The most dangerous period of life for any person, peasant or noble, was infancy and early childhood. In normal years perhaps as many as one-third of all children died before age five from illness, malnutrition, and accidents, and this death rate climbed to more than half in years with plagues, droughts, or famines. However, once people reached adulthood, many lived well into their fifties and sixties.
Childbirth was dangerous for mothers as well as infants. Village women helped one another through childbirth, and women who were more capable acquired midwifery skills. In larger towns and cities, such women gradually developed into professional midwives who were paid for their services and who trained younger women as apprentices. For most women, however, childbirth was handled by female friends and family.
Many infants were abandoned by parents or guardians, who left their children somewhere, sold them, or legally gave authority over them to some other person or institution. Sometimes parents believed that someone of greater means or status might find the child and bring him or her up in better circumstances than they could provide. Christian parents gave their children to monasteries as religious acts, donating them to the service of God in the same way they might donate money. (See “Living in the Past: Child’s Play.”)
Toward the end of his Ecclesiastical History, when he was well into his sixties, Orderic Vitalis (ca. 1075–ca. 1140), a monk of the Norman abbey of Saint Evroul, explained movingly how he became a monk:
And so, O glorious God, you didst inspire my father Odeleric to renounce me utterly and submit me in all things to thy governance. So, weeping, he gave me, a weeping child, into the care of the monk Reginald, and sent me away into exile for love of thee, and never saw me again…. I crossed the English channel and came into Normandy as an exile, unknown to all, knowing no one…. But thou didst suffer me through thy grace to find nothing but kindness among strangers…. The name of Vitalis was given me in place of my English name, which sounded harsh to the Normans.2
Orderic had no doubt that God wanted him to be a monk, but even half a century later he still remembered his grief. Orderic’s father was a Norman priest, and his Anglo-Saxon mother perhaps gave him his “English” name. Qualms of conscience over clerical celibacy may have led Orderic’s father to place his son in a monastery.
Donating a child to a monastery was common among the poor until about the year 1000, but less common in the next three hundred years, which saw relative prosperity for peasants. On the other hand, the incidence of noble parents giving their younger sons and daughters to religious houses increased dramatically. This resulted from and also reinforced the system of primogeniture, in which estates were passed intact to the eldest son instead of being divided among heirs. Monasteries provided noble younger sons and daughters with career opportunities, and their being thus disposed of removed them as contenders for family land.