Childbirth was seen as the most important function of a Tudor woman, but that did not mean that all married women were always pregnant. As we have seen, the majority of women married in their middle twenties, and would continue to have children until their late thirties. Lower-class women, who of course formed the majority of the population, seem to have had a child about every two years, which would mean having around seven children at the most. Upper-class women married rather younger, at around the age of twenty and often did have a child every year. As we have more records of the lives of the rich rather than the poor women it is their experiences which colour our thoughts about the period.
In its early stages, for both rich and poor, pregnancy was difficult to diagnose. Medical books of the time give various tests: for example, one entitled Aristotle’s Complete Masterpiece1 includes a whole list of symptoms from fullness and milk in the breasts and ‘depraved appetites’ to the veins under the tongue being of a greenish colour. There was simply no quick and reliable test as we have today. There were numerous cases recorded of women being treated for various illnesses, not realizing they were pregnant. Moriceau in his Accomplisht Midwife of 1673 tells of the wife of a counsellor of the (French) court ‘who after having been in a course of Physick of six or seven whole months was at length brought to bed of a child.’2 There are also examples of women thinking they were pregnant when they were not, the most famous being Queen Mary I herself.
Even when you did know that you were pregnant, there was little that could be done in terms of pre-natal care. For most women there would have been no other food available than the food they ate anyway, and not much chance of varying their normal routine when they were pregnant. In any case, dietary advice was based on the humours,3 and would hardly be approved of today. Fish and milk were both considered too phlegmatic, and salads were also among the foods that were not recommended.
Pregnant women had to be careful to avoid ugly sights and pictures as well as any sudden fright, as these could harm the child. Moriceau records the case of a mother whose baby was born face first, and therefore much bruised. On seeing the child she thought this was because early in her pregnancy ‘she fixed her looks very much upon a Blackmoor belonging to the Duke de Guise, who alwaies kept several of them.’4
As there was not much that could be done medically to help prevent mishaps, it is not surprising that great faith was put in amulets and certain stones. The most useful was thought to be the aetites or eagle stone, a hollow stone which has a pebble, sand or other material inside it so that it rattles when shaken. This was not only supposed to prevent miscarriage but was also believed to help relieve the pains of childbirth. It was a very ancient talisman, being mentioned by Pliny, Dioscorides and St Isidore, Bishop of Seville in the seventh century, who wrote about the curative and protective powers of various stones. The eagle stone was thought to attract the unborn child rather in the way that a magnet attracts iron, so that wearing one bound to your arm prevented abortion. It was important to remove the stone and place it on the woman’s lower abdomen once labour started, or else the child would not be born.5
It was evidently a popular talisman; Dr Bargrave, Dean of Christchurch, Canterbury, in the seventeenth century, wrote of an eagle stone bought from an Armenian in Rome that it was so useful that ‘my wife can seldom keep it at home, and therefore she hath sewed the strings to the knit purse in which the stone is for the convenience of tying it to the patient on occasion.’6
Guillemeau, in his Childbirth, or The happy Deliverie of Women, which first appeared in English in 1612 recommended that a woman should wear a gold or steel chain, or else ‘a little gad of steele between the two breasts’ as this would stop her milk from curdling.7
Pregnancy then as now was not always good news. Few women wrote their feelings down but in poor families more than one or two children meant that they could no longer make ends meet. Even those women who were very happy at the thought of a new baby had their fears about the pregnancy and delivery. The upper classes were particularly desperate to produce a male heir, but a surprisingly large number of them did not do so. Patricia Crawford estimates that in the seventeenth century 19 per cent of landed families died childless, either because they never conceived or because all the children they had died.8 A pregnancy in a well-to-do family must therefore have been good news, but here is a quote from a letter written in 1623, from Lucy, Countess of Bedford, to Jane, Lady Cornwallis, showing just how terrifying the thought of pregnancy could be:
itt trobels me more to hear how aprehensive you are of a danger itt hath pleased God to carry you so often safely through, and so I doubt not will againe, though you may do yourselfe and yours much harme by those doubtings and ill companions for all persons and worst for us splenetick creatures. Therefore, dear Cornwallis, lett not this melancholy prevale with you to the begetting or nourishing of those mistrusts (wich) will turne more to your hurt than that you feare, which I hope will passe with safety and end to your comfort.9
This was Lady Cornwallis’s fourth pregnancy, so these fears were not even those of a first-time mother.
There were those to whom pregnancy was a nightmare come true. These were unmarried women to whom pregnancy meant loss of income and no chance to do anything much about it. A woman who had a baby outside of marriage was considered to have shown herself an untrustworthy character, so that finding work afterwards was difficult. Such mothers might well find themselves being supported by their parish, something that the rate-payers hardly regarded with any enthusiasm. There were also very public penances for such unmarried mothers, which had to be carried out on a Sunday, before a full church congregation.
