Medieval Childhood
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Medieval Childhood

Archaeological Approaches

D. M. Hadley, K.A. Hemer, K.A. Hemer

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eBook - ePub

Medieval Childhood

Archaeological Approaches

D. M. Hadley, K.A. Hemer, K.A. Hemer

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The nine papers presented here set out to broaden the recent focus of archaeological evidence for medieval children and childhood and to offer new ways of exploring their lives and experiences. The everyday use of space and changes in the layout of buildings are examined, in order to reveal how these impacted upon the daily practices and tasks of household tasks relating to the upbringing of children. Aspects of work and play are explored: how, archaeologically, we can determine whether, and in what context, children played board and dice games? How we may gain insights into the medieval countryside from the perspective of children and thus begin to understand the processes of reproduction of particular aspects of medieval society and the spaces where children's activities occurred; and the possible role of children in the medieval pottery industry. Funerary aspects are considered: the burial of infants in early English Christian cemeteries the treatment and disposal of infants and children in the cremation ritual of early Anglo-Saxon England; and childhood, children and mobility in early medieval western Britain, especially Wales. The volume concludes with an exploration of what archaeologists can draw from other disciplines – historians, art historians, folklorists and literary scholars – and the approaches that they take to the study of childhood and thus the enhancement of our knowledge of medieval society in general.

