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Citation: C N Trueman "Women in Tudor England"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, 17 Mar 2015. 23 Apr 2018.

Tudor England witnessed many famous events such as the Spanish Armada, the Reformation and famous individuals such as Henry VII, Henry VIII and Sir Francis Drake. But what had happened to the position women had in English Tudor society? The position of women had remained unchanged for centuries and the time of the Tudors saw little, if any, improvement despite the fact that 1485 to 1603 saw 2 queens. Neither Mary Tudor nor Elizabeth did much to advance the cause of women. Why was this?

Mary Tudor

For centuries girls had been told and, if educated, that they were inferior. So by the time, they became women, they would have acted as if they were inferior to men. The Church taught this and used the Bible to justify this belief. If men of God said that women were inferior it had to be true.....So two sections of society grew up to believe the same thing. Both men and women believed that women were inferior to men and that this was ordered by God. No change came with the Reformation. The protestant leader John Knox wrote:

Young girls were taught that they had to obey their parents instantly. As a father dominated a household, this basically meant that the girls grew up to instinctively obey men. Even uncles, older brothers and male family friends could expect instant obedience from girls. Girls received no formal education (though very few boys did) but they were taught that their sole function in life was to marry, have children and look after their homes and husbands. Girls were taught that God had commanded them to be obedient to men - be it father or husband.

Girls from a poor home received no education as we would recognise it. They learned skills for life from their mothers. Girls from the homes of the rich received some form of education but it was in things like managing a household, needlework and meal preparation. It was generally believed that teaching girls to read and write was a waste of time. Two of Henry VIII's wives were barely literate - Jane Seymour and Catherine Howard.

Young ladies from a rich family would have no choice over who their husbands would be. Marriages were frequently arranged so that the families involved would benefit - whether the young lady loved her future husband was effectively irrelevant. In fact, it would not have been unusual for a couple to meet for the first time at their wedding as happened to Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves.

There was no legal age for marriage and many girls aged 14 would have got married at that age. In the homes of the poor, there was almost a rush to marry off daughters as it was believed that once they reached a certain age - about 14 - they would have been seen as being too old for marrying off and therefore a liability at home - one extra mouth to feed and no extra income coming into the house.

Once married, the main function of a wife was to produce a son to continue the family line. This was true for royalty right down to the common peasant. In would not have been unusual for wives to be pregnant every twelve months. In Tudor England, pregnancy and especially childbirth was dangerous for the wife. Death in childbirth was not unusual. One 'tradition' at this time was for a wife to prepare a new baby's nursery but to also make arrangements for the baby should she, the mother, die in childbirth.

The actual act of childbirth was assisted by a 'midwife'. In fact, this was usually an elderly female relative or female neighbour with no medical knowledge. Complications were frequent and death not unusual in childbirth, but no proper doctors existed in Tudor times to change this. Even if a delivery of a baby was successful, the mother could still fall prey to illness due to the lack of hygiene during childbirth. The most famous Tudor casualty of this was Jane Seymour who died after successfully giving birth to Edward VI. Puerperal fever and post-birth infections were both killers.

The way women dressed was also strictly controlled. Women who were not married could wear their hair loose. Married women had to hide their hair away under a veil and a hood. Queens might wear their hair loose on state occasions but this was only tolerated because they had to wear a crown. Anne Boleyn's hair was so long that she could sit on it - but despite her forceful nature, even she did what was expected of her and wore her hair in a hood after her marriage to Henry VIII.

As in previous times, a woman's dress covered nearly everything. Sleeves came down to the wrists and even in summer dresses reached the floor. Corsets were common but a plunging neckline would be considered acceptable. For queens, ceremonial dress could be even of a challenge as their dresses could be beautiful to those looking at them but they were both bulky and weighed a great deal as they were usually encrusted with jewels. Worn on a hot evening at a state occasion, such dresses must have been uncomfortable to wear.
Elizabeth I
who conformed to standards of dress expected for women
The law gave a husband full rights over his wife. She effectively became his property. A wife who committed adultery could expect to be severely punished as Catherine Howard found out. A peer could have his adulterous wife burned at the stake if the king/queen agreed. A wife who killed her husband did not commit murder - she committed the far worse crime of petty treason. This also lead to her being burned at the stake. Wife beating was common and the logic of Tudor England was that the wife would have provoked her husband into beating her and if she had behaved properly, he would not have beaten her. Therefore she herself was responsible for her beating! In theory, a wife could walk away from a marriage - but to what? Who would keep her? Who would employ her? Therefore, women had to stay in a marriage even if it was a brutal one as there was very little else she could do.

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Women in Tudor England - History Learning Site

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Tudor England witnessed many famous events such as the Spanish Armada, the Reformation and famous individuals such as Henry VII, Henry VIII and Sir Francis Drake. But what had happened to the position women had in English Tudor society? The position of women had remained unchanged for centuries and the time of the Tudors saw ...

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Forms of Address in Tudor England | Mass Historia

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The most tangible manifestation of the relative positions of people in society was their manners. It was the mark of a good upbringing, among both the high and low born, that one showed all the proper marks of deference and respect (referred to as "dutie").

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What, how and where people ate in Tudor times depended greatly on who they were: the rich nobility enjoyed lavish feasts of meat, seafood and sugary treats, while yeomen and labourers were restricted to a diet of bread, pottages and vegetables. Everything from the number of dishes eaten to the ways in which food was served was dictated by status: in 16th-century England, you truly were what you ate. Here, Melita Thomas, the editor of Tudor Times - a new website about daily life in the period - explores the etiquette of the Tudor dining table

In Tudor England, maintaining the difference between ranks was so important to the concept of a well-ordered society that efforts were made to enshrine the distinctions between the classes in 'sumptuary' laws. These laws tried to control what you ate and wore, according to your position in the God-given hierarchy, which stretched from the king at the top, down through the numerous grades of nobility and clergy, to the gentry, yeomen and finally the labourers at the bottom of the heap.

Of course, for the poorest, sumptuary laws were not terribly relevant. Labourers would not often be able to afford more than pottage - the staple dish - and you could eat as much of that as your budget would allow. The rich ate pottage too, but instead of what was basically cabbage soup with some barley or oats - and a sniff of bacon if you were lucky - a nobleman's pottage might contain almonds, ginger and saffron, as well as wine.

However, for aspiring courtiers who spent fortunes trying to outdo one other in lavish display, the sumptuary law was very relevant indeed. Failure to obey it could earn you a fine, as well as contempt for trying to 'ape your betters'. In theory, even the nobles were supposed to limit the amount spent on food each year to about 10 per cent of their capital, although that was for their immediate family, and did not include the amount to be spent on the household.

The other rule to take into account was the strict observance of fasting on Fridays, Saturdays and, sometimes, Wednesdays too. Fasting did not mean going without food altogether, just eschewing flesh, and, in Lent, butter, eggs and dairy foods as well. Children, pregnant women and the elderly were not expected to fast, however, and it was possible to obtain a dispensation from fasting, but this was exceptional.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was hauled before the King's Council and severely reprimanded in 1543 for flagrantly eating meat during Lent. He was either deliberately risking an accusation of heresy (the reformed church being inclined to see fasting as superstitious), or he actively disliked fish.

Pocket permitting, meat was replaced by an extraordinary array of fish and other seafoods, including seal and porpoise, the latter apparently a great favourite of Katharine of Aragon.

Monarchs, although strictly observing the rules of fasting, were, of course, unlimited in what they could eat, or provide for their guests and courtiers. On flesh days at Henry VIII's court, a staggering range of meats and fowl would be enjoyed, including brawn, beef, mutton, bacon, goose, veal and lamb. Kid, hens, capons and peacocks also featured, as did cygnet, mallard, teal, woodcock, ousels, thrush, robins, cranes, bitterns, buzzards and venison of all sorts. Venison was the king of meats - not available to buy, it was hunted in the deer parks of the king and his nobles, and frequently given as a present. Henry VIII sent a hart to Anne Boleyn as a symbol of courtship.

Four seasons

Seasonality was a major factor in 16th-century diets. For small-scale farmers, there was insufficient feed to keep livestock over winter, so the majority were slaughtered - traditionally on Martinmas (11 November), and as much of the meat as possible was preserved. But no matter how thrifty the housewife, eking out the meat of a single pig through the whole winter with a few onions and leeks must have been a hard task.

The wealthier landowners could keep more meat, slaughtering as needed. Game continued to be hunted throughout the winter by the wealthy, but poaching by the poor could mean hanging.

Estimates suggest the Tudor nobility's diet was 80 per cent protein - one wonders how the digestive tract coped! Salads were eaten, often comprising a mixture of cooked and raw ingredients and including green vegetables such as leeks, onions, radishes and cabbage, as well as lettuce, chives, boiled carrots, flowers and herbs. They were dressed with oil, vinegar, and sometimes sugar.

Turnips, consumed during the 15th and early 16th century, later fell out of favour, becoming considered fit only for cattle. Fruit was enjoyed, but with no refrigeration it could only be consumed in season, or preserved. Mary I was particularly fond of pears, and Elizabeth of York and Jane Seymour were great lovers of cherries. Henry VIII's new palaces were designed with plentiful orchards and fruit trees, including the new apricot trees, introduced in the 1540s. One of his last acts as king was to order new apple trees for his Privy Gardens.

Most households served three meals a day, although breakfast, if eaten at all, was not substantial: it consisted of bread, perhaps with butter and sage, washed down with a small ale. The main meal of the day was dinner. In the first half of the century, 10 or 11am was the dining hour, but by the 1580s and 1590s it was becoming more usual to eat at around 12pm. In the houses of the rich, the meal could easily last a couple of hours. On ordinary days in any home of the middle class or above, dinner was divided into two courses, each consisting of several different dishes.

A numbers game

The Sumptuary Law of 31 May 1517 dictated the number of dishes per meal: a cardinal could serve nine dishes, while dukes, marquises, bishops and earls could serve seven. Lower-ranking lords were permitted to serve only six, and the gentry class, with an income of £40-100 per annum, could serve three.

A dish contained a set amount of a particular item - for example, one swan, bustard or peacock (all reserved for the higher ranks of nobility), but four smaller fowl, or 12 very small birds, such as larks. To prevent the higher ranks feeling deprived if they went out to dinner, the host could serve the number of dishes and food appropriate to the highest-ranking guest. Additionally, weddings were exempt from the rules.

Both courses would offer a pottage plus a selection of meats, custards, tarts, fritters and fruit. The first course tended to offer boiled meats, and the second, roasted or baked meats. For formal feasts, each course was heralded by the entrance of the 'subtlety'. This was an extraordinary decorative art form, the creation of wonderful representations of castles, cathedrals, hunting scenes or similar, made of marzipan and spun sugar for the most important feasts, and of wax for lesser occasions.

In 1527, Cardinal Wolsey served a superlative feast for the French embassy, including subtleties of castles, of the church and spire of St Paul's, of "beasts, birds, fowls of diverse kinds, personages... some fighting... some leaping... some dancing", and a whole chess set of sugar paste, which the French delighted in so much it was boxed up and sent home with them.

At court, following the two main courses was a third, consisting of spiced wine, known as hippocras; sweetmeats, comfits of all kinds, and wafers. Wafers, forbidden to all but the highest ranks, were thin, crisp biscuits made by pressing flavoured batter between hot irons. This course, eaten standing, was known as the 'void', variously taken as meaning that the table had been cleared, or 'voided', or that the course was eaten in a smaller room, thus 'voiding' the hall.

Supper, eaten at around 4 or 5pm outside court circles, was a much simpler affair. Meanwhile at court there were again two courses, each made up of numerous dishes.

If this sounds like a huge amount of food, it is worth remembering that the lives of even the elite required far greater calorie intake than is necessary today: houses were extremely cold, with no carpets or curtains, and the only source of heat was a fire. Travel was on foot or horseback for most of the time, both of which require substantial amounts of energy. Hunting, hawking, dancing and archery are also energetic pastimes. Elizabeth I was famous for standing for hours, and walking long distances at a brisk pace with her ladies trailing behind her, complaining bitterly.

Social customs

In the medieval period, dining, like everything else, was a communal affair. Henry VII and Elizabeth of York frequently dined in public in the Great Hall, surrounded by the court. However, Henry VIII preferred to dine in his Presence Chamber - a half public, half private space - and frequently took supper in his private rooms with a few friends and his current wife. Elizabeth I followed this example, and, unless she was entertaining foreign dignitaries or was on progress, usually dined alone.

At dinner in the Great Hall, whether in one of the royal palaces or the castle of a nobleman, the highest-ranking people sat at the top table, raised on a dais, with other tables arranged at right angles. A strict order of hierarchy was adhered to, with the higher-ranking people sitting at the table to the right hand of the top table, on both sides, moving down to the lowest ranking present at the furthest end of the table to the left of the top table.

