Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England

Adrian Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317062493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

This book places childbirth in early-modern England within a wider network of social institutions and relationships. Starting with illegitimacy - the violation of the marital norm - it proceeds through marriage to the wider gender-order and so to the 'ceremony of childbirth', the popular ritual through which women collectively controlled this, the pivotal event in their lives. Focussing on the seventeenth century, but ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, this study offers a new viewpoint on such themes as the patriarchal family, the significance of illegitimacy, and the structuring of gender-relations in the period.

1 Legitimate and Bastard Births

DOI: 10.4324/9781315606613-1

Most births in seventeenth-century England – well over 90 per cent of them – took place within marriage; yet there was always a perceptible number of illegitimate births. And since unmarried motherhood had quite distinctive implications, it is appropriate to consider the incidence of bastard-bearing, its origins ¹ and its consequences for the mother. ² (Such implications of course also extended to the bastard child, but this topic is highly elusive and seems to have attracted very little attention.) ³ These themes, it will emerge, are not only significant in their own right but also open onto wider horizons in three ways. First, illegitimacy sheds much light upon marriage itself, bearing out with particular force the principle that deviance illuminates the norm. Second, the management of illegitimacy involved the intricate network of arrangements which linked the parish – the basic unit of the early-modern English polity – to the larger institutions of Church and State. And third, I shall be arguing that bastard-bearing was a risk which all women ran at the outset of their childbearing careers. Thus illegitimacy, despite being numerically exceptional, is a fruitful starting-point for examining the social arrangements surrounding childbirth.

¹ Much has been published on the origins, incidence, estimation and demographic significance of illegitimacy, and what follows is necessarily synoptic. The central work in the field is Richard Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996); amongst many other achievements, Adair has shown that previous estimates of the illegitimacy ratio were too low by about one-third. Nevertheless still useful are Peter Laslett, ‘Long-term trends in bastardy in England’, in Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977), 102–59, and especially Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard M. Smith (eds), Bastardy and its Comparative History (London, Edward Arnold, 1980). ² The treatment and fate of bastard-bearers has attracted much less attention than the origins and incidence of bastard-bearing, as Susan Dwyer Amussen has observed: An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988), 116. The question of their fate was commendably raised by Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560–1640 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996), 283–7, but I have found little on the subject published since then. On their treatment, the main studies I have drawn on are Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century: a Study in Social and Administrative History (London, Routledge, 1926); W.E. Tate, The Parish Chest: a Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969); Walter J. King, ‘Punishment for bastardy in early seventeenth-century England’, Albion 10 (1978), 130–51; G.R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (London, Croom Helm, 1979); Keith Wrightson, ‘Infanticide in European history’, Criminal Justice History 3 (1982), 1–20; Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987); Richard Connors, ‘Poor women, the parish and the politics of poverty’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London, Longman, 1997), 126–47. ³ On the legal status of bastards see John Brydall, Lex spuriorum_ or, the Law Relating to Bastardy (London, 1703) and Alan Macfarlane, ‘Illegitimacy and illegitimates in English history’, in Laslett et al. (eds), Bastardy, 71–85. Studies of the fate of bastard children are chiefly confined to parish children and foundlings: see Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, Kegan Paul, 1925), chapters 1 and 5; Ruth K. McClure, Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981); Susan Staves, ‘Resentment or resignation? Dividing the spoils among daughters and younger sons’, in John Brewer and Susan Staves (eds), Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London, Routledge, 1995), 194–218, at 209–14; Alysa Levene, ‘The mortality penalty of illegitimate children: foundlings and poor children in eighteenth-century England’, in Alysa Levene, Thomas Nutt and Samantha Williams (eds), Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 34–49; Steve Hindle, ‘“Without the cry of any neighbours”: a Cumbrian family and the poor law, authorities, c. 1690–1730’, in Helen Berry and Elizabeth A. Foyster (eds), The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126–57, at 139.

Illegitimacy as a Risk

As a rough average covering the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, perhaps one English birth in 30 or 40 was illegitimate; or, in other words, the illegitimacy ratio was about 2.5 or 3 per cent. ⁴ (It is from parish registers that such estimates can be made, for many registers identified the child’s bastard or legitimate status at baptism, albeit in a great variety of ways.) ⁵ But this figure conceals considerable differences over time and by place – and these sources of variation interacted as well.