The thought of abortion must have been tempting for such women. Of course, nobody from the time would have admitted either trying to abort their own child, or helping someone else to abort theirs, so the evidence of such things tends to be indirect. Women at the time might well have been more prone to miscarriages than modern women, due to nutritional deficiencies, pelvic deformities resulting from rickets in childhood, or uterine muscles weakened by long labours, so even convenient miscarriages cannot always be assumed to have been brought on deliberately.10
The means to bring on abortion were at hand. Women’s commonplace books do contain a number of herbal recipes to ‘bring on women’s courses’, ‘promote women’s terms’ or any number of other phrases meaning to bring back their periods. This is an ambiguous phrase, as it could mean a recipe for use by a woman who had stopped having her periods for some reason other than pregnancy, and wished to bring them back with a view to having a baby. Some of these recipes, however, come with the hint that they may cause miscarriage in pregnant women and they usually contain rue or savin, herbs known to bring on contractions, or involve massage, which can have the same effect. Here is an example, from Markham’s The English Housewife: ‘Water of rue drunk in a morning four or five days together, at each time an ounce, purifieth the flowers in women; the same water, drunk in the morning fastings, is good against the griping of the bowles, and, drunk at morning and at night, at each time an ounce, it provoketh the terms in women.’11
Most pregnancies led to a birth, and the rituals surrounding it. Today we tend to regard childbirth as a medical event, a time to be near skilled doctors and nurses, whereas in the sixteenth century it was much more of a social event, a time when a woman wanted to be surrounded by her female friends and relations.12 The rituals were centred on giving the woman female support, and on allowing her to drop out of normal society for as long as her circumstances allowed and her state of health demanded.
The first part of the ceremony was ‘taking your chamber’. This meant retiring, about four to six weeks before the birth, to a specially prepared room, hung with the best hangings the family could afford. The room would be fastened up against fresh air, which was thought harmful at such a time. Details of the preparations made at Greenwich for Anne Boleyn’s lying-in survive, and these even included making a ‘ffalse rooffe in the quenes bede cham ffor to seyle and hange yt wth clothe of ares and makyng off a cubborde of state with an a place with iii shelves ffor the queens plate to stonde on.’13 Plate in the sixteenth century was an important status symbol, and a queen would expect to be surrounded by symbols of power as she gave birth to what might be the future heir to the throne.
It wasn’t only queens that went to such great lengths. It was common for great ladies to borrow hangings, carpets and other fine decorations for their lying-in. Honor, Lady Lisle, thinking she was pregnant, even tried to make use of the royal wardrobe, not to mention those of all her wealthy contacts,14 to fit out her chamber. Very wealthy ladies had special pottery for use on such occasions, like the piece in the illustration, which is from an Italian set now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
When labour began, whether the mother was rich or poor, the various friends – who would have been invited beforehand – would all be sent for, along with the midwife. The women not only kept the mother-tobe company, but also helped the midwife, and made the mother’s caudle, a special drink made of spiced wine or ale which was fed to invalids to keep up their strength and spirits.
Much has been written about childbirth at this time, most of it concentrating on some of the horrors that happened when things went wrong. As records are so scarce, nobody can be certain how many women died in childbirth in the sixteenth century, but even in Tudor times most deliveries produced a living child in a matter of hours. This is not to say that the risk to mothers was not much higher than that today. The official UK maternal mortality rate, according to the United Nations,15 was 0.059 per 1,000 at 1988, as opposed to Schofield’s estimate of 14 to 18 per 1,000 before 1750.16 This, though, was no more than an adult woman’s chance of dying from any of the numerous infectious diseases of the sixteenth century, so childbirth was perhaps not as dangerous as most women of the time felt it was. The important point is that the fear of childbirth was very great, as the death rate was high enough for everyone to know someone who had died in childbirth. Considering too that a birth was such a public event, many women must have watched a friend or relative die in childbirth, and a lengthy and painful death it tended to be. No wonder good luck charms to bring a safe and speedy delivery were so common.
Complicated deliveries were indeed not very likely to have a happy outcome. Forceps did not exist at the time, and the only way to attempt to deliver a child that refused to be born was by using metal hooks. This not only killed the child, but tore the mother internally too, leading to infections which could be fatal. Puerperal fever, the cause of Jane Seymour’s death, killed a great number of women.