To make sure everyone was seated correctly, books of etiquette gave elaborate orders of precedence, even including instructions for the seating of the pope's foster-parents - woe betide the hostess whose steward got it wrong!

Dining furniture consisted of trestles, which were stored when not in use. The highest-ranking person had a chair, but everyone else sat on benches. The table was covered with a cloth, and it was considered very poor manners to spill. The cost of clothes and the difficulty of laundering also added to the need to eat carefully.

Food was shared in a 'mess': a portion of each dish. At the top table, there was a mess between two (except the king and queen, who each had their own), but the lower ranks shared between four - two on either side of the table. Following her proxy marriage to James IV of Scotland, Margaret, daughter of Henry VII, shared a mess with her mother, Elizabeth of York, to demonstrate her new rank as a fellow queen. The highest-ranking person helped himself first.

As eating was communal, it was important to follow the strict rules of etiquette: these were elaborate, yet practical, as they prevented anyone touching food that would be eaten by someone else. Everyone brought his own knife and spoon to the meal - forks being considered a fancy, foreign notion. The requirement for a personal spoon is behind the custom of giving one as a christening gift.

The place setting was a trencher - made of silver, or even gold, for the king, then of lesser value material through to the standard ash, or, for the poorest, bread; together with a cup, a loaf of bread of appropriate quality (fine white for the lord, and coarse brown for lesser mortals). Among the upper classes a linen napkin was provided, which was draped over the left shoulder. Salt, being costly, was usually only seen on the top table.

For soft foods, the diner would spoon some of the serving onto his trencher, being careful not to leave his spoon in the dish. Before taking a helping of anything else, he would wipe his spoon clean with bread. He would eat the food by dipping his bread into it, rather than spooning it up, so none of his saliva could enter the communal bowl.

For meat, he would grasp the piece he wanted with the thumb and two fingers of his left hand, then sever it from the joint, using his knife in his right hand, again ensuring his fingers touched only his own portion. The food was lifted to the mouth in the thumb and fingers.

Dinner in larger households was in relays. Once the master, family and guests had dined, the servants ate what was left. At court, after the king and queen and courtiers had finished, the senior servants would take their places, followed by the junior servants, before the tables were dismantled and stored for the next meal. If any food were left, it was given to the poor.
Melita Thomas is the editor of Tudor Times. To find out more, visit www.tudortimes.co.uk

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Tudor dining: a guide to food and status in the 16th century

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What, how and where people ate in Tudor times depended greatly on who they were: the rich nobility enjoyed lavish feasts of meat, seafood and sugary treats, while yeomen and labourers were restricted to a diet of bread, pottages and vegetables.

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Supper, eaten at around 4 or 5pm outside court circles, was a much simpler affair.

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The Sumptuary Law of 31 May 1517 dictated the number of dishes per meal: a cardinal could serve nine dishes, while dukes, marquises, bishops and earls could serve seven. Lower-ranking lords were permitted to serve only six, and the gentry class, with an income of £40–100 per annum, could serve three.

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Most households served three meals a day, although breakfast, if eaten at all, was not substantial: it consisted of bread, perhaps with butter and sage, washed down with a small ale. The main meal of the day was dinner. In the first half of the century, 10 or 11am was the dining hour,

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The other rule to take into account was the strict observance of fasting on Fridays, Saturdays and, sometimes, Wednesdays too. Fasting did not mean going without food altogether, just eschewing flesh, and, in Lent, butter, eggs and dairy foods as well.

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Pottage

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pottage – the staple dish – and you could eat as much of that as your budget would allow. The rich ate pottage too, but instead of what was basically cabbage soup with some barley or oats – and a sniff of bacon if you were lucky – a nobleman’s pottage might contain almonds, ginger and saffron, as well as wine.

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Comprehensive Collection of 15th Century Spanish Sailing Terminology

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A comprehensive list of nearly every class of ship ever made

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Explore TheHistorian1600s' photos on Flickr. TheHistorian1600s has uploaded 52 photos to Flickr.

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🇪🇸 Spanish Replica Ship Nao Victoria Arrives at Portsmouth England

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The ship was built in 1992 and is the only ocean going replica of the original, which became the first vessel to successfully circumnavigate the globe 1522 as part of Magellans Expedition.

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The term Galleon "large ship", comes from Old French Galion "little ship" (13c.), from Spanish (Castilian) Galeón "armed merchant ship", from Portuguese Galeão "war ship", from Byzantine Greek Galea " galley" + augmentative suffix -on. Another possible origin is the Old French word galie meaning "galley;" also from Byzantine Greek galea.

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Galleons were ocean-going ships popular in the 15th and 16th centuries. Most were originally consigned for trade

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The term Galleon "large ship", comes from Old French Galion "little ship" (13c.), from Spanish (Castilian) Galeón "armed merchant ship", from Portuguese Galeão "war ship", from Byzantine Greek Galea " galley" + augmentative suffix -on. Another possible origin is the Old French word galie meaning "galley;" also from Byzantine Greek galea.

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Hired rowing boats were the taxis of Tudor London. ‘Coasting’ vessels also linked smaller seaports, distributing goods traded into the bigger ports. Transport by water was more efficient than road travel, but it was not necessarily faster.

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The poor state of repair of the roads made travelling on them slow and unpredictable. On foot, travellers might achieve 12 miles a day, and on a horse perhaps three times as much.

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Tudor roads were often unusable in winter or bad weather.

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Orphanage in 16th century? - Improve Your Writing - Wattpad Forums

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Also, I've seen this scene in The Tudors (and i know that wasn't historically accurate and i shouldnt go there) where Henry goes to this "orphanage" and sees Katherine Howard. If there are no orphanages, what could there be that is kind of similar?

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16th Century England expert or something? - Improve Your Writing - Wattpad Forums

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3) The two brothers. These two brothers portaled from another planet to take refuge in Earth the same year: 1507. Unlike Mary, the brothers survives and are not amnesiacs. 11 and 12, they try to survive by trying to work to earn and have something to eat.

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"When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field, Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now, Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held: Then being asked where all thy beauty lies, Where all the treasure of thy lusty days, To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes, Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

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Life in Elizabethan England 14: Masters and Servants

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Everyday life in Tudor England - Master and servants: grooms and serving maids in a great household in the time of Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare.

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Citation: C N Trueman "Women in Tudor England"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, 17 Mar 2015. 23 Apr 2018.

Tudor England witnessed many famous events such as the Spanish Armada, the Reformation and famous individuals such as Henry VII, Henry VIII and Sir Francis Drake. But what had happened to the position women had in English Tudor society? The position of women had remained unchanged for centuries and the time of the Tudors saw little, if any, improvement despite the fact that 1485 to 1603 saw 2 queens. Neither Mary Tudor nor Elizabeth did much to advance the cause of women. Why was this?

Mary Tudor

For centuries girls had been told and, if educated, that they were inferior. So by the time, they became women, they would have acted as if they were inferior to men. The Church taught this and used the Bible to justify this belief. If men of God said that women were inferior it had to be true.....So two sections of society grew up to believe the same thing. Both men and women believed that women were inferior to men and that this was ordered by God. No change came with the Reformation. The protestant leader John Knox wrote:

Young girls were taught that they had to obey their parents instantly. As a father dominated a household, this basically meant that the girls grew up to instinctively obey men. Even uncles, older brothers and male family friends could expect instant obedience from girls. Girls received no formal education (though very few boys did) but they were taught that their sole function in life was to marry, have children and look after their homes and husbands. Girls were taught that God had commanded them to be obedient to men - be it father or husband.

Girls from a poor home received no education as we would recognise it. They learned skills for life from their mothers. Girls from the homes of the rich received some form of education but it was in things like managing a household, needlework and meal preparation. It was generally believed that teaching girls to read and write was a waste of time. Two of Henry VIII's wives were barely literate - Jane Seymour and Catherine Howard.

Young ladies from a rich family would have no choice over who their husbands would be. Marriages were frequently arranged so that the families involved would benefit - whether the young lady loved her future husband was effectively irrelevant. In fact, it would not have been unusual for a couple to meet for the first time at their wedding as happened to Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves.

There was no legal age for marriage and many girls aged 14 would have got married at that age. In the homes of the poor, there was almost a rush to marry off daughters as it was believed that once they reached a certain age - about 14 - they would have been seen as being too old for marrying off and therefore a liability at home - one extra mouth to feed and no extra income coming into the house.

Once married, the main function of a wife was to produce a son to continue the family line. This was true for royalty right down to the common peasant. In would not have been unusual for wives to be pregnant every twelve months. In Tudor England, pregnancy and especially childbirth was dangerous for the wife. Death in childbirth was not unusual. One 'tradition' at this time was for a wife to prepare a new baby's nursery but to also make arrangements for the baby should she, the mother, die in childbirth.

The actual act of childbirth was assisted by a 'midwife'. In fact, this was usually an elderly female relative or female neighbour with no medical knowledge. Complications were frequent and death not unusual in childbirth, but no proper doctors existed in Tudor times to change this. Even if a delivery of a baby was successful, the mother could still fall prey to illness due to the lack of hygiene during childbirth. The most famous Tudor casualty of this was Jane Seymour who died after successfully giving birth to Edward VI. Puerperal fever and post-birth infections were both killers.

The way women dressed was also strictly controlled. Women who were not married could wear their hair loose. Married women had to hide their hair away under a veil and a hood. Queens might wear their hair loose on state occasions but this was only tolerated because they had to wear a crown. Anne Boleyn's hair was so long that she could sit on it - but despite her forceful nature, even she did what was expected of her and wore her hair in a hood after her marriage to Henry VIII.

As in previous times, a woman's dress covered nearly everything. Sleeves came down to the wrists and even in summer dresses reached the floor. Corsets were common but a plunging neckline would be considered acceptable. For queens, ceremonial dress could be even of a challenge as their dresses could be beautiful to those looking at them but they were both bulky and weighed a great deal as they were usually encrusted with jewels. Worn on a hot evening at a state occasion, such dresses must have been uncomfortable to wear.
Elizabeth I
who conformed to standards of dress expected for women
The law gave a husband full rights over his wife. She effectively became his property. A wife who committed adultery could expect to be severely punished as Catherine Howard found out. A peer could have his adulterous wife burned at the stake if the king/queen agreed. A wife who killed her husband did not commit murder - she committed the far worse crime of petty treason. This also lead to her being burned at the stake. Wife beating was common and the logic of Tudor England was that the wife would have provoked her husband into beating her and if she had behaved properly, he would not have beaten her. Therefore she herself was responsible for her beating! In theory, a wife could walk away from a marriage - but to what? Who would keep her? Who would employ her? Therefore, women had to stay in a marriage even if it was a brutal one as there was very little else she could do.

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Women in Tudor England - History Learning Site

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Tudor England witnessed many famous events such as the Spanish Armada, the Reformation and famous individuals such as Henry VII, Henry VIII and Sir Francis Drake. But what had happened to the position women had in English Tudor society? The position of women had remained unchanged for centuries and the time of the Tudors saw ...

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LIFE FOR WOMEN IN THE 16TH CENTURY

By Tim Lambert

It is a myth that 16th century women were meek and submissive. Some were strong-minded and they had more influence than is sometimes imagined.

In 1513 Henry VIII went to war in France. He made the queen, Catherine of Aragon, Governor of the Realm, and Captain-General of the home forces in his absence. In other words, he was willing to entrust the kingdom to her. In 1544 Henry went to war in France again. This time he made Catherine Parr regent in his absence.

WOMEN'S WORK IN THE 16TH CENTURY

In 16th century England women were not allowed in the professions (such as doctors, lawyers and teachers). However, women were allowed to join some of the guilds (organizations of tradespeople and skilled workers). In 1562 a law, the Statute of Artificers, made it illegal to employ a man or a woman in a trade unless they had served an apprenticeship. However, in the case of women, the law was often not enforced. Very often the guilds (who regulated trade) let male members employ their wives or daughters in their workshops. Furthermore, if a craftsman died his widow often carried on his trade.

In the 16th century some women worked spinning cloth. Women were also tailoresses, milliners, dyers, and embroiderers. There were also washerwomen. Some women worked in food preparation such as brewers, bakers, or confectioners. Women also sold foodstuffs in the streets. Furthermore, a very common job for women in the 16th century was a domestic servant. Other women were midwives. However, most women were housewives and they were kept very busy. Most men could not run a farm or a business without their wife's help.

In the 16th century most households in the countryside were largely self-sufficient. A housewife (assisted by her servants if she had any) had to bake her family's bread and brew their beer (it was often not safe to drink water). She was also responsible for curing bacon, salting meat, and making pickles, jellies, and preserves (all of which were essential in an age before fridges and freezers). Very often in the countryside the housewife also made the family candles and their soap. A 16th-century housewife also spun wool and linen.

A farmer's wife also milked cows, fed animals and grew herbs and vegetables. She often kept bees. She also took goods to market to sell. On top of that, she had to cook, wash the family's clothes, and clean the house. A 16th-century housewife was also supposed to have some knowledge of medicine and be able to treat her family's illnesses. If she could not they would go to a wise woman. Only the wealthy could afford a doctor.