⁴ Adair’s figures, which extend only to 1754, yield a median of 2.5 per cent (Courtship, 50); after 1754 the ratio was consistently higher than 3 per cent (Laslett et al. (eds), Bastardy, 14). ⁵ The words used to describe illegitimate children included bastard, base-born, natural, spurious; these and other terms are normally treated as equivalent, though a case can be made for differentiating them (cf. below). For the forms and completeness of recording, see Adair, Courtship, 32–47; Tate, The Parish Chest, 311–22; Laslett, ‘Long-term trends’, passim and 154; Anthea Newman, ‘An evaluation of bastardy recordings in an east Kent parish’, in Laslett et al. (eds), Bastardy, 141–57, at 142; Macfarlane, ‘Illegitimacy and illegitimates’, 79–81. Some examples are given in David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), note 16 (503) to Ch. 5.

1. At the national level, the illegitimacy ratio stood at about 4 per cent in the decade 1600–09; ⁶ it fell quite steeply, reaching a ‘nadir’ of little more than 1 per cent in the 1650s; and it then began a slow climb, passing 3 per cent during the 1750s and subsequently accelerating to reach 5 per cent or more by 1800. ⁷
2. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as Richard Adair has demonstrated, regional differences were equally striking. While some six distinct regions can be distinguished, much of the variation amongst them is captured by a division into two ‘super-regions’: a ‘Highland’ zone, located to the north and west, and a complementary ‘Lowland’ territory in the south and east. ⁸ And until 1650 the illegitimacy ratio was twice as great in the ‘Highlands’ as in the ‘Lowlands’ – though after 1650, when the levels plummeted in both super-regions, the disparity between them narrowed considerably.
3. So too there were pronounced differences at the level of the individual parish: ⁹ thus in the early eighteenth century the ratio was 6.4 per cent at Colyton, Devon (well over double the corresponding regional level) but only 0.8 per cent at Aldenham, Hertfordshire (less than half the corresponding regional level). ¹⁰ And such local variation was even more intense over shorter periods of time, for we find various local illegitimacy crises, each lasting for perhaps two to five years. For instance, an episode of this kind must surely be suspected in Aldenham itself during the 1720s, when the illegitimacy ratio was more than seven times as high as it was in the surrounding decades. ¹¹ The significance of these statistics becomes clearer if we notice that the vast majority of bastard births – typically 80 per cent of them or more – were first births. ¹² For there is abundant evidence that illegitimacy resulted from failures and dislocations in the process of courtship and marriage. Bastard-bearing took place at the beginning of a childbearing career; the usual age of the bastard-bearer was very similar to the age of the newly married mother, on average between 23 and 27. ¹³ At this stage of their lives, young women had spent perhaps ten years as servants, gradually building up their savings towards marriage; and just as most brides had formed their marital attachments in the latter stages of service, ¹⁴ so too most bastard-bearers had become pregnant as servants. ¹⁵ And the resemblance between brides and bastard-bearers is underlined by the fact that many brides were pregnant at the moment of marriage. The sin of ‘fornication’ seems to have been popular, but specifically between a young man and woman who were officially or unofficially betrothed, ¹⁶ for as Katherine Salter put it in 1564, ‘after a couple have talked of matrimony it is lawful for them to have carnal copulation’. ¹⁷ Thus the pregnant bride and the bastard-bearer had probably started out in similar positions – enjoying ‘carnal copulation’ in anticipation of marriage – but while one had the good fortune to get married before the birth of the child, the other did not. It is therefore not surprising to discover that the incidence of bridal pregnancy varied over time and by region in rough harmony with the illegitimacy ratio. ¹⁸ For instance, bridal pregnancy was more common in the ‘Highlands’ than it was in the ‘Lowlands’, and this ‘super-regional’ disparity was much reduced after about 1650. ¹⁹

But there was another way for a young servant woman to become pregnant: namely through the attentions of her master. How widespread was this? There are indications that it may have made a major contribution to bastardy: Paul Griffiths has found that in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London and Norwich it was suspected that masters, or their close relatives, were responsible for the pregnancies of over 40 per cent of the bastard-bearers brought before the magistrates. Further, it seems that some of these masters had told their maids that – as Robert Parker of London said to Alice Ashmore in 1605 – ‘thou art my servant and I may do with thee what I please’. ²⁰ Others cajoled the maid, bribed her or subjected her to repeated harassment. ²¹ And masters’ abuse of their authority by no means stopped there, for some ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Legitimate and Bastard Births
• 2 The Bonds of Marriage
• 3 Gender and Power
• 4 The Ceremony of Childbirth
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index