Once delivered, the umbilical cord was tied and cut, the baby washed and then swaddled. Swaddling involved wrapping the new baby in linen bands from head to foot. To us it seems a strange idea, but at the time it was considered essential if the child were to grow up without physical deformity. Nurses even tried to alter their charges’ natural looks by swaddling, as this passage from Guillemeau shows:
Some swathe all the child’s body hard to make him have a goodly necke, and to make him seeme the fatter, but this crushing makes his brests and the ribs which are fastened to the back-bone to stand out; so that they are bended, and draw the vertebrae to them, which makes the backe bone to bend and gine out eyther inwardly or outwardly or else to one side and that causeth the childe to be either crump-shouldered, or crook-brested, or else to have one of his shoulders stand further out than the other. . . .17
After the birth the mother was confined to bed for three days, with the room kept dark, since labour was believed to weaken the eyesight. At the end of this time came the woman’s ‘upsitting’, after which she remained in her chamber but was no longer confined to bed. (The upsitting was a social occasion, with the mother’s female friends being entertained with a meal in the mother’s chamber.18)
It was about this time that the christening would take place, although babies who seemed likely to die were christened at birth by the midwife. Midwives were, in theory at least, licensed by the local bishop in the sixteenth century. Surviving licences show that the midwife had to promise to baptize the child using the correct words, depending on the official religious line of the time when the licence was issued, and was to inform the parish curate of the baptism.19 Christenings varied enormously according to the social status of the parents. At the top end of society, royal babies were welcomed with all the pomp and ceremony that would attend them for the rest of their lives. When Henry VIII’s much longed-for son Edward was christened on 15 October 1537 at Hampton Court, three days after his birth, nearly 400 people were present at the midnight ceremony, whilst on the day of his birth the conduits in London flowed with ale and wine.20 Even if all babies could not expect a welcome as grand as that enjoyed by Prince Edward, their godparents would still be chosen for them with great care. Godparents were a good way of widening the family’s network of contacts, and they seem to have been expected to take an active interest in their godchildren. The Pastons, for example, left various bequests to their godchildren in their wills, while the Church considered godparents as the child’s blood relations, so that godparents were amongst those whom one was forbidden to marry.
After the ‘upsitting’ there would be a further week or so in which the woman would be confined to her chamber, but not confined to bed. The final stage of the confinement consisted of the woman being out of her chamber, but not out of doors. The end of the whole process was marked by a church ceremony known as ‘churching’.
The ‘churching’ ceremony was very short, probably lasting only about ten minutes. The woman would kneel in some convenient part of the church, perhaps in the specific pew some churches had reserved for such a time, while the priest read Psalm 121 (I have lifted up mine iyes unto the hilles, from whennce cummeth my helpe?), the Lord’s Prayer and then a short prayer of thanks. The woman then made an offering to the church, and returned the ‘crysome’ cloth that the child was wrapped in at its baptism.21
The ceremony might have been simple, but it was still a matter of some controversy in the sixteenth century. The official church view of the matter had always been that it was a thanksgiving service, but the popular view was that this was a purification ceremony after the ‘unclean’ process of childbirth. It was customary for a woman to wear a veil, and Puritan opinion, both male and female, felt that this was rather too close not only to Catholic but also to Jewish ceremony. They were very much against the fact that a woman had to give money to the church as part of the ceremony; it was, in their eyes, yet another chance for the priests to make money out of their congregations. The idea of the need for a purification ceremony at all was another factor. To them, childbirth was merely a natural event. Henry Barrow expressed the matter as follows:
Why are the women held in superstitious opinion that this action is necessary? Why is it a statute and ordinance of their church? An essential part of their worship . . . To conclude, why should such solemn, yea public thanks (to take it at the fairest they can make it) to be given openly in the Church more for the safe deliverance of those women, being (though a singular benefice of God) yet a thing natural, ordinary and common . . .22
There were evidently women who felt the complete opposite and who wanted to be churched in the old way. In 1577 an Essex clergyman refused to church three women who were wearing veils, even though they said that they did so ‘only for warmth’. The ecclesiastical authorities eventually forced him to church the women, veils and all.23
This, then, was the full ritual surrounding childbirth, although of course many women were just not able to drop out of society for a whole month. A study of the Baptismal Register of Preston, Lancashire 1611–1619, unusually records the churching of the parish women. For the 230 baptisms for which churchings are recorded, the gap between the baptism and churching varies from eight to forty-eight days, with most taking place after about thirteen days. The length of a woman’s lying-in therefore seems to have varied.24 Ralph Josselin’s wife, Jane, in the seventeenth century lay in for different periods of time, depending on how well she felt.25
The mother having recovered, life was still very uncertain for the new baby. Infant mortality was very high – about 13 per cent in the period 1550–99 for children under a year, then about 6 per cent for those between one and four years.26 There was no real alternative to mother’s milk, so a baby who could not be given this for some reason had very little chance of survival. The most influential book on midwifery of the sixteenth century was Richard Jonas’s The Byrth of Mankynd, published in 1540 and itself a translation of Eucharius Rosslin’s Der Swangern Frawe of 1513. It recommends that a woman should feed her own child, ‘for because that in the mothers bellye it was wonte to the same and feede with it’, but few wealthy mothers took his advice. They wanted to get pregnant as many times as possible and suckling their own child helped prevent this. It is no doubt because of this that the book goes into some detail on selecting a wet-nurse.