Poor and middle class wives were kept very busy but rich women were not idle either. In a big house, they had to organize and supervise the servants. Also if her husband was away from the woman usually ran the estate. Very often a merchant's wife did his accounts and if was traveling she looked after the business.

In their spare time, rich women liked to hunt deer and hares with dogs. They also liked hunting with falcons. Wealthy women also played cards.

WOMEN'S EDUCATION IN THE 16TH CENTURY

Girls did not go to grammar schools. However, girls from well-off families were usually educated at home. Tutors taught upper-class girls. Middle-class girls were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and skills like sewing by their mothers. Merchant's daughters were very often taught to run their father's business. Some women were taught to read by their husbands or by the parish priest.

In the 16th century some upper class women were highly educated. Two of Henry VIII's wives, Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr were well educated. (Catherine Parr was a famous writer). Queen Elizabeth I was also well educated and she liked reading. Girls learned music and dancing and needlework. They also learned to read and write. They might also learn languages like Greek and Latin, Spanish, Italian, and French. However, towards the end of the 16th-century girls spent less time on academic subjects and more time on skills like music and embroidery.

Of course, most children in Tudor England did not go to school. Boys and girls from poor families were expected to start working and contributing to the family income from the time they were about 7 years old. Even in wealthy families people believed that girls should not be idle. Obviously they were allowed some time to play but otherwise they were supposed to work e.g. by weaving or reading suitable books. All children, whether male or female and rich or poor were supposed to obey their parents and treat them with respect. Discipline was harsh. (Although children were precious).

MARRIAGE IN THE 16TH CENTURY

Most women in the 16th century were wives and mothers. Life could be hard for spinsters. Often they lived with relatives but they had to work long hours to support themselves.

In the 16th century marriages were usually arranged, except for the poorest people. Divorce was unknown. (Though marriages were occasionally annulled. That is, it was declared they had never been valid). Legally girls could marry when they were 12 years old. However, normally it was only girls from rich families who married young. The majority of women married in their mid-20s. Widows could inherit their husband's property. Bess of Hardwick was widowed 4 times. She became a very rich woman.

Childbirth could be dangerous in the 16th century. Some women died 'in childbirth' (actually they usually died after giving birth because the midwife's hands were dirty and the unfortunate woman became infected). Poor women tended to give birth about once every two years. Rich women gave birth more often, perhaps once a year. That was because poor women breast-fed, which reduced their fertility. Rich women gave their babies to wet nurses to breastfeed.

WOMEN AND RELIGION IN THE 16TH CENTURY

There were many independent minded women in 16th century Europe with strongly held views on religion. Some of them were martyred including a woman named Anne Askew, who was executed in 1546. Queen Mary (1553-1558) was a Catholic and she persecuted Protestants. During her reign 56 brave women were burned to death for their beliefs.

WOMEN'S CLOTHES IN THE 16TH CENTURY

In the 16th century clothes were usually made of wool or linen. Only rich women could afford cotton and silk. However there were many grades of wool. You could buy expensive fine wool or cheap, coarse wool.

16th century women wore a kind of petticoat called a smock or shift or chemise made of linen or wool and a wool dress over it. A woman's dress was made of two parts, a bodice, and a skirt. Sleeves were held on with laces and could be detached. Working women wore a linen apron.

In the late 16th century many women wore a frame made of whalebone or wood under their dress called a farthingale. If they could not afford a farthingale, women wore a padded roll around their waist called a bum roll. However in the 16th century women did not wear knickers.

Rich women enjoyed embroidery. Many of their clothes were embroidered even hats and shoes.

In the 16th century all women wore hats. The poorest women wore a linen hat called a coif. In the early 16th century women wore hats called gable hoods (because they looked like the gables on the end of roofs). However, Anne Boleyn introduced the curved French hood into England. Then, in the late 16th century bonnets became fashionable. Rich women wore ostrich feathers in their bonnets.

It was fashionable for wealthy women to have pale skin (if you were sunburned it showed you were poor as you had to work in the hot sun). Women whitened their skin with egg whites or white lead. They reddened their lips and cheeks with cochineal (a dye made from crushed beetles).

From the 14th century to the mid-17th century laws called sumptuary laws laid down what each class could and could not wear. In the 16th century, complicated laws said that only persons of a certain rank could wear certain expensive materials such as velvet and silk. (These laws, of course, made no difference to poor people since they could not afford 'sumptuous' materials even if they wanted to). The laws were supposed to keep the classes distinct and easily recognizable. You were supposed to be able to tell which class somebody belonged to by his or her clothes. However, the sumptuary laws proved to be unenforceable and many people simply ignored them.
Famous Women in 16th Century Europe Life for women in the Ancient World Life for women in the 19th Century A History of Women's Rights Life in the 16th Century My Youtube video about women in the 16th century
Last revised 2020

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LIFE FOR WOMEN IN THE 16TH CENTURY By Tim Lambert It is a myth that 16th century women were meek and submissive. Some were strong-minded and they had more influence than is sometimes imagined. In 1513 Henry VIII went to war in France.

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Dowry is related to property or money given upon marriage, and dower and curtesy are concepts connected with property rights of a widowed spouse.

Dowry

Dowry refers to a gift or payment by a bride's family to the groom or his family at the time of marriage. As an archaic usage, dowry can also refer to dower, the goods a woman brings to a marriage and retains some power over.

Less commonly, dowry refers to a gift or payment or property given by a man to or for his bride.

This is more usually called a bride gift.

In South Asia today, dowry deaths are sometimes a problem: a dowry, paid on marriage, is returnable if the marriage ends. If the husband is unable to repay the dowry, the death of the bride is the only way to end the obligation.

Dower

Under English common law and in colonial America, dower was the share of a deceased husband's real estate to which his widow was entitled after his death. During his lifetime, she was, under the legal concept of coverture, not able to control any of the family property. After the widow's death, the real estate was then inherited as designated in her deceased husband's will; she had no rights to sell or bequeath the property independently. She did have rights to income from the dower during her lifetime, including rents and including income from crops grown on the land.

One-third was the share of her late husband's real property to which dower rights entitled her; the husband could increase the share beyond one-third in his will.

Where a mortgage or other debts offset the value of real estate and other property at the husband's death, dower rights meant that the estate could not be settled and the property could not be sold until the widow's death. In the 18th and 19th centuries, increasingly dower rights were ignored in order to settle estates more quickly, especially when mortgages or debts were involved.

In 1945 in the United States, a federal law abolished dower, though in most states, one-third of a husband's estate is awarded to a widow automatically if he dies without a will (intestate). Some laws limit the rights of a husband to bequeath less than one-third share to his widow except in prescribed circumstances.

A husband's right of inheritance is called curtesy.

Curtesy

Curtesy is a principle in common law in England and early America by which a widower could use his deceased wife's property (that is, property which she acquired and held in her own name) until his own death, but could not sell or transfer it to anyone but children of his wife.

Today in the United States, instead of using common law curtesy rights, most states explicitly require that one-third to one-half of a wife's property be given outright to her husband at her death, if she dies without a will (intestate).

Curtesy is occasionally used to refer to a widower's interest as surviving spouse in the property left by the deceased wife, but many states have officially abolished curtesy and dower.

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What Are Dowry, Dower, and Curtesy, and How Are They Different?

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Dowry is related to property or money given upon marriage, and dower and curtesy are concepts connected with property rights of a widowed spouse. Dowry refers to a gift or payment by a bride's family to the groom or his family at the time of marriage.

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The 800-year old document referred to as Magna Carta has been celebrated over time as the beginning of a foundation of personal rights under British law, including for systems based on British Law like the legal system in the United States of America - or a return to the personal rights that had been lost under Norman occupation after 1066.

The reality, of course, is that the document was only meant to clarify some matters of the relationship of the king and the nobility - that day's "1 percent." The rights didn't, as they stood, apply to the vast majority of residents of England. The women affected by the Magna Carta were also largely the elite among women: heiresses and wealthy widows.

Under common law, once a woman was married, her legal identity was subsumed under that of her husband: the principle of coverture. Women had limited property rights, but widows had a bit more ability to control their property than other women did. The common law also provided for dower rights for widows: the right to access a portion of her late husband's estate, for her financial maintenance, until her death.

A Brief Background

The 1215 version of the document was issued by King John of England as an attempt to pacify rebelling barons. The document primarily clarified elements of the relationship between the nobility and the king's power, including some promises related to areas where the nobility believed that the king's power had been overstepped (converting too much land to royal forests, for instance).

After John signed the original version and the pressure under which he signed it was less urgent, he appealed to the Pope for an opinion on whether he had to abide by the provisions of the charter. The Pope found it "illegal and unjust" because John had been compelled to agree to it, and said that the barons should not require it be followed nor should the king follow it, on pain of excommunication.

When John died the next year, leaving a child, Henry III, to inherit the crown under a regency, the charter was resurrected to help guarantee support of the succession. An on-going war with France also added pressure to keep the peace at home. In the 1216 version, some of the more radical limits on the king were omitted.

A 1217 reconfirmation of the charter, reissued as a peace treaty, was the first to be termed magna carta libertatum" - great charter of liberties - later to be shortened simply to Magna Carta.

In 1225, King Henry III reissued the charter as part of an appeal to raise new taxes. Edward I reissued it in 1297, recognizing it as part of the law of the land. It was regularly renewed by many subsequent monarchs when they succeeded to the crown.

The Magna Carta played a part in British and then American history at many subsequent points, used to defend ever further expansions of personal liberties, beyond the elite. Laws evolved and replaced some of the clauses, so that today, only three of the provisions are in effect pretty much as written.

The original document, written in Latin, is one long block of text. In 1759, William Blackstone, the great legal scholar, divided the text into sections and introduced the numbering that is common today.

What Rights?

The charter in its 1215 version included many clauses. Some of the "liberties" guaranteed in general - mostly affecting men - were:

A limit on the right of the king to tax and to demand fees

Guarantees of due process when charged in court

Freedom from royal rule over the English church

Clauses about royal forests, including returning some land converted to forests under John to public lands, and a prohibition of fish farms in rivers

Clauses about limits on and responsibilities of Jewish moneylenders, but also extending the limits and responsibilities to "other than Jews" who lent money

Standard measures for some common products like cloth and ale

What About the Women?

John, who signed the Magna Carta of 1215, in 1199 had put aside his first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, probably already intending to marry Isabella, heiress to Angoulême, who was only 12-14 at their marriage in 1200. Isabella of Gloucester was a wealthy heiress, too, and John retained control over her lands, taking his first wife as his ward, and controlling her lands and her future.

In 1214, he sold the right to marry Isabella of Gloucester to the Earl of Essex. Such was the right of the king, and a practice that enriched the coffers of the royal household. In 1215, Isabella's husband was among those rebelling against John and forcing John to sign the Magna Carta. Among the provisions of the Magna Carta: limits on the right to sell remarriages, as one of the provisions which constrained a wealthy widow's enjoyment of a full life.

The few clauses in the Magna Carta were designed to stop such abuses of wealthy and widowed or divorced women.

Specific Clauses of the Magna Carta (1215) Directly Affecting Women's Rights and Lives
6. Heirs shall be married without disparagement, yet so that before the marriage takes place the nearest in blood to that heir shall have notice.
This was meant to prevent false or malicious statements promoting the marriages of an heir, but also required that heirs notify their nearest blood relatives before marrying, presumably to allow those relatives to protest and to intervene if the marriage seemed forced or otherwise unjust. While not directly about women, it could protect a woman's marriage in a system where she did not have full independence to marry whomever she wanted.
7. A widow, after the death of her husband, shall forthwith and without difficulty have her marriage portion and inheritance; nor shall she give anything for her dower, or for her marriage portion, or for the inheritance which her husband and she held on the day of the death of that husband; and she may remain in the house of her husband for forty days after his death, within which time her dower shall be assigned to her.
This protected the right of a widow to have some financial protection after marriage and to prevent others from seizing either her dower or other inheritance she might be provided with. It also prevented her husband's heirs - often a son from a first marriage - from making the widow vacate her home immediately on the death of her husband.

Widows Remarrying
8. No widow shall be compelled to marry, so long as she prefers to live without a husband; provided always that she gives security not to marry without our consent, if she holds of us, or without the consent of the lord of whom she holds, if she holds of another.
This permitted a widow to refuse to marry and prevented (at least in principle) others from coercing her to marry. It also made her responsible for getting the king's permission to remarry, if she was under his protection or guardianship, or to get her lord's permission to remarry, if she was accountable to a lower level of nobility. While she could refuse to remarry, she was not supposed to marry just anyone. Given that women were assumed to have less judgment than men were, this was supposed to protect her from unwarranted persuasion.

