All Things Medieval

Medieval children who attended school were the lucky ones with stable families and upwardly mobile futures. Even boys who later became apprentices usually went to enough school to learn to read, write and do basic math; sometimes school was a formal requirement of their apprenticeship contracts. The boys who didn’t go to school were the poor of either country or city. If country, they were busy with farm work. If city, they often became servants around the same age that other children went to school. And while only boys went to school or began apprenticeships, both boys and girls became servants.

Child servants were popular with the city households who could not afford better help. All work was labor-intensive, so all but the poorest homes had servants of some kind. Obviously, children are not the best workers, but they are just as obviously the cheapest. They came from the poorest homes, the ones that could not afford any servants at all, and their parents were glad to get them any sort of paying work. There wasn’t much bargaining power for child servants.

One popular strategy was to pay child servants minimally for a few years, with a lump sum at the end. This is recorded most frequently in Italian cities, where girls needed dowries to marry. By promising to provide the girl with a dowry that her family could never afford, the employer could keep her working cheaply for six or seven years. If she ran away or quit before she was old enough to marry, they were off the hook for the dowry. Hard work and harsh treatment made it difficult for many of these poor girls to stick it out.

In England, child servants were usually ten years old. Going into service was not always a bad deal for a child. It depended on what sort of household they went into. Doing well in the right place could mean an invitation to work in a more prestigious place. Boys who had learned to read, and who found work in aristocratic households, could be promoted to positions as clerks or managers. On the dark side, going into service in the wrong place could mean ending up in prostitution or crime. A low-class tavern that needed children to run errands might be a dangerous place to work.

Servants, including children, usually lived at their place of work. They may have had no more than a mat on the floor or a small bunk at the back of the kitchen. In better places, they lived in an upper room with other servants, crowded into communal beds and owning no more than their clothes. They worked long days.

Baptism was called “christening” because it brought the child (or adult) formally into the Christian church, perhaps also bringing the spirit of Christ into the child’s heart. It also gave the child his official Christian name. For an infant born to a Christian family, this just meant being given a name. For medieval pagan Saxons, Danes, Swedes, Huns, or Prussians, it meant being given a “Christian name” in addition to the one already in use. This Christian name usually recalled a saint, including the names in the Bible. For infants in already-converted families, there was a wider choice.

Since christening could take place as late as six weeks after birth, it suggests that the baby had no name at first.  There were probably families who really did not name an infant until it had survived for a few weeks. In other cases, a child may have been called by the chosen name from the start, but it was at this ceremony that the name was recorded in the church records. The baptism/christening record served as proof of birth and identity.

European names in the early Middle Ages tended to be the old pre-Christian names from Germanic roots. They were most often two syllables and had been compound words in the original language, even if nobody thought about the root meanings any more. Elements like joy, friend, noble, wolf, bear, spear, guard, elf, counsel, bright, fame and battle were repeated in various combinations.

In the pre-medieval years, as the Roman Empire collapsed, Germanic people settled all over: Goths in Italy, Visigoths in Spain, Franks in France and Germany, Saxons in Germany and then England, Danes and Swedes in Scandinavia. The same naming traditions, using the same root words, went to all of these places. By the Middle Ages, the streams were beginning to meet and mix again. Most obviously, when the Normans invaded England in 1066, they brought both Danish and Frankish names. These Norman names displaced the native ones, but not entirely.

The Anglo-Saxon names of this type included Edwin, Edgar, Alfred, Harold, Wilmer, and many other names no longer familiar (you can read a list here).  We don’t use many of the Anglo-Saxon women’s names; it’s a rare exception, like Ethel or Edith, that has been revived. Girls’ names seemed to have switched to Norman forms more strongly than boys’ names.

It’s hard to sort out which names are precisely Frankish, Danish, Visigoth-Spanish, and so on. We can see some trends in, for example, the names of the first wave of Normans: William, Robert, Richard, Henry, Geoffrey, Matilda, Emma, Adelaide. Soon after, we add Reginald, Gilbert, Fulk, and Mabel.

Early kings and queens of the Franks: Pepin, Louis, Charles, Carloman, Lothair, Otto; Hildegard, Fastrada, Luitgard, Bertha, Gisela, Adalhaid (Frankish form of Adelaide).

Early kings in Spain: Ferdinand, Sancho, Alfonso, Garcia, Ramiro, Bermudo.

The First Crusade gives us, in addition: Godfrey, Louis, Baldwin, Raymond, Bohemund, Tancred, Hugh, Alice and Melisande.

All of these names are made from two Germanic roots. Some of the names are no longer in use, like Luitgard and Bohemund, but many of them are still doing well. So these can be considered the foundation layer of European names, already in use before they converted to Christianity.

Certain common names were used over and over during these centuries, and further, some aristocratic families tended to conserve certain names, using them over and over, so that it was often easy to know what family someone came from by his Christian name. Counts of Flanders were generally named Baldwin, while Counts of Toulouse were most often called Raymond. Kings of Castile were Ferdinand or Sancho, over and over. Scattered among these famous aristocratic examples, we can be sure that the common people had similar regional, local and familial alternations between generations.