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1. Introduction: Archaeological approaches to medieval childhood, c. 500–1500
D. M. Hadley and K. A. Hemer
The study of medieval childhood has been a vibrant field of research among historians over the last few decades (for reviews, see Orme 2008; Heywood 2010, 348–53). These studies have explored diverse aspects of childhood, including education (Orme 1973; 2001, 237–72; 2006; Bowers 1996; Clark 2002), work (Hanawalt 1986, 156–68; 1993), play (Orme 2001, 163–98), upbringing and socialization (Hanawalt 1977; 1986, 171–87; 1993; Shahar 1990, 21–32, 77–120; Goldberg 2008), experiences of religion (Orme 2001, 199–236), naming practices (Hanawalt 1993, 45–8), and adolescence and the transition to adulthood (Hanawalt 1993), drawing on the wealth of evidence from such sources as lawcodes, court records, saints’ Lives, literary sources, and didactic texts, such as advice manuals. Archaeologists have also made important contributions to our understanding of medieval childhood, although the focus of their investigations has tended to be more narrowly restricted, with discussion dominated by the evidence from burials (e.g. Crawford 1993; 2007; 2008; 2011; Lucy 1994; Buckberry 2000; Lewis 2002; 2011; Lewis and Gowland 2007) and toys (e.g. Egan 1988; 1996; 1998; 2011; Forsyth and Egan 2005; Crawford 2009; Lewis 2009; McAlister 2013). This is, perhaps, inevitable because it is in these forms of archaeological evidence that children and their activities are most directly encountered – through their physical remains, which reveal aspects of lived experiences relating to health and diet, the manner in which they were treated in death, and the material culture with which they played. The aim of this volume is to broaden the focus of archaeological approaches to medieval childhood, and to highlight the manner in which archaeological evidence is capable of contributing to an understanding of medieval childhood that is just as wide-ranging and nuanced as that to have emerged from the investigation of written sources.
Archaeological interest in childhood emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly among Scandinavian archaeologists (e.g. Gräslund 1973; Weber 1982), who were – perhaps not coincidentally – also among the pioneers of gender archaeology (see, in particular, Bertelsen et al. 1987, based on the proceedings of an important conference held at Stavanger (Norway) in 1979). In the late 1970s, Norwegian archaeologists were raising awareness of children in past human societies, most notably through museum displays created in response to the United Nations ‘International Year of the Child’ in 1979 (Lillehammer 1989, 97). Arguably the most influential early contribution to the emerging field of the archaeology of childhood was by the Norwegian archaeologist Grete Lillehammer, who pointed out in 1989 that for too long ‘the child’s world has been left out of archaeological research’ (Lillehammer 1989, 89). Lillehammer was influenced by ethnographic studies that had revealed the diversity of the nature and duration of childhood, and she argued that the study of children and childhood would not only elucidate the experiences and contributions of the youngest members of communities, but it would also require archaeologists to grapple with such fundamental issues as ‘the concepts of adaptation and acculturation’ (Lillehammer 1989, 93–5). Lillehammer’s review focussed on burial evidence and toys as the most direct means of exploring ‘the child’s world’, and she suggested that archaeologists might fruitfully examine the child’s relationship to both the environment and the adult world (Lillehammer 1989, 102–3). She concluded that ‘[t]he main obstacle to finding the child’s world is neither the child nor the archaeological record, but the discipline’s own understanding and knowledge of the adult world and her environment in past societies’ (Lillehammer 1989, 103). This, indeed, remains an issue for archaeologists to address: if it is felt that children and childhood are difficult to study from archaeological evidence, then archaeologists should reflect on whether they are really uncovering people at all in any of their analyses (similar considerations were addressed in the emergence of gender archaeology: e.g. Tringham 1991).
Since this pioneering work, a plethora of edited collections have explored archaeological approaches to childhood (e.g. Sofaer-Derevenski 2000; Baxter 2006; Crawford and Shepherd 2007; Bacvarov 2008; Dommasnes and Wrigglesworth 2008; Lillehammer 2010; Lally and Moore 2011; Gläser 2012). However, most of these collections were multi-period in focus, typically including only a few medieval contributions. Among the handful of extended studies of the archaeological evidence for medieval childhood, are Mary Lewis’s (2002) study of the impact of urbanisation on childhood health in medieval and early post-medieval England, a study of metal toys from London dating to c. 1200 to 1800 by Hazel Forsyth and Geoff Egan (2005; see also Egan 1996), and Sigrid Mygland’s (2007) study of the diverse array of material culture associated with children that has been excavated from medieval contexts in Bergen (Norway), where the waterlogged environment permitted recovery of wooden artefacts and clothing. Preceding them all was Sally Crawford’s (1999) influential volume on childhood in Anglo-Saxon England, which demonstrated the importance of interpreting the archaeological record within an inter-disciplinary context. There have also been a number of monographs focussing explicitly on the archaeology of childhood in later historical periods, particularly in north America (e.g. Baxter 2005), which have proven influential on approaches to the medieval archaeology of childhood. Aside from monographs and edited collections, there has been a proliferation of scholarly articles exploring the archaeological evidence for medieval children and childhood. In the discussion that follows, the key insights and debates that have emerged from two decades or more of scholarship on the archaeological evidence for childhood in the British Isles between c. 500 and 1500 are highlighted, and the lacunae identified. This serves to place the contributions to this volume in context.
The archaeology of medieval childhood: a review
Funerary archaeology
Children who were once invisible in the archaeological record are slowly coming into view. The primary data for the archaeology of childhood are the children themselves
Lewis 2007, 1
The 1980s saw a growing interest in the manner in which aspects of social identity were constructed through the burial record, and while the focus among medieval archaeologists was typically on gender identity (e.g. Pader 1980; 1982; Arnold 1980; Brush 1988) analysis of the funerary treatment of children was sometimes included in such studies (e.g. Pader 1982). Out of this scholarship emerged studies focussing specifically on the ways in which we might begin to understand childhood from burial evidence (e.g. Crawford 1993; Lucy 1994). Attention fell, in particular, on the inhumation cemeteries of the early Anglo-Saxon period, as this permitted exploration of the relationship between grave goods, on the one hand, and the age and sex of the interred, on the other. Simultaneously, the need to consider childhood in its historically-specific context began to be stressed, with Sam Lucy (1994, 29) arguing that ‘the idea of what a “child” was may have been a far more flexible … concept than we can imagine’. Contrasting approaches were adopted, with some studies focussing on detailed contextual analyses of individual cemeteries (e.g. Pader 1980; 1982; Lucy 1998), while others surveyed the evidence on a regional or national basis (e.g. Stoodley 1999; 2000). The patterns that emerged from these analyses were then used to explore the ways in which childhood was constructed in a funerary context in the early Anglo-Saxon period.