Over the centuries, a good number of wealthy widows married without the necessary permissions. Depending on the evolution of the law about permission to remarry at the time, and depending on her relationship with the crown or her lord, she might incur heavy penalties - sometimes financial fines, sometimes imprisonment - or forgiveness.

John's daughter, Eleanor of England, secretly married the second time, but with the support of the then-king, her brother, Henry III. John's second great-granddaughter, Joan of Kent, made several controversial and secret marriages. Isabelle of Valois, queen consort to Richard II who was deposed, refused to marry the son of her husband's successor and returned to France to remarry there. Her younger sister, Catherine of Valois, was queen consort to Henry V; after Henry's death, rumors of her involvement with Owen Tudor, a Welsh squire, led to Parliament forbidding her remarriage without the king's consent - but they married anyway (or had already married), and that marriage led to the Tudor dynasty.

Debt Repayments During Widowhood
11. And if anyone die indebted to the Jews, his wife shall have her dower and pay nothing of that debt; and if any children of the deceased are left under age, necessaries shall be provided for them in keeping with the holding of the deceased; and out of the residue the debt shall be paid, reserving, however, service due to feudal lords; in like manner let it be done touching debts due to others than Jews.
This clause also protected the financial situation of a widow from moneylenders, with her dower protected from being demanded for use to pay her husband's debts. Under usury laws, Christians could not charge interest, so most moneylenders were Jews.

Testimony About Murders
54. No one shall be arrested or imprisoned upon the appeal of a woman, for the death of any other than her husband.
This clause wasn't so much for protection of women but prevented a woman's appeal - unless backed up by that of a man - from being used to imprison or arrest anyone for a death or murder. The exception was if her husband was the victim. This fit within the larger scheme of understanding of a woman as both unreliable and having no legal existence other than through her husband or guardian.

59. We will do towards Alexander, king of Scots, concerning the return of his sisters and his hostages, and concerning his franchises, and his right, in the same manner as we shall do towards our other barons of England, unless it ought to be otherwise according to the charters which we hold from William his father, formerly king of Scots; and this shall be according to the judgment of his peers in our court.
This clause deals with the specific situation of the sisters of Alexander, king of Scotland. Alexander II had allied himself with the barons fighting King John, and had brought an army into England and even sacked Berwick-upon-Tweed. Alexander's sisters were held as hostages by John to assure a peace - John's niece, Eleanor of Brittany, was held with the two Scottish princesses at Corfe Castle. This assured the return of the princesses. Six years later, John's daughter, Joan of England, married Alexander in a political marriage arranged by her brother, Henry III.

Summary

Most of the Magna Carta had little directly to do with women.

The chief effect of the Magna Carta on women was to protect wealthy widows and heiresses from arbitrary control of their fortunes by the crown, to protect their dower rights for financial sustenance, and to protect their right to consent to marriage (though not to arrange just any marriage without the permission of the king). The Magna Carta also specifically freed two women, the Scottish princesses, who had been held hostage.

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How Did the Magna Carta of 1215 Affect Women's Rights?

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The 800-year old document referred to as Magna Carta has been celebrated over time as the beginning of a foundation of personal rights under British law, including for systems based on British Law like the legal system in the United States of America - or a return to the personal rights that had been lost under Norman occupation after 1066.

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By the end of 15th century, the basic law of inheritance for the majority of England & Scotland was primogeniture - inheritance by the oldest (legitimate) son

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Life in Elizabethan England 41: Heirs and Inheritance

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Everyday life in Tudor England - Heirs, heiresses, titles, lands, and wardship in the time of Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare.

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For our purposes, we are interested in the peerages created in the Kingdom of England prior to the Act of Union in 1707.

The ranks of the English peerage are Duke (highest rank), Marquess, Earl, Viscount, and Baron.

Although not royalty or noble, I will also include the rank of knight in this topic.

You will find noted below forms of reference and address for the wives of nobility, but not husbands who may have married a female noble. It is expected that she will use the appropriate form of reference and address appropriate to the wife of a man of his rank. She may also continue to use her own title and be addressed in that way if her rank is higher than that of her husband.
*Note: This is not intended to be an academic treatment of the subject and I do not guarantee historical accuracy. The intent of this article is to provide a framework for entertainment purposes in Second Life. If I have made any glaring errors, I would be grateful for feedback and correction.
Our period of interest, the 16th century, was the Tudor era. The Tudor monarchs of that century were;

Henry VII, 1485 - 1509

Henry VIII, 1509 - 1547

Edward VI, 1547 - 1553

Mary I, 1553 - 1558

Elizabeth I, 1558 - 1603

Whoever assumes the role of King or Queen of the South may or may not choose to portray one of those monarchs, but we would encourage people to make up a new monarch in the style of the time for more flexible role play opportunities. It is not our purpose to accurately portray history, and although heavily influenced by history, we are not bound by it.

Forms of Address: Monarchs are referred to as "His Majesty the King" or "Her Majesty The Queen". After initially addressing the monarch as "Your Majesty", the King can be addressed as "Sire" and the Queen as "Ma'am".

The English coronation oath is the oath of office taken by the British monarch, and dates back to at least the coronation of Edgar at Bath Abbey in 973 A.D.

At the time of Edgar, the Oath was very simple and read as follows:

First, that the church of God and the whole Christian people shall have true peace at all time by our judgment; Second, that I will forbid extortion and all kinds of wrong-doing to all orders of men; Third, that I will enjoin equity and mercy in all judgments.

There were changes made to the coronation oath in 1689, but that is after our period of interest.

The Royal Consort of England was the spouse of the King of England. A queen consort usually shares her husband's rank and holds the feminine equivalent of the king's monarchical titles. Historically, queens consort do not share the king regnant's political and military powers.

The husband of a reigning Queen is likely to have his own title. The husband of Queen Elizabeth II is Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. It was thought that to give the husband of a reigning Queen the title of King would create potential conflict and confusion.
PRINCE OR PRINCESS (HEIR APPARENT)
The Prince of Wales is the heir apparent to the British Throne.

In 1409 the revolt in quest of Welsh independence was suppressed by Henry IV. The tradition of investing the heir-apparent of the monarch with the title of "Prince of Wales" is usually considered to have begun in 1301, when King Edward I of England invested his son Edward Caernarfon with the title at a Parliament held in Lincoln.

Forms of Address: The Prince of Wales would be referred to as "His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales." Initially you would address the Prince as "Your Royal Highness" and afterward as "Sir". A Princess of Wales in her own right would be referred to as "Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales." You would initially address her as "Your Royal Highness" and afterward as "Ma'am". The wife of the Prince, the Princess Consort, would be referred to and addressed in the same way as a Princess of Wales in our time frame.
CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN OF THE MONARCH
We do not encourage the portrayal of children in our environment, and as a child or grandchild became of age, he would be granted land and a title, most likely Duke or Earl, or if a female, married to someone of high rank.

Forms of Address: The children and grandchildren of the Sovereign would be referred to as "HRH (His Royal Highness or Her Royal Highness) Prince/Princess (name) of (wherever)". Initially he or she would be addressed as "Your Royal Highness", and after that Sir or Ma'am. Their wives would be addressed in the same manner.

Great grandchildren would be referred to as "The Lord/Lady (Name)". They would be addressed initially as "My Lord" or "My Lady", and afterward as "Sir" or "Ma'am". Interestingly, the wife of a great grandson would not be referred to by her own name, but as "The Lady (Name of her husband)". So, the wife of Lord John Stewart, great grandson to the King, would be referred to as "The Lady John Stewart."

A Duke (male) or Duchess (female) can either be a monarch ruling over a duchy or a member of the nobility, historically of highest rank below the monarch. A duchy is the territory or geopolitical entity ruled by a duke. The term implies a territorial domain, within which the duke has actual subjects or significant land holdings, with respect to which the duke has or had unique legal privileges, e.g. sovereignty or manorial rights or entitlement to certain duties or income from residents (e.g. the corvée), etc. A dukedom is the title or status of a duke, a rank in the present or past nobility, and is not necessarily attached to a duchy. Sons of sovereigns are normally given a dukedom.

Forms of Address: A Duke or Duchess is referred to "His Grace, the Duke of (Wherever)" or "Her Grace, the Duchess of (Wherever)". The initial form of address would be "Your Grace" or "Duke" or "Duchess". Afterward they can be addressed as "Sir" or "Ma'am".
MARQUESS/MARCHIONESS
A Marquess or Marquis is a nobleman of hereditary rank. The Marquess or Marchioness ranks below Duke or Duchess and above Earl.

In times past, the distinction between a Count and a marquess was that a marquess's land, called a march, was on the border of the country, while a count's land, called a county, often wasn't. Because of this, a marquess was trusted to defend and fortify against potentially hostile neighbors and was thus more important and ranked higher than a count. The title is ranked below duke, which was mostly restricted to the royal family and those that were held in high enough esteem to be granted such a title.

The word "marquess" is unusual in English, ending in "-ess" but referring to a male and not a female. In continental Europe it is usually equivalent where a cognate title exists. A woman with the rank of a marquess, or the wife of a marquess, is a marchioness.

Forms of Address: A Marquess would be referred to as "The Most Honourable Marquess of (Wherever)", or "The Most Honourable Marchioness of (Wherever)". You would address him as "My Lord", "Your Lordship", or "Lord (Wherever)". You would address her as "My Lady", "Your Ladyship", or "Lady (Wherever)". After initial adress you can call him "Sir" or her "Ma'am".

An Earl is a member of the nobility ranking below Marquess and above Viscount. There never developed a feminine form of earl; countess is used as the equivalent feminine title.

Forms of Address: An Earl is referred to as "The Right Honourable Earl of (Wherever)", and a Countess as "The Right Honourable Countess of (Wherever)". Initially you would address an Earl as "My Lord", "Your Lordship", or "Lord (Wherever)". You would address a Countess as "My Lady", "Your Ladyship", or "Lady (Wherever)". After initial address you can call him "Sir" or her "Ma'am".

A Viscount ranks below an Earl but above a Baron. The word Viscount corresponds in the UK to the Anglo-Saxon shire reeve (root of the non-nobiliary, royal-appointed office of sheriff). Thus early viscounts were originally normally given their titles by the monarch, not hereditary; but soon they too tended to establish hereditary principalities.

Forms of Address: The title of a viscount may be either a place name, or a surname, or sometimes, a combination thereof. In any event, a Viscount is referred to as "The Viscount (Name)", or "The Viscount (Name) of (Wherever)". A Viscountess is referred to as "The Viscountess (Name)", or "The Viscountess (Name) of (Wherever)". Initially you would address a Viscount as "My Lord", "Your Lordship", or "Lord (Wherever)". You would address a Viscountess as "My Lady", "Your Ladyship", or "Lady (Wherever)". After initial address you can call him "Sir" or her "Ma'am".

Baron is a title of nobility, entitled to attend the Great Council which by the 13th century had developed into the Parliament of England.

William I introduced "baron" as a rank in England to distinguish the men who had pledged their loyalty to him under the feudal system, bound to perform a stipulated annual military service, and obliged to attend his council.

Forms of Address: They would be referred to as the "Baron of (Wherever)", or "Baroness of (Wherever)". You would address a Baron as "Baron" or the name of the place he is Baron of, and more casually as Sir. You would address a Baroness as "Baroness", "Madam", or "Lady (Wherever)".

A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a monarch or other political leader for service to the monarch or country, especially in a military capacity. Historically, in Europe, knighthood has been conferred upon mounted warriors. During the High Middle Ages, knighthood was considered a class of lower nobility. By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior. Since the Early Modern period, the title of knight is purely honorific, usually bestowed by a monarch, as in the British honours system, often for non-military service to the country.

Knighthood in the Middle Ages was closely linked with horsemanship (and especially the joust) from its origins in the 12th century until its final flowering as a fashion among the high nobility.

Knights of the medieval era were asked to "Protect the weak, defenseless, helpless, and fight for the general welfare of all." They also had to protect women. These few guidelines were the main duties of a medieval knight, but they were very hard to accomplish fully. Knights trained in hunting, fighting, and riding, amongst other things. They were also trained to practise courteous, honorable behaviour, which was considered extremely important.

Forms of Address: Knights were often, but not always, members of an Order. A woman could be a Lady of the order, and would have the title of Dame. A knight would be referred to as "Sir (Name)" and his wife would be referred to as "Lady (Name)". They would be addressed as "Sir", "My Lady", or "Lady (Name)". Some orders had female members, and they would be referred to as "Dame (Name)". They would be addressed as "Madam" or "Dame (Name)".

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Royalty, Nobility and Gentry of England in the 16th Century

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For our purposes, we are interested in the peerages created in the Kingdom of England prior to the Act of Union in 1707. The ranks of the English peerage are Duke (highest rank), Marquess, Earl, Viscount, and Baron. Although not royalty or noble, I will also include the rank of knight in this topic.