The child was believed to develop some of the mother’s characteristics as it fed from her, so it was very important that the wet-nurse should have the right temperament. Rosslin also describes at some length how she should look, that the mother should ensure that the nurse’s ‘bulke and breste be of good largenesse’ and explains how to test her milk to see that it is suitable. Despite all these instructions the choice of nurse must have been fairly limited, as finding an available woman who had given birth fairly recently cannot have been easy, even in the sixteenth century.
The detail of the early life of Tudor babies is difficult, if not impossible, to work out. For one thing, it was very much a matter which fell into the woman’s realm, therefore little was written on the subject. Hints are given in books such as Guillemeau’s The Nursing of Children which was first published in English in 1612. The baby seems to have lived very much indoors for the first month or so of its life, during which time it would be completely swaddled. After that time its arms would be left free and the nurse would begin to carry it about more, but it was not until it was about eight or nine months old that swaddling would stop completely. There must have been considerable temptation not to change the baby as often as necessary, with all the fiddle of swaddling and unswaddling it every time. Both The Nursing of Children and The Byrth of Mankynd emphasize the need to change and wash the child frequently, although of course care had to be taken to keep it out of draughts as this was done. Guillemeau gives detailed instructions for this procedure. The doors and windows are to be closed, the nurse is to sit by the fire with a pillow on her lap and to place the child on this as she washes it.27 These instructions, were, of course, aimed at children of better-off parents, the sort who were Guillemeau’s patients and who could afford to buy books. It is a matter of debate as to whether poorer children got the same treatment.
Tudor children were breast-fed for much longer than is common today. The Byrth of Mankynd comments that Avicen (a Persian physician who lived 980–1037) recommends breast feeding for two years ‘but be it amonge us most commenlye they suck but one yeare’.28 The child is to be weaned little by little. The Byrth of Mankynd recommends giving it bread and sugar to eat at first, but Guillemeau recommends sops of bread (i.e. bread moistened with water or milk) or gruel, then later a chicken leg with most of the flesh removed, so that ‘he may the better pull and gnaw it’.29 Sugar and chicken were both expensive items so were highly unlikely to have been on the menu for most children, who must have been fed the same pottage that the rest of the family lived on.
Guillemeau gives nurses several hints on how to look after the child properly, reminding them, for example, to remember to tie the baby into its cradle so that it didn’t fall out as it was rocked. These instructions are reminders that it was almost impossible for a mother to supervise the nurse properly, unless she was living under the mother’s roof. It was expensive to have the nurse live in, so most women who chose to have wet-nurses sent their babies out to live in the nurses’ home. Babies may well not have been given the same care and attention there as their own mother would have given them, so babies who lived with their own mothers probably had a better chance of survival.
The ceremony surrounding childbirth, whilst having the advantage of giving the woman time off from her usual routine, was rather unhealthy. General medical opinion today is that it is better to get out of bed soon after childbirth and to eat a normal diet. Tudor ladies did themselves no favours by shutting themselves away in stuffy dark rooms and by eating invalid food. Some midwives did more harm than good by trying hasten the birth by stretching the mother and pushing down on her stomach, not realizing that the early stages of the birth ought to be left to happen naturally. The fact that the Byrth of Mankynde warns against this practice shows that it must have been common.
Rich women had a tendency to take to their beds during pregnancy and to cosset themselves rather than take reasonable exercise. As it was generally believed that lower-class women gave birth more easily than higher-class ones, there was a social cachet in having a difficult pregnancy and birth, which encouraged the richer women to revel in any problems they had, and perhaps to imagine some difficulties which never existed at all. This seems to have increased as time went on, and by the late seventeenth century various commentators tell women to avoid this habit. R. Barret, in his A Companion for midwives, childbearing women and nurses, published in 1699, complains of pregnant women who were ‘always stuffing their Guts with slops, having their Chamber Windows adorn’d like an Apothecaries Shop with Pill-Boxes and Gally Pots’.30
As we have also seen, richer women usually sent their children out to nurse where they may not have been as well cared for. The net result of all this was that poorer women probably had a better survival rate at childbirth than the richer ones, and more of their children probably survived at least the early part of infancy. It is a relief to know that the poor did better than the rich in at least one respect in the sixteenth century.