Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (eBook)

Introduction

The study of the history of childhood has, in recent decades, moved forward in leaps and bounds, so that we now have detailed and intensive study of the Roman family, and the family in medieval Europe.1 One area that has been overlooked, however, is childhood in Anglo-Saxon England. Never has the term ‘Dark Ages’ been more relevant than to the study of the early medieval child. Philippe Ariès, the founder of the study of the history of childhood, reflected in 1960 that ‘in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist’.2 Recent work by childhood historians has revised this assertion and has updated many of the suggestions about attitudes towards children in pre-modern history, but while our understanding of the child in past times in general has developed with the discipline, the Anglo-Saxon child remains caught up in outdated prejudices and ignorant speculations.

In the nineteenth century, the Victorian scholar John Thrupp painted a grim picture of Anglo-Saxon childhood: ‘At first, the child could be exposed as soon as born: when reared, he could be sold into slavery: he was liable to be punished for his father’s crimes, and to be sold in payment of his debt. At the time of the Norman conquest all these barbarous liabilities had ceased: and although the child was still regarded as occupying a position of extreme subjection or dependence, he had ceased to be a chattel or a slave.’3 A century later, Anita Schorsch demonstrated that no change in the perception of childhood had touched the medieval period: ‘Medieval communities dealt with their children as they dealt with their animals … Both shared the floor, the worms, the dirt, and every manner of disease that being a dog or a child in this period invited and implied. In perhaps one way alone children were uniquely different from the animals with whom they wallowed: children were treated as if they were expendable.’4

In 1983, Neil Postman felt able to describe the Dark Ages as a time when ‘childhood disappears’.5 Recent work has done much to rectify the image of children and childcare from the eleventh century onwards, but the early Anglo-Saxon period still appears to be difficult territory for childhood historians.6 Overviews of the history of childhood persistently rush from the late Roman period to the eleventh century with only an embarrassed glance at pre-Conquest England. John Boswell, in his magisterial survey of the abandonment of children in western Europe from late antiquity to the Renaissance, offered twenty-nine pages on ‘western Europe in the Early Middle Ages’ of which only three or four paragraphs are about Anglo-Saxon England, while Charles Somerville, in The Rise and Fall of Childhood devoted only a handful of pages to European childhood from AD 500 to 1000, explaining that: ‘the period between the fall of Rome and the year 1000 is the most obscure in all of western history. We can say little about the lives of children, aside from obvious inferences from the authoritarian family pattern common at that time.’7

In practice, the evidence for the Anglo-Saxon period, while not abundant, is sufficiently informative for me to feel able to devote a whole book to the subject of Anglo-Saxon childhood. The aim of this book is to redress the balance in childhood studies, and to present, as far as is possible given the existing evidence, a picture of childhood and family in the Anglo-Saxon period. This period covers the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England in the fifth century to the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century. The evidence for the child from the Anglo-Saxon period is presented through a variety of forms of discourse, both archaeological and documentary, but these varying forms do not complement each other and cannot present a holistic view of the child – rather, we can snatch at presentations and representations of a set of social personae, or aspects of different childhoods, associated with children through the period. The evidence for the earlier period until the arrival of Christianity is drawn largely from archaeological sources, in the form of excavated cemeteries and settlements, but later documentary sources also offer insights into pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon society. From the seventh century onwards Anglo-Saxon society is more clearly recorded in documentary sources such as lawcodes, wills, charters, poetry and the accounts of the lives of the saints, but the archaeological evidence, particularly from the cemeteries, also has a part to play in building a picture of later Anglo-Saxon childhood.

The beginning of the Anglo-Saxon period in England is usually placed somewhere in the fifth century, when the Romano-British culture, with its villas, towns and roads, faded into archaeological obscurity, and a new group, migrating from the coasts of what are now Holland, Germany and Scandinavia, began to make its presence felt in eastern England. The culture of these Germanic settlers, with their distinctive artefacts, cemeteries and settlements, spread rapidly westwards, and soon dominated lowland Britain. The settlers brought a new language, and a way of life that was rural, familial and pagan. The archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest Anglo-Saxons lived in relatively small, dispersed hamlets or farmsteads, with no great constraints on land use. Fences are rarely visible on these sites, and when their timber-built halls began to deteriorate, they were simply abandoned, and new ones were built elsewhere. Little is known about the religion of these people, but their burial ritual included grave goods, and the rich variety of artefacts recovered from their graves by archaeologists may give some insight into the social structures of these communities.

The kin group was at the heart of early Anglo-Saxon society, and was responsible for the safety, protection and good conduct of its members. To be without family or kin was a desperate plight, as Old English poems such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer testify.

At the end of the pagan period, there were significant political, cultural and economic upheavals in Anglo-Saxon England. Christianity was introduced to Anglo-Saxon society by the late sixth century, and with it, Mediterranean or Roman ideas on age thresholds and appropriate treatment of juveniles almost certainly had an impact on the old Germanic social structures. With Christianity came formal schooling. Education, a great factor in extending the period of perceived childhood, was apparently introduced widely and may not have been confined only to the small upper-class section of society. A general move from rural to urban life is identifiable towards the end of this period, putting different strains and influences on family structure and attitudes towards offspring. Old family groups and kinship ties may have been weakened, as the fragmented political units of early Anglo-Saxon society, probably originally based around kinship groups, were gradually merged, and Anglo-Saxons gained wider, supra-familial, regional and even national identities. Where once the family was looked to for fulfilment of responsibilities and obligations, now responsibility devolved from the kin to the Church and ‘state’, to whom loyalty was now owed and from whom care was expected. These factors had a reconstructable effect on attitudes towards children. Later written sources, immediately post-dating Christianity, nonetheless have something to say about the earlier society the Church tried to reconstruct, both in terms of allowable marriage bonds and in terms of new extensions to the family in the form of god-parents.

The study of earlier Anglo-Saxon children and their families is valuable not only in its own right as a fascinating area of research, but also for its wider implications. A great deal of myth and misunderstanding surrounds research into family life in past societies, in particular the question of social attitudes towards children. Any endeavour to clarify our understanding of even one society from the past may help all such studies of childhood. More specifically, the scrutiny of Anglo-Saxon childhood should complement recent interest in the reconstruction of society at this time. It is difficult to investigate thoroughly any facet of adult life in the Anglo-Saxon world when the researcher does not know the parameters within which she or he is working: an analysis of adult burial ritual, for instance, is going to be severely hampered if the age at which the ritual distinguishes adults from juveniles is unknown.

In the documentary sources, we can see that Christianity, with its ideals of human society drawn from a Mediterranean model, was sometimes at odds with the traditional Germanic society. Much of the literature from the Christian period deals with ‘correct’ socialisation, but to what extent did the strictures of the Church – about the rearing of children, the proper formation of family relationships, the education of children and the socialisation of children – have an impact on actual Anglo-Saxon practice? One of the aims of this book will be to try to reconstruct, as far as possible, the ‘shape’ of the Anglo-Saxon family and the place of the child within the family, including any experience of fosterage or of extended families.

An overall synthesis of the archaeological evidence and the comparative evidence of anthropological and literary sources may provide...