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Main Body: English 16th Century Trade - English History Museum Project, Splendor 319

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Museum project for English History 319 at VCU. Fall 2011. In depth discussion of several pieces found locally that can be traced back to Tudor and Stuart England. All of the pieces are related to Elite culture in 16th and 17th century England.

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tudor re-enactment reenactment history education interpretation elizabethan living history historical authentic museum consultancy advice hand-made clothing

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The Tudor Group is an historical interpretation society concentrating on the later Tudor period (1560-1603 ) who through enthusiastic demonstrations and talks, attempt to illustrate some of the ordinary facets of life during this fascinating period.We have a growing reputation for enthusiasm and historical accuracy.

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Life for the poor in Tudor times was harsh. When the harvest failed it was tempting for poor people to steal food. When people did break the law, they risked public flogging or being hanged.

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By Tim Lambert

SOCIETY IN TUDOR ENGLAND

In 16th century England most of the population lived in small villages and made their living from farming. However, towns grew larger and more important. During the 16th century trade and industry grew rapidly and England became a more and more commercial country. Mining of coal, tin, and lead flourished. So did the iron industry. During this period England became richer and richer.

As England grew more and more prosperous life for the well off became more and more comfortable. Upper class and middle class people benefited from the growing wealth of the country. However, for the poor in Tudor England life did not improve. For them, life was hard and rough.

Meanwhile in the 15th century the population of England may have been around 2 and a half million. It rose steadily during the 16th century. By 1525 it had risen to around 3 million and by 1600 it was about 4 million.

Tudor society was divided into four broad groups. At the top were the nobility who owned huge amounts of land. Below them were the gentry and rich merchants. Gentlemen owned large amounts of land and they were usually educated and had a family coat of arms. Most important gentlemen never did any manual work. Below the gentry were yeomen and craftsmen. Yeomen owned their own land. They could be as wealthy as gentlemen but they worked alongside their men. Yeomen and craftsmen were often able to read and write. Below the yeomen were the tenant farmers who leased their land from the rich. There were also wage laborers. They were often illiterate and very poor.

In Tudor Times the parish became the basis of local government. The most important person was an appointed magistrate called the Justice of the Peace. Meanwhile in Tudor Times kings and queens grew stronger. During the Middle Ages the barons held castles, which were difficult to capture so it was easy for them to rebel. Cannons changed all that.
The history of English society
THE POOR IN TUDOR ENGLAND

In the 16th century jobs were not always easy to find. In Tudor Times there were thousands of people without jobs wandering around looking for work. There were also disabled beggars. There were also people who pretended to be mad or disabled in order to beg. Tudor governments tolerated disabled beggars. However, they did not tolerate able-bodied people without jobs wandering from place to place. They thought such 'sturdy vagabonds' without a fixed place in society were a threat to law and order.

Since the 14th century there had been laws against vagabonds but in 1530 a new law was passed. The old and disabled poor were to be given licenses to beg. However, anyone roaming without a job was tied to a cart in the nearest market town and whipped till they were bloody. They were then forced to return to the parish where they had been born or where they had lived for the last 3 years.

A law of 1547 said vagabonds could be made slaves for 2 years. This terrible law was abolished in 1550. Once again flogging was made the punishment for vagrancy.

PUNISHMENTS IN THE 16TH CENTURY

In Tudor Times prison was seldom used as a punishment. Instead, people were held in prison until trial then the prisoner was given a physical punishment. Tudor punishments were simple but harsh like flogging. Minor crimes were also punished by the pillory or the stocks. The pillory was a wooden frame on a pole with holes through which a person's head and hands were placed. The frame was then locked. The stocks was a wooden frame with holes through which a person's feet.

More serious crimes were punished by death. Beheading was reserved for the wealthy. Ordinary people were usually hanged.

HOUSES IN TUDOR ENGLAND

In the Middle Ages rich people's houses were designed for defense rather than comfort. In the 16th century, life was safer so houses no longer had to be easy to defend. Rich Tudor people built grand houses e.g. Cardinal Wolsey built Hampton Court Palace. Later the Countess of Shrewsbury built Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire.

Middle class Tudors built sturdy 'half-timbered' houses. They were made with a timber frame filled in with wattle and daub (wickerwork and plaster). In the late 16th century some people built or rebuilt their houses with a wooden frame filled in with bricks. Roofs were usually thatched though some well off people had tiles. (In London all houses had tiles because of the fear of fire).

In Tudor Times furniture was more plentiful than in the Middle Ages but it was still basic. In a wealthy home, it was usually made of oak and was heavy and massive. Tudor furniture was expected to last for generations. You expected to pass it on to your children and even your grandchildren. Comfortable beds became more and more common in the 16th century. In a middle class Tudor home, a mattress was often stuffed with flock (a kind of rough wool).

Chairs were more common than in the Middle Ages but they were still expensive. Even in an upper class home children and servants sat on stools. The poor had to make do with stools and benches.

In the 15th century only a small minority of people could afford glass windows. In the 16th century, they became much more common. However, they were still expensive. If you moved house you took your glass windows with you! Windows were made of small pieces of glass held together by strips of lead. They were called lattice windows. However the poor still had to make do with strips of linen soaked in linseed oil.

Chimneys were also a luxury in Tudor Times, although they became more common. Furthermore, in the Middle Ages, a rich person's house was dominated by the great hall. It extended all the way up to the roof of the building. In the 16th century, many people installed another story in their house over the great hall. So well off Tudor people's houses became divided into more rooms.

In rich people's houses the walls of rooms were lined with oak paneling to keep out drafts. People slept in four-poster beds hung with curtains to reduce drafts. Wealthy people hung tapestries or painted cloths on their walls.

In Tudor England carpets were a luxury only the rich could afford. They were usually too expensive to put on the floor! Instead, they were often hung on the wall or over tables. People covered their floors with rushes or reeds, which they strewed with sweet smelling herbs.

In the 16th century wealthy people lit their homes with beeswax candles. However, they were expensive. Other people made used candles made from tallow (animal fat) which gave off an unpleasant smell and the poor made do with rushlights (rushes dipped in animal fat).

Rich Tudors had clocks in their homes. Most people relied on pocket sundials to tell the time. Rich people were also fond of gardens. Many had mazes, fountains, and topiary (hedges cut into shapes). Less well off people used their gardens to grow vegetables and herbs.

However poor people lived in simple huts with one or two rooms (occasionally three). Floors were of hard earth and furniture was very basic such as benches, stools, a table, and wooden chests. The poor slept on mattresses stuffed with straw or thistledown. The mattresses lay on ropes strung across a wooden frame.

In the 16th century toilets were basic. In 1596 Sir John Harrington invented a flushing lavatory with a cistern. However, the idea failed to catch on. People continued to use chamber pots or cesspits, which were cleaned by men called gong farmers. (In Tudor Times a toilet was called a jakes). For toilet paper, rich people used rags while poor people sometimes used a plant called woolly mullein.
The history of homes

Tudor House Museum in Southampton

FOOD IN TUDOR ENGLAND

In the 16th century rich people ate vast amounts of meat. However, they did not eat many vegetables. On certain days by law people had to eat fish instead of meat. At first, this was for religious reasons but later in the 16th century, it was to support the fishing industry. If you lived near the sea or a river you could eat fresh fish like herring or mackerel. Otherwise, you might have to rely on dried or salted fish.

Poor people lived on a dreary diet in the 16th century. In the morning they had bread and cheese and onions. They only had one cooked meal a day. They mixed grain with water and added vegetables and (if they could afford it) strips of meat.

All classes ate bread but it varied in quality. Rich peoples bread was made from fine white flour. Poor people ate coarse bread of barley or rye.

The Tudors were also fond of sweet foods (if they could afford them). However, in the 16th century sugar was very expensive so most people used honey to sweeten their food.

In the 16th century new foods were introduced from the Americas. Turkeys were introduced into England about 1525. Potatoes were brought to England in the 1580s but at first, few English people ate them.

People drank ale or beer or, if they were rich, wine. The Tudors also drank cider and perry.

Rich people liked to show off their gold and silver plate. The middle classes would have dishes and bowls made of pewter. The poor made do with wooden plates and bowls. There were no forks. People ate with knives and their fingers or with spoons. Rich people had silver or pewter spoons. The poor used wooden ones.

In the 16th century ordinary people made much of their own food. A farmer's wife cured bacon and salted meat to preserve it. She baked bread and brewed beer. She also made pickles and conserves and preserved vegetables. Many farms kept bees for honey.
The history of food The history of drinks
TOWNS IN TUDOR ENGLAND

Only a small part of the population of 16th century England lived in towns. Nevertheless, peasants brought things to weekly markets to sell. All kinds of manufactured goods like shoes and pottery were on sale in towns.

In 1500 London probably had a population of between 60,000 and 70,000. By 1600 its population was over 250,000. Other Tudor towns were much smaller. Bristol probably had a population of about 14,000 in 1500. By 1600 it had grown to about 20,000. The next largest town, Norwich had about 10,000 inhabitants in 1500. In 1600 it still had less than 20,000. The largest town in the north of England was York. In 1500 it had a population of about 10,000. By 1600 it had only risen to about 12,000. The next largest town was probably Exeter with a population of about 9,000 in 1600. Most of the towns in Tudor England were much smaller with populations of between 2,500 and 4,000. In the 16th century, anything with more than 1,000 inhabitants was considered a town.

In most Tudor towns tradesmen of one kind tended to live and work in the same street e.g. in many towns butchers and slaughterhouses gathered together in a street called the Shambles.

Tudor towns were dirty, smelly and crowded. There were no sewers and no drains. Rubbish such as rotting vegetables, offal, and dirty water were thrown in the streets. In some towns, every man was supposed to clean the street in front of his house once a week but it is unlikely many people bothering! Rats and other vermin were common.

People usually obtained their water from wells or from water carriers who carried water in containers on their shoulders. Some towns had conduits which brought in water from the countryside and which the public could use. Furthermore, in some Tudor towns, the principal streets were paved but most town streets were not.

In Tudor towns streets were also very narrow. Upper stories of buildings jutted out over lower stories. These were called jetties. At night the streets were dark and dangerous. Quite apart from the danger of being robbed it was easy to have an accident in dark, unpaved streets. In London, you could hire a link boy with a lamp to light your way. However many people avoided going out after dark.

Given the dirty condition of Tudor towns it is not surprising that outbreaks of plague were common. When the plague struck it might kill 10%, 15% or even more of the population of a town. However, towns always recovered. There were always plenty of poor people in the countryside willing to come to towns in search of work.
The history of English towns
16TH CENTURY LONDON

London grew enormously in the 16th century. In 1500 the town was encompassed by its walls but by 1600 rich men had built houses along the Strand joining London to Westminster. In the Middle Ages, the church owned about 1/4 of the land in London. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries it released a great deal of land for new buildings.

Along the walls of Tudor London were several gates, Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate and Ludgate. Two of the gates were used as prisons, Ludgate and Newgate. Furthermore, the body parts of traitors who had been hung drawn and quartered were displayed over the gates as a warning.

Over the River Thames was London Bridge, which had buildings along its length. (Many of them had shops on the ground floor). South of the Thames was the large suburb of Southwark. The River Thames was a major transport route as Tudor London was the largest port in England. Sailing ships sailed to quays just before London Bridge and there were also smaller boats owned by watermen for transporting people along the Thames. Tudor monarchs and other rich people had their own barges. There were also many fishermen in London and The Thames teemed with fish like salmon, trout, perch, flounder and beam. However, The Thames sometimes froze over and fairs were held on it.

At night the streets of London were dark and dangerous. At 9 pm in summer and at dusk in winter church bells rang the curfew and the city gates were locked.

TRANSPORT IN TUDOR ENGLAND

In Tudor England roads were just dirt tracks. Men were supposed, by law, to spend a number of days repairing the local roads but it is unlikely they did much good! People traveled by horse. You could either ride your own or you could hire a horse. From the mid-16th century some rich people rode in carriages. They must have been very uncomfortable because they did not have springs and roads were very bumpy.

In Tudor Times you would be lucky if you could travel 50 or 60 kilometers a day. It normally took a week to travel from London to Plymouth. However rich Tudor people deliberately traveled slowly. They felt it was undignified to hurry and they took their time.

Goods were sometimes transported by pack horse (horses with bags on their sides). Also carriers with covered wagons carried goods and sometimes passengers. However when possible people preferred to transport goods by water. All around England there was a 'coastal trade'. Goods from one part of the country, such as coal, were taken by sea to other parts.
The history of transport
GAMES IN TUDOR ENGLAND

Although the days of armored knights were over rich people still enjoyed tournaments in the 16th century. The contestants dressed in armor and rode horses. They fought with wooden lances and swords.

Rich people also enjoyed hunting. They went hunting deer with bows and arrows. After it was killed the deer was eaten. The rich also went hawking. Falcons were trained to kill other birds.