Funerary evidence was the principal data set on which rested the pioneering research among medieval archaeologists interested in childhood, and this echoed the research focus of archaeologists working on other periods (e.g. Scott 1999; Rega 2000). Comparison of the deposition of grave goods with the age profile of skeletal remains, led Anglo-Saxon archaeologists to discuss the age categories that existed in the early Anglo-Saxon period and where the threshold between childhood and adulthood was to be found. This research was influential in exposing the mistaken assumptions that were inherent in earlier scholarship, which often failed to recognise that modern constructions of childhood were different from those of the Anglo-Saxon period. For example, Sally Crawford pointed out that claims that children were sometimes buried with adult grave goods were based on a belief that individuals aged between around twelve and seventeen years were still children, whereas, in fact, in Anglo-Saxon society adulthood was achieved, at least in terms of legal responsibility and capacity to marry, by around twelve years (Crawford 1991; 1999, 47–53; 2000, 170–2).
Research on early Anglo-Saxon burial practices has long debated the reasons for the disproportionately low numbers of burials of infants and young children in cemeteries of this period. A variety of factors that may explain this phenomenon have been discussed, including issues relating to taphonomy, biases in excavation, the nature of post-excavation procedures and selective exclusion of this demographic group from community cemeteries (Buckberry 2000; Crawford 2000, 169–70; see also Squires this volume). It is notable, however, that there is local variation, and while some cemeteries possess infant burials in varying numbers, others are completely devoid of infant burials, suggesting that in such cases infants ‘were not acknowledged within the burial ritual as community members’ (Stoodley 2011, 658). The discovery of infant burials in early Anglo-Saxon settlements has prompted particularly fruitful debate recently (e.g. Hamerow 2006, 14, 24; for continental parallels, see Beilke-Voigt 2008), and the notion that these were merely ‘casual’ deposits or of little significance, as was once thought, has been challenged (Crawford 2008, 202). There has been discussion of the potential symbolic resonances of burying infant remains beneath buildings or in the back-fill once they had been abandoned. It has been suggested that these infant remains were possibly ritual deposits, although it is acknowledged that interpretation is hampered by the nature of the recording of these burials, which are often not regarded as significant by excavators (Crawford 2008, 199–200). Yet, even as the analytical potential of the burials of children was recognised, it was also pointed out that we need to be careful not to assume the priority or agency of infant and child burials in all contexts. In particular, Crawford (2007) has suggested that when children were deposited in the same grave as an adult, the burial of the latter may have been the primary focus. She has gone as far as to argue that the child in such burial contexts was not necessarily regarded as having any agency at all: ‘there is no good reason to suppose that the Anglo-Saxons always privileged all bodies in the burial ritual, nor that one or all of the bodies found within the multiple burial ritual should not have had a role as “objects”, rather than as bodies’ (Crawford 2007, 90).
Those regions and periods in which burial with grave goods was not normative, have, in general, attracted far less attention from funerary archaeologists until recently (Buckberry 2007; Hadley 2010; 2011; see also Hemer this volume). Accordingly, there has been only limited discussion of the funerary treatment of children in early medieval cemeteries from western and northern Britain (where poor bone survival is also a limiting factor; see Hemer this volume) and the cemeteries of the later medieval period. The feature of these cemeteries that has been afforded the most attention is the increased proportions of burials of infants and children, in comparison with cemeteries characterised by the early Anglo-Saxon furnished rite (Figure 1.1). This has been typically assigned to the influence of Christianity, which is presumed to have required all Christians to be afforded burial in consecrated ground, and examples of the burials of the very youngest members of the community adjacent to the walls of later Anglo-Saxon churches have been subject to particular scrutiny as potential evidence for the special place of children in the heart of Christian communities (e.g. Crawford 1999, 87–8; Page 2011; reviewed in Craig-Atkins this volume, where an alternative explanation is proposed). A recent study of later medieval churchyard burials in Britain by Roberta Gilchrist, which focussed on evidence for the use of magic in funerary rituals, noted that the graves of children ‘make up a disproportionate number of those interpreted … as being linked with magic’ (Gilchrist 2008, 148). The later medieval graves of children have been found to include a variety of objects with apotropaic attributes, such as beads, fossils and coins, which are argued as having been placed in the grave ‘as protection against malevolent forces, and perhaps to deflect the evil eye’ (Gilchrist 2008, 149). The clustering of burials of infants in some later medieval cemeteries has also been noted, and interpreted as evidence that ‘age-cohorts were perceived as a distinct social group or category’ (Gilchrist 2012, 206). Baptised infants who died before the age of two years may, Roberta Gilchrist (2012, 207–9) has argued, have been likened to the ‘Holy Innocents’ – the infants massacred by Herod – who were expected to be the first souls saved at the Resurrection. She has also suggested that instances of infants buried in adult graves ‘may have been regarded as spiritually efficacious material, while their spotless souls would have been desirable companions for adults journeying through purgatory’ (Gilchrist 2012, 209). On the whole, however, the funerary treatment of children by medieval Christian communities has scarcely begun to be addressed.
Figure 1.1. Burial of a six-year-old child from the later Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Black Gate, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Tyne and Wear) (reproduced courtesy of John Nolan; we are grateful to Dr Diana Mahoney Swales for assistance with identifying this image from the site archive).
Osteological evidence
By the 1990s there was increased recognition among osteologists that the remains of children were both worthy of study and survived in sufficient numbers to provide viable sample sizes for analysis (something which had previously been doubted; see reviews in Lewis 2007, 2–13; 2011, 3). As a consequence, numerous osteological studies of children emerged, with many drawing on medieval case-studies. Rather than continuing to emphasise the value of the study of children’s remains for understanding such broader issues as demographic profiles of societies, fertility rates or societal adaptation to the environment, which had characterised earlier research (Lewis 2007, 10–13; 2011, 3), this research began to focus on what could be learned about aspects of children’s lives and manner of deat...

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