Children in Care

The Development of the Service for the Deprived Child

Jean S. Heywood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415863506
• eBook ISBN: 9781136249792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is Volume V of twelve in the Sociology of Youth and Adolescence Series. Originally published in 1959, this study looks at the development of service for the deprived child. It was written primarily to help students to explore the changing social patterns and ideas which lie behind the history of attention and care given to the deprived child.But it tells also a story of human struggle, endurance and inspiration which seems to me to belong not only to the professional social worker but to the people and the community at large.

CHAPTER ONE

THE CHILD IN THE EARLY COMMUNITY

THERE is little positive evidence for the care of the deprived child in English history before the Reformation. Most of it has to be pieced together from casual references, the absence of information about the deprived child at this time being just as significant as would have been copious references to him. The manorial group of medieval society was self-sufficient and room could be found for the homeless child within the community, in the cottage of the childless villein or to replace those sons of villeins who had gained permission from the lord to leave the manor to become clerks or monks. Such children were mostly orphans who could not be cared for by relatives, or were illegitimate. The illegitimate child was completely without rights, the property of the mother's master, if she were a servant¹, and the Church, in upholding the sanctity of marriage, condemned his very existence, forbidding him to inherit or to be ordained. Yet while he was nobody's child, he was also the child of the people,² and some community obligation was implied towards him. Then, as now, the natural families absorbed him and the motherly and childless, whose poverty was not too great, were glad to care for him. Sometimes a distant relative would take him in, particularly if his mother was an erring daughter of the Church, who, like Langland's nun, had borne a child in cherry time, to the scandal of the parish.³

In practice the distinction between the legitimate and the illegitimate appears to have been a largely artificial one, however, and bastards were acknowledged by fathers and provided for in wills equally with the legitimately born,¹ while special dispensations to enable illegitimate sons to be ordained or hold ecclesiastical office were frequent.² Among the wealthy it was not difficult to find a wet nurse and afterwards to send the child, along with lawful children, to a monastery or nunnery for boarding education, or to the house of some other member of the nobility. Trevisan, an Italian who in 1496 accompanied an ambassador from Venice to the English court, describes this as the usual practice for all children among the well-to-do after they reached the age of seven or nine. He ascribes it to ‘the want of affection in the English & because they like to enjoy all their comforts themselves, and think they are better served by the children of strangers than they would be by their own children.’³ This form of deprivation existed in the middle ages as a commonplace among the prosperous families. Many children of the nobility spent the greater part of their childhood away from home, in ecclesiastical houses or homes of the wealthy, while their parents, for example, were holding office abroad; and when child and parent were incompatible such arrangements seemed sometimes a convenient and easy solution to an exasperated and weary mother. For this we have the testimony of Margaret Paston writing to her son in 1469:—‘Also I would ye should purvey for your sister to be with my lady Oxford or with my lady of Bedford, or in some other worshipful place whereas ye think best, for we are either of us weary of each other.’

The procuring of wet nurses and the fostering of young motherless children must also have been a common practice among those with means. In the fourteenth century Legends of Holy Women, translated by the English Augustinian, Osborn Bokenham, there is a story told which puts into words the people's feelings about the hazards of child life of long ago. It tells of a prince and princess who set sail on a visit to Rome. During a storm at sea the princess gave birth to a son and died. The prince persuaded the crew to take his wife's body ashore to an island where it was left, together with the living child, whom he committed in prayer to the care of Saint Mary Magdalene,

‘For he nowt hath wyth fostryd to be.’

Two years after, returning on his way home, the prince visited the island and found his son alive and well, miraculously preserved and fostered by the Saint.

The Church in the middle ages had an important part to play in providing help for the deprived child. From the time of Constantine it had been officially concerned on behalf of the state to secure care for the poor and fatherless along with other people needing help. Special houses or hospitals were used for the care of the sick, the old, the beggar and the new born child, and the monasteries and convents from the time of St. Benedict had attempted to carry on this work of the early Church. At the end of the middle ages, however, there is little evidence that the religious houses at this period gave habitual care to the deprived child as such. Their care of children seems to have been confined to giving expensive boarding education for the children of the wealthy as a means of providing revenue. Eileen Power in her study of medieval English nunneries has examined the records of nunnery accounts which show that the schoolgirls boarded in the convents were invariably of aristocratic families. We have Chaucer's evidence, too, that this is the usual background of convent educated girls. In the Reeve's Tale, the Miller's wife, daughter of the parson of the town, is described as ‘y-comen of noble kin’ and ‘was y-fostered in a nunnery’. The only indication of any care being given by nuns in their convents to poor country girls is found in a letter from Cranmer to the Abbess of Godstow. ‘Stephen Whyte hath told me that you lately gathered round you a number of wild peasant maids and did make them a most goodly discourse on the health of their souls, and you showeth them how goodly a thing it be for them to go often times to confession. I am mightily glad of your discourse.’¹ The contact appears slight. On the other hand monastic houses frequently maintained schools for poor children and may have lodged the boys within the monastery, including fatherless children.