Rich people also liked wrestling and 'casting the bar', which was like shot-putting but with an iron bar. They also played billiards. Rich people also played board games like chess and backgammon (a backgammon set was found on the wreck of the Mary Rose. It is the same as a modern one). They also played tennis with a leather ball stuffed with hair. They also played bowls and skittles. Playing cards were also popular.

All classes gambled in 16th century England. Poor people gambled with dice. They also played games like shuffleboard (shove ha'penny) and nine men's morris. The Tudors also played drafts and fox and geese.

Music and dancing were also very popular. The printing press made books much cheaper so reading was a popular pastime for well off people.

Ordinary people played a rough version of football. There were no rules and the 'pitch' was often a large area including woods and even streams! It was a very rough game. Injuries like broken limbs were common.

Cruel 'sports' like cockfighting were also popular in the 16th century. So was bear baiting. A bear was chained to a post and dogs were trained to attack it.

THE THEATRE IN TUDOR ENGLAND

16th century people liked plays, both comedies and tragedies. In the 16th century groups of professional actors became common. However, Tudor governments were suspicious of actors. They were regarded as layabouts who did no useful work. From 1572 actors had to hold a license from a noble. Without protection from some powerful man, actors were likely to be arrested as vagrants!

In the early 16th century actors performed in market squares or in courtyards. However, in the late 16th century plays became more and more popular and it eventually became worthwhile making purpose-built theaters in large towns. In 1576 a man named James Burbage built the first theater. Others followed. Those who could afford the best seats were sheltered from the weather. However, the poor customers stood in the open air. They were called groundlings. Rich people sat on the stage!

There were no female actors in the 16th century. Boys played women's parts. Plays were usually held during the day because of the difficulty of lighting a stage.

Meanwhile Tudor children played with wooden dolls. (They were called Bartholomew babies because they were sold at St Bartholomew's fair in London). They also played cup and ball (a wooden ball with a wooden cup on the end of the handle. You had to swing the handle and try and catch the ball in the cup).
The history of games
EDUCATION IN TUDOR ENGLAND

Boys usually went to a kind of nursery school called a 'petty school' first then moved onto grammar school when they were about seven. The school day began at 6 am in summer and 7 am in winter (people went to bed early and got up early in those days). Lunch was from 11 am to 1 pm. School finished at about 5 pm. Boys went to school 6 days a week and there were few holidays.

Many Tudor children learned to read and write with something called a hornbook. It was not a book in the modern sense. Instead, it was a wooden board with a handle. Fixed to the board was a sheet of paper with the alphabet and the Lord's prayer (the Our Father) written on it. The paper was usually protected by a thin slice of animal horn.

Discipline in Tudor schools was harsh. The teacher often had a stick with birch twigs attached to it for hitting boys.

When they were about 15 or 16 the brightest boys might go to one of England's two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Of course, many boys did not go to school at all. If they were lucky they might get a 7-year apprenticeship and learn a trade. Some craftsmen could read and write but few laborers could.

As for girls, in a rich family a tutor usually taught them at home. In a middle class family their mother might teach them. Upper class and middle class women were educated. However, lower class girls were not.

Tudor children who did not go to school were expected to work. They helped their parents by doing tasks such as scaring birds when seeds were sown They also helped to weave wool and did other household tasks.

In the 16th century children from rich families usually had their marriages arranged for them. Children from poorer families had more choice over whom to marry. Yet girls usually married young. Many were married when they were only 15 or 16. Boys often married between the ages of 18 and 21.
The history of education
CLOTHES IN THE 16TH CENTURY

For rich people fashion was important. For the poor clothes had to be tough and practical. All classes wore wool. However, it varied in quality. The rich wore fine quality wool. The poor wore coarse wool.

Linen was used to make shirts. Only the rich could afford silk. Rich people also embroidered their clothes with silk, gold or silver thread. Rich women wore silk stockings.

Men wore short trouser-like garments called breeches. They also wore tight fitting jackets called doublets. Another jacket called a jerkin was worn over the doublet. Over the jerkin, rich men wore a gown, or later in the 16th century a cloak or cape.

However instead of a doublet many workingmen wore a loose tunic. It was easier to work in. Some workingmen wore a leather jerkin called a buff-jerkin. Men also wore stockings or woolen socks, which were called hose.

Tudor women wore a kind of petticoat called a smock or shift or chemise made of linen or wool and a wool dress over it. A woman's dress was made of two parts, a bodice, and a skirt. Sleeves were held on with laces and could be detached. Workingwomen wore a linen apron.

In Elizabethan England many women wore a frame made of whale bone or wood under their dress called a farthingale. If they could not afford a farthingale women wore a padded roll around their waist called a bum roll.

Tudor women did not wear knickers. However men sometimes wore linen shorts.

In the 16th century everyone wore hats. Poor women often wore a linen cap called a coif. After 1572 by law all men except nobles had to wear a woolen cap on Sundays.

In the 16th century buttons were usually for decoration. Clothes were often held together with laces or pins. Furs in Tudor Times included cat, rabbit, beaver, bear, badger and polecat.

People used mostly vegetable dyes such as madder for red, woad for blue or walnut for brown. The most expensive dyes were bright red, purple and indigo. Poor people often wore brown, yellow or blue.

Some Tudor women wore wigs. Both Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots wore them. When Mary was beheaded her wig came off.

In the 16th century laws called sumptuary laws laid down what each class could and could not wear. Complicated laws said that only people with a certain amount of wealth could wear certain expensive materials such as velvet and silk. These laws, of course, made no difference to poor people since they could not afford costly material anyway! However, the laws were supposed to keep the classes separate. You were supposed to be able to tell which class somebody belonged to by his or her clothes. However many people simply ignored the sumptuary laws.
The history of clothes
16TH CENTURY MEDICINE

In the 16th century many people died in epidemics of sweating sickness (possibly influenza). Many others died of smallpox. Queen Elizabeth I almost died of it). Even if you survived smallpox it could leave you disfigured with pox marks or blind. Syphilis was also rampant. Dysentery was also a killer.

Tudor doctors were very expensive and they could do little about illness partly because they did not know what caused disease. They had little idea of how the human body worked. Doctors thought the body was made up of four fluids or 'humors'. They were blood, phlegm, choler or yellow bile and melancholy or black bile. In a healthy person all four humors were balanced but if you had too much of one you fell ill.

If you had too much blood you would be bled either with leeches or by cutting a vein. Too much of other humors would be treated either by eating the right diet or by purging (taking medicines to cause vomiting).

Doctors also thought infectious disease, like plague, was caused by poisonous 'vapors', which drifted through the air and were absorbed through the skin.

One of the main ways of diagnosing sickness was uroscopy (examining urine) by its appearance, its smell or even by its taste!

Astrology also played a part in Tudor medicine. Most doctors believed that different zodiac signs ruled different parts of the body.

Since doctors were so expensive many people went to see a wise woman if they were ill. The wise women would have knowledge of different herbs and their properties and might be able to help.

The average lifespan in the 16th century was shorter than today. Average life expectancy at birth was only 35. (So only half of all people born lived to be 35). However many Tudor people died while they were still children. Out of all people born between one third and one half died before the age of about 16. However if you could survive to your mid-teens you would probably live to your 50s or early 60s. Even in the 16th century some people did live to their 70s or 80s.
The history of medicine
16TH CENTURY WEAPONS

In the 16th century warfare was transformed by guns. Early guns were lit by a slow match (string was soaked in saltpeter and when it was lit it smoldered). The slow match was touched to the gunpowder to ignite it. However, in the early 16th century, the wheellock was invented. A metal wheel spun against a piece or iron pyrites generating sparks that ignited the gunpowder. As a result, most cavalry stopped using lances. Instead, they carried two or three pistols each, ready to fire, and sabers.

Meanwhile in the early 16th century the traditional English weapon was the longbow but handguns were increasingly used. The longbow slowly went out of use in Tudor times. However, muskets took a long time to reload and during that time the infantry needed protection from cavalry. They were protected by men with pikes (a weapon like a long spear).

Tudor forts and walled towns often had bastions. They were triangular sections of the wall that jutted out from the rest of the wall. They provided flanking fire. In other words, guns on the bastion could fire at approaching soldiers from the sides.
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Last revised 2019

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By Tim Lambert In 16th century England most of the population lived in small villages and made their living from farming. However, towns grew larger and more important. During the 16th century trade and industry grew rapidly and England became a more and more commercial country. Mining of coal, tin, and lead flourished.

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The first form of transport was, of course, Shanks pony (the human foot!). However people eventually learned to use animals for transport. Donkeys and horses were probably domesticated between 4,000 and 3,000 BC (obviously the exact date is not known). Camels were domesticated slightly later between 3,000 and 2,000 BC.

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There were always orphans. People married early and had many children. Most people did not see thirty. Women died in childbirth and both sexes of contagious diseases. Fathers died and left a family destitute. Mothers could not care for children as they were having to work as servants, or day laborers. Others had poor extended families who could not help.

Many children were orphaned. A quarter of all families had lost a father by the time they were ten. It was worse if the mother died, children died at twice the normal rate. Younger children died more often. In French, English, and Spanish villages at least one-third of the children lost one of their parents during childhood.

There were different types of homes. Foundling homes, which no longer exist, were created by the church in the middle ages. They were established to keep poor parents from murdering their own infants. Some of the infants were illegitimate and not wanted. These became widespread. Parents would leave their children in front of the facility or slip them through a turning receptacle in the door. The nuns would care for the infants, baptize them, and place children with willing homes. The treatment of children varied. They could be treated like the children of the home or as servants. Often infants were sent to rural poor families. Each lactating woman had six children to care for. They died in great numbers. There were large numbers of children in Catholic countries in these sorts of facilities. As time went on parents who had fallen on hard times would leave their older children in these places. They were like the foster care homes of today.

There were also almshouses. Whole families went to almshouses. The Church would collect alms for the poor. Some alms houses evolved from hospitals others were established in the late medieval period. These were something like the projects only much worse, and they provided work of an unpleasant nature. The family tried desperately to be independent.

Then there were hospitals. A hospital then was not what it is now. They were originally not created to treat the sick but a place to care for travelers, the aged, dying and indigent children. They were concerned with saving souls and helping different poor people. There were hospitals for retired bakers, lepers and also children. These were something like the nursing homes of the present.

All of these were run by the Church.

In the later era cities, wars and plagues created a number of orphans that was no longer manageable. Often there were no relatives after catastrophic events to care for them. Those who were not raised by relatives became beggars and prostitutes. Orphan children were locked up with the mentally ill and tramps in hospitals in cities like Venice. The first real orphanages in the modern sense were from the 16 th century. Cities and secular organizations began to take a role. This was the start of the modern orphanage, although the living conditions were often terrible and when there were epidemics, famines or war, they were the first to die.

Orphanages were different. Belgium founded the first schools for poor children. They taught children ands they were for the poor, not just orphans. The father could be dead, in the military, or sick to put the family in financial straights. They provided some training but only for boys. It is assumed that the girls went into domestic service. Very often they required the children to beg. Paris founded an institute to educate poor children. The orphanage with complete care was founded after that in England, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands. However their philosophies varied a great deal and had very different results.

Orphanages did well in parts of Italy and the Netherlands where they were given a lot of money. To be accepted in an Italian orphanage you have to be a citizen, seven to twelve, legitimate, and fit for work. The Dutch founded the orphanage based on confiscated Catholic property and restricted their orphanages to Dutch citizens. They thought it was in their interests to preserve a middle class. They were fed well and trained for the same positions as their parents and had low mortality. The basic motivation was to provide enough so that people did not end up swelling the ranks of the poor. The administrators were the elite who were trying to get higher appointments. It was financed in large part by the government and only 16% by benefactors.

In Germany orphans were apprenticed out. The orphanage providing certain things including all funding. Special training was given to a small number. 75% of orphans survived in Germany in an institution. Half died outside it. The alternative it was thought was to become a vagabond and a burden. Children were to be employed at fifteen. The orphanage provided funding, the master, training in a profession. The goal was to find employment that suited the aptitude of each child.

In Sweden children who were begging were taken off the street and forced into the orphanage where they did work under horrendous conditions. The orphanage was regarded as an alternative to begging and provided a source of cheap labor.

Orphans in France and Spain had infant mortality above 80%. Some were places where all infants died. Children were put out when they were fourteen where they had to fend for themselves and find work. Often they had to serve as servants or apprentices at earlier ages than other children.

Leaving children at an orphanage indicated desperation. Relatives were made responsible by law for the education and property of orphans. Godparents were to care for the children until they were adults. After the French revolution Godparents were still required to swear this in a civil ceremony. But still there were many unclaimed in the modern era. Before putting the children in an orphanage the family would have the children leave home to work younger, and they were often placed as servants or apprentices with relatives. Families would reclaim children if they could. Children were left with a piece of cloth.

In general those who lived through the orphanage experience were given a start in life. Girls were sent to be servants and given small dowries. Boys were made to work for very little as teenagers for the local merchants and then sent to the army.

