting from suffocation in the parental bed). Some children’s toys— miniature figurines, for example—have survived from the period.

Infanticide was still common for female babies, but illegitimate children were sometimes added to the father’s

household. To counter the pattern of infant exposure and abandonment, orphanages appeared, the first being established in 787 at Milan. By the early fourteenth century, there were two hospitals in Florence that accepted foundlings, and in 1445 a separate foundling hospital, the Innocenti, was established. Other foundling hospitals appeared in Rome, Bologna, Pavia, and Paris by the end of the fifteenth century. During the course of the Middle Ages, opportunities for schooling expanded from the limited possibilities offered by palaces, monasteries, or nunneries. Schools began to  appear in the major cities of Europe; many of them, such as the grammar school at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, which was revived by John Colet early in the sixteenth century, were founded for the express purpose of training boys in business.