The deprived child as we know him, while very young, seems more likely to have been found in the medieval hospital, though his stay was probably brief. These hospitals were staffed by a master or warden with two or three priests and religious, or sometimes lay, brothers or sisters, and were the community's expression of man's duty towards his neighbour.¹ A statute of 1414 describes their purposes as being ‘to sustain old men and women, lazars, men and women out of their senses and memories, poor women with child, and other poor persons.’ There is mercifully no specific mention of children being cared for as permanent inmates in these places of compassion, but some who were born in the lying-in hospitals and became deprived by the death of a mother in childbirth, and abandoned children, for whom a home could not be found, were cared for in them.² If the babies were to survive it must have been imperative to find a wet nurse for them, either within the hospital, or, more likely, in a family outside. The clergy and nuns of the hospital may have taken on responsibility for placing the children in foster homes within the parish, as in the early days of Christianity they had been enjoined to do. But widespread poverty must have made this difficult while the child was dependent, and many must have died.

Because of the poverty of the middle ages the child had to become economically useful to the feudal group as early as possible and his period of childhood and protection was short. He worked from an early age. The parish, however, had from earliest times regarded itself as a community with funds to help the poor and the distressed. Such funds, gathered in tithe, as well as being used for the leper and the lame and others in need, may also have been used for the orphaned and the deprived child, frequently to apprentice a boy or dower a girl. If he could not be absorbed within the community the contemporary evidence at the end of the middle ages points to the conclusion that the deprived child found his livelihood as a beggar. Indeed there is some evidence that begging was an accepted pattern of his life only rarely relieved by monastic shelter. There is the story of the twelfth century St Bernard of Tiron in Picardy, for example, who tried to put into practice in his monastery the spirit of divine charity preached by St; Benedict. ‘For he sent no man away who ever came to him, neither blind nor lame, nor halt nor crooked nor maimed, but all alike were fostered in the wide bosom of his mercy. He shrank not from receiving men with their womenkind bearing sucklings on their backs; none was driven away however mean or contemptible or poor. Wherefore pupils or orphans hearing this—such as beg their livelihood from door to door or tend other men's flocks in the fields, hearing this they would comfort each other, saying, “let us also go to that haven where all are received.”’¹

Boccaccio, in telling the story of the exiled Count of Antwerp, describes how he stood with his two motherless children begging for alms outside a London church door, and how ‘a certain great lady, the wife of one of the King's marshals of Oxford’, being struck by the little girl offered a home for her. ‘Having thus disposed of his daughter’ the Count then went into Wales where another of the King's marshals took his little boy.²

The care of the deprived child was haphazard and quite unorganised but the agricultural nature of medieval society, its hierarchy and its lack of unemployment, particularly after the scarcity of labour produced by the Black Death, did not make it difficult to absorb someone of working capacity and in good health, while the moral values on which contemporary life was based also made it less likely that the child was homeless for very long. The Church taught with powerful sanctions the duty of the seven corporal works of mercy¹ and in the giving of alms and the feeding, clothing and sheltering of the homeless the humblest citizen could secure for himself treasure, not of earth, but, more important as he believed, in heaven.

Yet it would be unrealistic and untrue to suppose that such children were not exploited, and that the charity disbursed to them was not sometimes given more for the good of the giver's soul than the welfare of the recipient. Boccaccio's story hints at the tensions in those families which fostered a beggar's child and at the distinction made in standards of living and conduct between natural and foster children. Such children were used too, as they have been in recent times, to assist the travelling tinker or professional beggar,² for which purpose child-stealing was not unknown. We have the record of one Alice de Salisbury who in 1373 stole Margaret Roper, the little daughter of a London grocer, carrying her away and stripping her of her clothes so that she might not be recognised by her family. Alice intended the child should go begging with her, but the theft was fortunately discovered, Margaret was claimed, and Alice did penance one hour a day in the stocks.³

Wardship of the orphan child with means was a profitable business in medieval society. They were ‘bought and sold as beasts,’ and we have business accounts of merchants, guardians of orphans, which show how they were able to invest at interest the money left for the child, and, while providing for him, make handsome profit of which they would claim half.⁴ This practice, widely found, was an obvious field of profit and exploitation. In most of the large towns the Chamberlain was made the special guardian of orphans mainly in order to safeguard their property; in London, for example, there was a regular court of orphans.¹ Clearly there had been considerable abuse of a vulnerable group on whose behalf the state had to intervene.

The state intervened, too, to regulate the parishioners' charity to the poor; an early statute of 1388² gave responsibility to every neighbourhood for the support of its own poor. In the fifteenth century local administration of voluntary poor relief through the community of the parish became firmly established.

The pattern changes as the economic pattern of the middle ages changes with the Reformation and the Tudors. The destruction ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• 1. THE CHILD IN THE EARLY COMMUNITY
• 2. INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND THE CHILD
• 3. THE CHILD AND THE INEFFECTIVE FAMILY
• 4. THE PHILANTHROPIC CARE OF CHILDREN
• 5. THE POOR LAW CARE OF CHILDREN
• 6. THE GROWTH OF STATE OBLIGATION TOWARDS THE CHILD
• 7. THE EMANCIPATION OF THE CHILD
• 8. THE STATE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FAMILY
• 9. THE UNDERLYING CONCEPTS OF THE PRESENT LEGISLATION
• 10. METHODS OF CARE TO-DAY
• 11. THE GROWTH OF PREVENTIVE AND ENABLING ASPECTS OF THE SERVICE
• APPENDIX
• LEGISLATION REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS
• INDEX