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Orphanages in the Medieval and Early Modern Period

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There were always orphans. People married early and had many children. Most people did not see thirty. Women died in childbirth and both sexes of contagious diseases. Fathers died and left a family destitute. Mothers could not care for children as they were having to work as servants, or day laborers.

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What happened to orphaned children during the middle ages?

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I am writing 1-3 paragraphs for a homework assignment tonight and needed to know what happened to orphans during the middle ages anything will help. Notes, links, sites, stuff you already know many thanks:)

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The High Middle Ages was an important period of transition in the care of France's "miserable persons," that is, the poor, sick, widows, orphans, aged, and infirm. By 1400, civic initiatives, parish networks, and lay sponsored hospitals began to take over the care-giving traditionally carried out by monastic houses and episcopal institutions. Foundlings are part of this larger group of the poor and marginal, yet they are more difficult to track within the available sources, and once they were passed on to an institution or a community, their long term care is almost always impossible to follow. This article is an initial foray into the process of finding foundlings in the archives and available texts and of placing these references in a social context that illuminates their plight and the networks of charity that assumed their care in northern France. The growth in numbers of foundlings during the High Middle Ages as well as the strategies that emerged for caring for such children shed light on the larger issue of how particular types of charity were administered and discussed between 1200 and 1500.

The challenge of writing about foundlings is in part documentary. We learn of foundlings almost exclusively through casual references. Indeed, when people and actions - even mundane ones - do not want to be found, remembered, or recorded because of poverty or shame, as in the case of suicides and abandonment, the challenges of writing their histories are particularly profound. Most archival encounters with medieval foundlings are largely unintended or the product of a chance reference. Because of this element of randomness, a word about terminology is important. Foundlings were those infants and very young children who were given up or abandoned with the intention or hope that they would be found and cared for in the absence of their natal parents. This article focuses on abandoned children and foundlings in the strictest sense. Orphans, children with one known and surviving parent, and bastards or illegitimate children whose parents were known even if they themselves had a restricted legal standing are of less concern here. Medieval institutions and texts could be quite clear about these distinctions, as shall become apparent.

When we encounter foundlings in official records it is usually for only the briefest possible moment. For example, the judicial records from St.-Martin-des-Champs in Paris offer a glimpse - on 6 September 1336 - of a mother abandoning her three-year-old child on the porch of the residence of the bishop of Châlons. One evocative detail breathes life into the encounter: the child cried after the mother as she fled. We only learn of this instance because the woman was later apprehended and prosecuted, though not for abandonment, which was not a crime under civil or ecclesiastical law.

Medieval literature affords further images of foundlings. To offer only one example here: Marie de France's lai Le Fresne, or the Ash Tree, is based upon the premise of divided twin girls, one of whom, carefully wrapped in silk from Constantinople and given a gold ring as a token of her noble status, was taken on the night of her birth by a loyal family nurse to a large town nearby. There the nurse stopped before the door of a nunnery and prayed. "God," she said, "by your holy name, if it pleases you, keep this infant from perishing." She then left the child in the branches of an ash tree that stood before the abbey gate. The porter of the nunnery found the girl and brought her to his recently widowed daughter, also a new mother, to nurse. The abbess of the nunnery later took in the noble foundling and raised her in the cloister as her niece.

Much in this fiction resonates with historical reality. Abbesses did consent to bring up children in their nunneries. The nurse's prayer for the girl echoes the notes that occasionally accompanied foundlings left at the Ospedal di San Gallo during Florence in the fifteenth century. One slave woman left her infant wrapped in rags with five and a half denarii and a message: "The love of God, in charity, so that [I] may find [my] child again." Other messages commended children to God and hoped for future reunions. Such textual fragments and prayers suggest the physiological, emotional, and practical difficulty of leaving a child. Finally, it is entirely plausible that widowed women with infants of their own would have worked or served as wet-nurses when the need arose.

Although more laconic, legal texts also offer telling examples. The northern French legal compilation known as the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir (ca. 1282) describes in passing what was understood to be a common scenario of abandonment. Embedded in an anecdote meant to illuminate an issue of procedure lies the story of a young woman called before the bailli to account for her child, "for it was common knowledge that she had been pregnant and she had been heard in labor, and it was not known what had happened to the child." She answered, "her mother had taken the child when it was born." The baby's grandmother was then summoned, and she explained that she "had given the child to a young man who was the father; and that he had contracted with her that he would take the child to a wet nurse in a good and sure place, for which he had already made arrangements." The child is never mentioned again, and while it would be reasonable to assume that someone disposed of the baby, we are not privy to more detail. In this example public rumor brought the case to the attention of the bailli. More often children were left in public spaces only to be found by royal or local officials. In these cases foundlings surface among the records of baillis and prévôts, but this is much more common for the late medieval period. In the years 1497-1498, for example, the prévôt of Chartres recorded "a found girl" left at the Porte Guillaume and another deposited in the local fish market. He brought both girls to the Aumône Notre-Dame, connected to the Hôtel-Dieu, which cared for foundlings in the region of Chartres.

As moving and evocative as these brief encounters can be, it remains to take up the challenge of making sense and giving meaning to these many small and singular examples. What do the institutions and social networks that responded to foundlings reveal about changes and trends affecting social structures and ideology of late medieval society? A new concern with foundlings and abandonment began to appear in medieval Europe in the thirteenth century. This did not involve an explicit discourse: there were no treatises on such infants, and no new laws attempted to curtail illegitimate births. The "state" did not intervene in the lives of women and men as it did in the nineteenth century. But there are clear indicators that the demography of medieval cities was changing in significant ways linked to class and gender roles, which I will trace briefly for Paris, where the most recent work has been done. As a result of these changes, moral theologians began to ask new questions about population pressures, social vices, the theology of charity, and hospital reform. From their comments on a range of topics we can trace an implicit discourse relating to charity and social welfare generally and to abandonment more specifically. Moreover, at this time and in part influenced by this intellectual context, the first hospital order to accept abandoned children, the Order of the Holy Spirit, began to spread throughout Europe. In northern France, however, caring for foundlings remained the work of parishes and local networks. By the mid-fourteenth century these local networks of care grew increasingly systematic and created their own institutional mechanisms to provide for this population in response to a more complex theology of charity and the specific social and civic needs of the period. By contextualizing foundlings within this history of population change, gender and class dynamics, and the development of moral theology, it is possible to offer a useful framework through which to interpret the many anecdotes of lost and found children.

Although infant abandonment has been well studied in the context of early modern Italy, its history in northern Europe during the High Middle Ages is far less well understood. John Boswell's lauded book, The Kindness of Strangers, is one of a very few studies to address the phenomenon of abandonment in the pre-modern context. Boswell's study is impressive for its range from classical antiquity through the fourteenth century, but he is most interested in the monastic custom of child oblation, that is, the donation of children to monastic houses. His comments on the later medieval period are more impressionistic. Ultimately he sees foundling hospitals and the demographic growth of Europe by 1300 as part of a cruel and changed world in which abandoned infants died at higher rates than in the warm and kind embrace of the tenth- and eleventh-century monastic cloister. The history of foundlings gains momentum in the late eighteenth century when the state, especially in France, as Rachel Fuchs and Christine Adams have shown, took a renewed interest in poverty, the family, and public morality. For this period it is possible to compile and analyze reliable demographic and fiscal data. For a medievalist, these studies of foundling homes and gender ideology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provide useful methodologies. While the comparative wealth of source material and statistical data does not exist for the medieval period, some important and illuminating parallels are possible, particularly if we look at migration patterns and employment open to young single women in urban centers.

Demographic pressures and the gendered context for abandonment

As is well known, the population of Europe experienced unprecedented growth during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Urban centers felt this expansion most profoundly, and many cities and towns swelled beyond their original medieval walls. Paris grew from an estimated 160,000 in 1240 to approximately 210,000 by 1328 - a figure it would not attain again until the end of the early modern period. As Sharon Farmer has shown, in Paris, as in many other cities, migration was the principal cause of this growth. Using the tax assessments from 1292 and the canonization records of King Louis IX, specifically the detailed descriptions of miracles performed at the dead king's tomb in St. Denis, Farmer found that of her sample taken from the St. Louis sources, 62.5 percent of the women and 72.7 percent of the men residing in Paris had migrated there from elsewhere. Migrant women in particular came to the city from impressive distances, not just from the suburban hinterland, but from Normandy, Brittany, and Burgundy.

The women who migrated were often poor, traveled with one or two companions, and settled in specific parts of the city, clustering on the right bank in the parish of St.-Merry along the rue St.-Denis and the rue St.-Martin or in the parish of St.-Paul. They often found employment in the textile industry doing needlework, carding or spinning wool, or they worked in domestic service and as laundresses. The unlucky fell ill, lived in abject poverty, or were forced into prostitution to survive. Although some portion of this population no doubt contracted marriages and had families, a significant number of women remained single and alone. These demographic changes generated a social context that allowed for, and perhaps even precipitated, child abandonment. The poor, migrant, female laboring population living in Paris at the end of the thirteenth century has parallels in the nineteenth century, and as Rachel Fuchs and Leslie Page Moch have shown, this was precisely the population that abandoned infants, typically because they did not have the resources to care for them. Moreover, similar patterns of migration, settlement, and poverty can be traced for other medieval cities; one thinks in particular of Montpellier and Marseilles.

The population changes affecting medieval Paris did not go overlooked. Beginning in the late twelfth century the circle of masters and theologians first around Peter the Chanter, then later around his successors at the university of Paris, took up questions relating to pastoral care, penance, and moral theology, many of which focused on issues like marriage, population expansion, alms for the poor, prostitution, and a host of other issues that demonstrate an abiding concern with the social and economic shifts taking place in the early thirteenth century. The Chanter devoted considerable time to discussions of prostitution, which he saw as an ill all too easily accessible to the student populations along the right bank. In 1198 Fulk of Neuilly preached against prostitution and helped found what would become the Cistercian nunnery of St.-Antoine-des-Champs specifically to shelter reformed and repentant prostitutes. In 1225, the university master William of Auvergne continued this campaign and founded the house of Filles-Dieu also for repentant prostitutes. In the following generation Parisian masters began to read medical texts and gloss the works of Aristotle, which in turn informed a new set of questions about the morality, meaning, and nature of population growth, procreation, and contraception. By 1300 preachers' manuals repeatedly addressed the issue of avoiding pregnancy for fear of generating children that parents could not provide for, typically due to the constraints of poverty. In this sense, theological texts and debates began to betray a mentality concerned with population growth, which created conditions for abandonment although they were rarely explicit on this account.

Institutionalizing charity and the contours of hospital reform

The Parisian masters and their disciples also imagined solutions to the needs of the poor. They advocated donations of alms and charity as penitential mechanisms that both relieved the burdens of sin and cared for those in need. Founding and supporting hospitals and charitable institutions was another preferred means to care for the helpless poor. The thirteenth century saw a vast increase in the number of new hospitals and in the reform of existing institutions. Pope Innocent III, who was schooled in Paris within the circle of Peter the Chanter, was instrumental in the move to reform medieval hospitals. Soon after taking up the pontificate he offered enthusiastic support for the hospital Order of the Holy Spirit founded by Gui of Montpellier, who was also credited with composing its rule. Innocent used Gui's foundation as a model for the hospital he created in Rome, Santo Spirito in Saxia, along the banks of the Tiber. Although it is no doubt a later invention, a legend circulated that Innocent was moved to found Santo Spirito because fishermen on the Tiber had pulled up in their nets the tiny lifeless bodies of abandoned babies, vividly illustrating the plight the city faced with respect to poor women and children. The Hospital of Santo Spirito became the head of a new reformed hospital order, and unlike many other medieval hospitals, its rule made specific provision for the acceptance and care of abandoned children. The order spread throughout Europe, though it took root most profoundly in Italy and southern France.

As important as the expansion of the Order of the Holy Spirit is for identifying shifts in the charitable landscape and the need to address the care of unwanted children, it was not until the middle of the fourteenth century that the order took root in a definitive way in northern France. Moreover, in the north a circle of reform-minded bishops initiated an agenda of hospital reform that rendered the care of foundlings more complex. During the thirteenth century many of the existing hospitals in France - the Hôtels-Dieu in Paris, St.-Pol, Amiens, Troyes, and Provins - gained new or rewritten rules regulating the behavior of the hospital sisters and brothers. Such legislation also defined who was to be admitted into the hospitals, for how long, and on what grounds. Several institutions curtailed the care they extended to pregnant women, poor women, children, and women who sought to give birth in the hospital space itself. In 1263, the rule for the Hôtel-Dieu-le-Comte of Troyes, which was extended to the Hôtel-Dieu in Provins, was very precise on this point, stipulating that "foundlings are not to be received in our house, for if we were to receive them, such children would pour in with such abundance that there would not be sufficient goods to care for them, and what is more, the care of such children does not pertain to us, but falls to the parish churches." In contrast with foundlings, here pueri inventi, orphans received hospital care until they reached ten years of age. The distinction and the clarity of this statute indicate that foundlings were a pressing issue for hospitals and ultimately for the urban communities and parishes that had to address the moral complexity and financial strain such children posed.