As the Christian culture grew stronger, babies were more often given names out of the Bible. Boys were John, Thomas, Matthew, Stephen, Peter and Paul. Girls were Joan, Joanna, Mary, Elizabeth and Anne. But another strong naming stream developed from saints: Benedict, Martin, Nicholas; Agnes, Catherine, Margaret, Barbara and Clara. The two naming streams came together as some early converts were declared saints, lending religious value to their pagan-root names: Anselm, Bernard, Bruno, Cuthbert, Edmund, Edward, and Hildegard.

The most popular English men’s names around 1400:  Adam, Geoffrey, Gilbert, Henry, Hugh, John, Nicholas, Peter, Ralph, Richard, Robert, Roger, Simon, Thomas, Walter, William. Most popular English women’s names: Agnes, Alice, Avice, Beatrice, Cecily, Emma, Isabella, Joan, Juliana, Margery, Matilda and Rohesia.  I have to admit I didn’t see Rohesia coming, but I’ll trust this person’s research: website on medieval names.

Naming traditions are highly regional and tend to be strongly conservative. In medieval Europe, in general, babies were named to honor someone, whether relative, friend or saint. England developed a tradition of naming babies after their parents, first. If John and Joan had a boy and a girl, their names were certainly John and Joan; variety came only with later children.

Some death records of families seem to suggest that if infant John died, his name might be recycled for the next baby boy. There may have been families in which two children shared the same name, though certainly a nickname must have been used to keep them separate. This may have occurred when an infant was named for one of his godparents, and a sibling happened to have a godparent whose name had also been used, and was the same. In other regions, there were traditions of naming babies after the saints on whose days they had been born.

Christening (baptizing) a baby was the important first stage of medieval life. If the baby looked sickly, it was done immediately, in case the infant died. For a healthy baby, the ceremony waited a week, but was usually done within six weeks, during the period when the mother was resting and not permitted to come to church. Parents were spectators, if the mother was there at all.

In the ceremony, friends presented the baby for baptism; they were known in English as “godparents.” Eventually, custom dictated that a baby boy needed two men and a woman as godparents, while a baby girl had two women and one man. They could not be relatives within any close degree, and families had to choose carefully because the Church considered godparents to be relatives to that infant. When grown, the child could not marry into the godparent’s family. It worked best if couples became godparents for each others’ children, and since being a godparents was an honor, people often went by work-related ties, like guild members standing up for each others’ babies.

Medieval infants were baptized by immersion; they were immersed quickly three times in a ceremonial container of water, the baptismal font. Then the priest drew a cross on the infant’s forehead with holy oil and they wrapped the baby in a white hooded robe that covered head and forehead, in theory preserving the holy oil for as long as possible.

Godparents usually gave the infant a gold coin as a christening gift. Whatever future relationship they had to the child (in some cases close and familial, in others distant and merely honorary), they made the first deposit for the baby’s life savings.

Edit: July 2024

Jewish infants in medieval Europe were circumcised, as they had always been. This ceremony probably took place at home, but at least the naming ceremony portion was held at the synagogue. There was a celebratory feast, which took place at home, but sometimes in a Jewish community center. Like the Christian godparents who presented the baby for baptism, the Jewish baby boy was held by a “pious and learned man, not necessarily a relative,” who was expected to play an ongoing role in the boy’s life.

There’s one distinctive detail about medieval Jews: in some communities including Germany, they believed that Adam’s first wife, Lilith, might come to steal the child before he could be circumcised. Therefore the adults held a “Watch Night” on the eve of the circumcision, probably in the family’s house.

(Details about Jewish infants are from The Jews in the Middle Ages, by Norman Roth (Greenwood Press, 2005), p. 112)

Being born alive was the first significant achievement for a medieval person. This event happened at home and with only women in attendance. Medieval doctors had nothing to do with birth, any more than your dentist will read a chest x-ray. It was only late in the period that university medical textbooks even mentioned the subject.

Newborn babies have soft bones and their limbs often appear curved. Medieval Europeans believed that the bones needed to grow straight, so they swaddled babies with legs and arms pulled straight. Babies spent most of their first six months wrapped into the same posture they’d assume again in death. Cradleboards were often used; babies could be hung on the wall, out of the way. This could be a much safer place for an infant to be, since semi-domesticated animals wandered in and out of homes. An infant left in an open cradle would need to be watched at every moment, and medieval parents who weren’t wealthy enough to employ nurses were generally also too busy to watch the baby so carefully.

Swaddling cloths were not likely to be made of cotton, since woven cotton came into clothing use only in the 12th century, as a luxury fabric in Italy. It was not until the 14th and 15th centuries that cotton was common enough to start to generate rags for the new paper industry, so it’s not likely that it was used for swaddling or sanitary diapering, either. Linen and wool were the everyday fabrics of the period; the well-to-do would have used linen toweling for their babies, while the poor would have used whatever cloth was available, probably worn-out fabric passed down from its original use as adult clothing.

The word “diaper,” in the Middle Ages, meant a repetitive geometric design painted on a wall. When weavers designed fabric to be used for towels, they used twill patterns that left threads floating across the surface to be more absorbent. Goose-eye twill, a popular towel pattern then and now, formed diamonds with central dots, very much like a diaper wall painting design. When wall painting became less common after the Middle Ages, the word “diaper” began to apply only to the goose-eye twill towels, and finally to the super-absorbent cotton twills used for sanitary swaddling of infants.