Northern France: Between parish and hospital

These archival traces and methodological reflections beg the question, which I am only able to answer in the most general way at this point: what happened to these children? Some information exists about where and how they were cared for, but conclusions remain elusive. In 1445, the hospital of St.-Esprit-en-Grève in Paris, under royal order, closed its doors to foundlings and accepted only orphans whose mothers had died in childbirth in the same hospital. All other children "found discarded or left by churches, in parishes or along the streets of the city, [were] to be cared for strictly by the parishes, churches or streets where they were found." The royal order imagined that concentric circles of care encompassing neighborhoods, parishes, and local churches would cope with the problem.

Medieval people - and women in particular - did rely on the sort of social networks, however tenuous and fragile at times, that the royal order envisioned as their first recourse. We see these connections among the impoverished sick women of Paris who - with considerable aid from friends - were able to find cures at the tomb of Saint Louis. It is certainly possible that women helped one another with the problems and challenges of unwanted children or children that they could not readily care for on their own given the constraints of day-labor and low wages, particularly in the absence of the financial help, physical protection, and social capital male relatives and friends could extend. There were limitations to such aid, however. Migration to cities meant that women often left behind or severed the networks of female kin and family who would have helped support and care for a child, which in turn would have allowed women to continue working. Thus when we consider abandonment we must recognize that behind that choice, in most cases, were women who had in various ways exhausted the limits of their immediate social networks.

What then was the next layer in the concentric circles that created the social structures of care? In most cases, the parish followed the neighborhood. In the absence of specifically designated institutions for foundlings, this pattern appears as the most common outlet for care of abandoned children. There is much more to be learned about how the medieval parish functioned. Unfortunately, records of medieval parishes are extremely sparse. Some parishes in northern France appear to have had officials charged with ministering to the needs of abandoned children. Such was the case in Reims, as we learn from a dispute in 1275 when two parishes contested responsibility for an abandoned child. The matter was referred to the carcerarius, an official in charge of such matters who referred in his testimony to the typical procedures for cases involving foundlings. This text opens a window onto the everyday workings of local parish institutions into which we so rarely have insight but which facilitated charity at its most basic and arguably important level.

By the later Middle Ages, wealthy members of the local bourgeoisie began to take on new roles as civic patrons and to care for the poor and sick in their midst, supplementing parish charity. Testamentary evidence is particularly useful for illuminating the intersection of parish care and local individual initiatives. While it is common in testaments from the thirteenth century to find alms bequests intended for the poor, local hospitals, nursing sisters, the infirm, and the leprous, several testaments from the beginning of the fourteenth century set aside income for foundlings as well. A cluster of wills from the first three decades of the fourteenth century offers insight into the charitable practices of a circle of bourgeois merchant drapers and their wives and widows in Paris. Among these wills are those of Jehanne Haudry and her husband Etienne, Jehan de Troyes, and the widow Jehanne du Faut, who lived much of her life as a wealthy benefactor and semi-religious woman. All four testaments offer small sums to support abandoned children at Notre Dame. Probably the testators left their alms to a fund administered through the cathedral to aid foundlings, though the terminology is not precise. It is possible that some children were abandoned at the cathedral, either at its door or inside.

The contours of lay piety visible in these wills are indicative of a shift in charity that took place at the end of the thirteenth century when laymen increasingly created charitable institutions for the specific needs of their communities. In this case we are privy to the vertical networks of care extended by wealthy bourgeoisie to the poor on an individual basis. Such efforts, however, found parallel and complimentary initiatives under the auspices of municipal governments and civic funds. In many cases these charitable impulses overlapped as members of local governing bodies were also prominent burghers whose testaments and personal charity reinforced municipal institutions. By the fourteenth century, when urban fiscal accounts became more numerous and detailed, the care and provision for foundlings took on greater specificity. The Cartulary of the town of Provins indicates that for the years 1274 to 1332 payments were made to women - presumably wet-nurses - who cared for foundlings who, unlike orphans, were maintained at the expense of the civic community. Similar accounts listing payments for the care of foundlings exist for Amiens, Douai, Marseilles, Lyon, and no doubt other urban communities in northern France. Indeed, such a system of paid wet-nurses has been documented for Chartres in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

As these brief examples demonstrate, by the end of the thirteenth century the social context for the abandonment of infants and children had changed in important ways. While the occasional references to foundlings and abandoned children resonate with the modern reader, we need to consider such anecdotes within the complex historical contexts of rapid urban growth, the pressures of forced poverty, and shifts in employment and gendered migration that created new problems, which in turn demanded new solutions grounded in local charity and civic mechanisms of care. While some hospitals closed their doors to foundlings on moral grounds and out of fear of exacerbating a problem, new foundations like the Order of the Holy Spirit emerged precisely to care for such children. The tension between these two efforts illuminates the issues surrounding foundlings and their care. Yet the initiatives of lay piety and municipal governments at the end of the thirteenth century make it incumbent upon us to reassess Boswell's harsh world of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In response to a changing environment, lay and ecclesiastical hierarchies worked in different ways to provide for a population of infants and children who had no one else.

*
Research for this preliminary study was made possible by a CRCW Junior Faculty Development Award from the University of Colorado at Boulder. I would also like to thank Scott Bruce, Gert Melville, and Dan Smail for their comments and suggestions.

1. Most Latin texts, particularly testaments, hagiography, and monastic sources, refer to infants and children with the same word: pueri. Rarely there are references to female children, puella, specifically. Puer inventi appears in the hospital legislation discussed below. Pueri abjectus is used for a child in a miracle of Thomas Becket, where Queen Eleanor is credited with caring for a foundling abandoned in the road: see James Craigie Roberton, ed., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, Canonized by Pope Alexander III, A.D. 1173, Rolls Series (London, 1875-85), 1:213-4 and 2:245, cited in R. C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), 50 n. 157. French texts - testaments, hospital records, and legal documents - refer to enfants trouvés and pauvres enfants (especially wills from the later medieval period) or enfants jettés and laissés. For the latter, see the hospital regulations for Saint-Esprit-en-Grève in Paris, 1445, below, n. 28.

2. The Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir, trans. F. R. P. Akehurst (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), ch. 63, "Concerning defenses," 663-4. Other telling examples that mention the death of children are in ch. 69, "On misadventure," 711. On the related issues of children out of wedlock and infanticide, both of which betray a mentality related to the problems of unwanted children, see "The Customs of Touraine and Anjou," in The Establissements de Saint Louis, trans. F. R. P. Akehurst (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), Book I, no. 14, "On promiscuous gentlewomen," and Book I, no. 39, "On women's misadventure and a repeat thereof."

3. For northern Europe, Billot is an exception. For early modern Italy, see Philip Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410-1536 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); Brian Pullan, Orphans and Foundlings in Early Modern Europe, The Stenton Lecture, 1988 (Reading: University of Reading, 1989); Stephen J. Milner, ed., At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Giuliano Pinto, "Il Personale, le balie e i salariati dell'Ospedale de San Gallo di Firenze negli anni 1395-1406," Ricerche storiche: Rivista semestrale del Centro Piombinese di Studi storici 4:2 (1974): 113-68; Richard C. Trexler, "Infanticide in Florence: New Sources and First Results," History of Childhood Quarterly 1:1 (1973): 98-116; and idem, "The Foundlings of Florence," History of Childhood Quarterly 1:2 (1973): 259-84.

4. There is a very extensive bibliography on abandonment, wet-nursing, foundling homes, and maternal charity for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France in both French and English. See, for example, Jean-Claude Peyronnet, "Les enfants abandonés et leurs nourrices à Limoges au XVIIIe siècle," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 23 (1976): 418-41; Claude Delasselle, "Les enfants abandonés à Paris au XVIIIe siècle," Annales: Economie, Société, Civilisations 30 (1975): 187-218; Antoinette Chamoux, "L'enfance abandonée à Reims à la fin du XVIIIe siècle," Annales de démographie historique (1973): 263-301; Paule Bavoux, "Enfants trouvés et orphelins du XIVe au XVIe siècles à Paris," in Assistance et assistés jusqu'à 1610: actes du 97e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1979), 359-70; and the articles in Sur la population française au XVIIIe et au XIXe siècles. Hommage à Marcel Reinhard (Paris: Société de démographie historique, 1973). In English, see Peter Laslett, et al., Bastardy and Its Comparative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750-1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Rachel Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: The State University of New York Press, 1984); idem, "Legislation, Poverty, and Child-Abandonment in Nineteenth-Century Paris," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (1987): 55-80; Leslie Page Moch and Rachel Fuchs, "Pregnant, Single, and Far from Home: Migrant Women in Nineteenth-Century Paris," American Historical Review 95 (1990): 1007-31; and Christine Adams, "Constructing Mothers and Families: The Society for Maternal Charity of Bordeaux, 1805-1860," French Historical Studies 22 (1999): 65-86.

5. Moch and Fuchs, "Pregnant, Single, and Far from Home;" and Moch and Fuchs, "Getting along." Both articles make clear the importance of female social networks to establish and foster ties with kin and potential employers.

6. See the introductory comments by Gavitt, 8-18.

7. The bourgeois commitment to local charity needs further investigation across time. The decisions and charitable impulses of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century merchants and citizens are comparable to those of organizations such as the League of Mothers of Families and the Society for Maternal Charity. Particularly important are the cross-class connections fostered between women through the mechanism of directed charity. See the discussion in Moch and Fuchs, "Getting along," 46-7; and Adams.

8. Lallemand, 110, 121-4.

9. Billot.

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Lost but not yet Found: Medieval Foundlings and their Care in Northern France, 1200-1500

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The High Middle Ages was an important period of transition in the care of France's "miserable persons," that is, the poor, sick, widows, orphans, aged, and infirm. By 1400, civic initiatives, parish networks, and lay sponsored hospitals began to take over the care-giving traditionally carried out by monastic houses and episcopal institutions.

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Foundlings: children that were abandoned; no idea who or where she came from

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hurches and governments in Renaissance society made efforts to protect and care for needy and helpless people, such as children without parents or guardians. A variety of organizations existed to help such children. However, the treatment children received sometimes depended on whether they were orphans or foundlings. Orphans were children whose parents had died, while foundlings were those abandoned by their parents. Society generally had less respect for foundlings than for orphans and in some cases treated them as less worthy of aid.

Some religious leaders saw foundlings born to unmarried women as being at special risk of sin because they had been "doubly conceived in sin." Although not all foundlings were born outside of marriage, their uncertain origins disgraced them in the public eye. Abandonment by poor families unable or unwilling to keep all of their children became increasingly common over the course of the Renaissance.

In spite of the social distinctions between the foundlings and orphans, they often ended up in the same large institutions. For example, the Hospital of the Pietà in Venice, originally established to house abandoned children, admitted many orphans after outbreaks of plague* in the 1350s and 1440s. During the 1500s it became more common to place foundlings and orphans in separate establishments. Some orphanages belonged to hospitals, while others stood on their own.

One great danger was that mothers might kill unwanted children before baptism-murdering their souls along with their bodies. To prevent such crimes, hospitals and other charitable institutions in some parts of Europe offered an alternative to desperate women. They provided places for people to abandon their children anonymously and in relative safety by simply leaving them on a special shelf or a rotating wheel. Unfortunately, when hospitals were flooded with abandoned children, death rates rose so high that abandonment threatened to become little more than a legal form of child murder. England and other Protestant countries were generally reluctant to let people abandon their children openly. Many hospitals and orphanages accepted foundlings but did not call attention to the fact.

Institutions that cared for large numbers of infants and children employed wet nurses to feed them. A wet nurse was a woman, usually of the peasant class, paid to breast-feed another person's child. After a few weeks in the hospital, most orphans and abandoned children were sent to stay with foster parents, often in the surrounding countryside. Most of them died, but those who survived generally returned to the hospitals between the ages of four and seven. The institutions prepared these older children for places in society as laborers, servants, housewives, or crafts workers. Some orphans and foundlings ended up spending their lives in service to the hospitals that had taken them in. In other cases, an apprenticeship* or an attachment to a foster family could lead to official adoption. Either way, the goal was to turn abandoned children into useful and productive adults, preventing them from becoming beggars or criminals.

* plague

highly contagious and often fatal disease that wiped out much of Europe's population in the mid-1300s and reappeared periodically over the next three centuries; also known as the Black Death

* apprenticeship

system under which a person is bound by legal agreement to work for another for a specified period of time in return for instruction in a trade or craft

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renaissance: an encyclopedia for students

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hurches and governments in Renaissance society made efforts to protect and care for needy and helpless people, such as children without parents or guardians. A variety of organizations existed to help such children. However, the treatment children received sometimes depended on whether they were orphans or foundlings.