Dark Ages Tragedy: The Baby in the River

By Kim Rendfeld 

The day must have started out like any other in eighth century Bischofsheim. A peasant woman was about to draw water from the river. What she saw in the water horrified her: a drowned newborn in swaddling.

The woman screamed uncontrollably and attracted a crowd. Rudolf of Fulda, Saint Lioba's hagiographer, says the villager was "burning with womanly rage." When she was able to speak, she said one of those Saxon nuns from Britain had borne and murdered the child and then contaminated the water with the corpse. The nuns led by Lioba protested their innocence and held prayers and processions for God to exonerate them.

A vision like flames appeared around a crippled girl, who publicly confessed. She was a beggar and had received food and clothing from the sisters, but she had been absent for a while, claiming illness. Rudolf said the nuns wept with joy at the revelation, but perhaps it was relief that everyone knew they were indeed guiltless. I would like to think that at least some of the nuns were shocked that someone they had helped not only ended her baby's life but, with the lack of baptism, also condemned the infant's soul.

Le Jeune Mendiants by Léon Perrault

This was not the only time or place parents killed their infants during the Middle Ages, and that practice contributes to the perception that medieval parents were not emotionally attached to their newborns. The reaction of the woman in the village shows otherwise. She was as appalled as we would be.

Rudolf sees this incident as the Devil using the girl to try to destroy Lioba and her abbey and the young mother's confession as a miracle that furthered Lioba's cause. She and the women who braved the Channel crossing and overland travel to today's Tauberbischofsheim, Germany, had a lot at stake. Their abbey was part of Saint Boniface's mission to spread and solidify Christianity on the Continent. If the very people the nuns were trying to help believed the women capable of such evil, the laity might turn away from the religion, and many souls would be lost.

The sisters' greatest obstacle was that they were foreigners. Lioba was born in the Saxon kingdom of Wessex and grew up in the abbey of Wimbourne. She and the other nuns would have stood out, even if they didn't wear habits. Their accents and manner of speaking would be different, and many were literate when the vast majority of the population could not read.

Some of you may recognize the story about the newborn in the river from an earlier post I did about the Saint Lioba (link below). Whether or not the vision happened as Rudolf described, I have a sickening feeling the murder of the baby is true.

The unnamed "poor little crippled girl" was an outcast. A medieval audience would have thought her disability was a curse from God, perhaps a punishment for her parents' sin, like conceiving a child on a Sunday. She was probably a teenager, old enough to marry by medieval standards, but her disability, poverty, and lack of family and connections made her undesirable as a wife.

Medieval folk also would have believed the nuns did all they could for the girl, who sat near the convent's gate and begged for alms. Her food came daily from Lioba's table. The nuns provided garments and other necessities as an act of charity.

Rudolf says only that the girl succumbed to the Devil's suggestions and committed fornication, but I have a feeling there is more. We know nothing about the baby's father. Perhaps, a man paid the girl and used her so that she could have some means to support herself in case the nuns no longer wished to provide for her. Or did someone get her drunk and take advantage? Maybe, a man told her she was pretty or was simply nice to her—a powerful thing to someone told she's undesirable her whole life. Did she hope the man might marry her, especially if she was fertile?

When she realized she was with child, did the girl turn to the man who impregnated her? If he agreed to acknowledge the infant as his and support the child but not marry her, a medieval audience would think he was doing the right thing, and if he had a wife, she was supposed to put up with it. But what if he refused to take any responsibility? How was a girl with no home, relying on charity for food and clothes, going to support a baby?

How I wish this girl would have left the newborn on the church steps and allowed her child to be taken to a monastery for the Church to raise. But she must have been alone when she gave birth, without even a midwife on hand. If she suffered from extreme post-partum depression, she might have thought the baby was better off dead.

Perhaps, she confessed to the murder because she did not want to see the people who had shown her the most compassion to be punished. Yet the girl's end is as sad as her child's. Rudolf wrote: "But the wretched woman did not deserve to escape scot-free and for the rest of her life she remained in the power of the devil."

It's uncertain what Rudolf means. Church legislators would forgive a mother who "kills her child by magical practice by drink or any art," but they required penance such as a pilgrimage when travel was dangerous and unpleasant, fasting, alms-giving, not bathing, and prayer. The penance would last seven years if the death was to conceal adultery; three years if the reason was poverty. I suspect the girl committed suicide, an act beyond God's grace in the medieval mind.

What the girl did to her baby was heinous—no other word can describe it. Still when I think about her, I see a frightened teenager young enough to be my daughter, without friends or family. Had one caring person been with her at that fateful moment, could the tragedy for both mother and child have been avoided?

Saint Lioba: Trusted Friend of a Martyr

Sources

Medieval Sourcebook: Rudolf of Fulda's Life of Leoba

Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne by Pierre Riché, translated by Jo Ann McNamara

Kim Rendfeld is the author of two novels set in early medieval Francia and is working on a third. In The Cross and the Dragon, Alda, a young Frankish noblewoman, must contend with a vengeful jilted suitor and the fear of losing her husband in battle. In The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar, Saxon peasant Leova will go to great lengths to protect her children after she's lost everything else.

The Cross and the Dragon will be rereleased August 3, 2016, in print and ebook formats. You can preorder the ebook at Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, or Barnes and Noble. The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar will be rereleased in November 2016. Preorders are available at Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes. It will soon be available on Amazon.

Vagrants and Vagabonds in Tudor England

by Deborah Swift

Jacques Bellange (c. 1575–1616)
The Beggar Looking Through his Hat 

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark!
The beggars are coming to town:
Some in rags, some in jags*
And one in a velvet gown 

Some gave them white bread,
And some gave them brown,
And some gave them a horse-whip,
And sent them out of town.

Tudor London attracted vagrants and beggars from all over England, who were in search of the rich pickings of the city. The Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536 led to an increase in the number of vagrants, as the monasteries had been the chief source of charity, and had also provided employment for vast numbers of people who worked for them as agricultural labourers. The nursery rhyme above is attributed to this time. Because travel by horsepower was so slow, it was unusual for people to reside outside their birth town, and so all migrant travellers were treated with a degree of suspicion, especially if they were poor. This is why travelling actors had to procure a licence.

Sites of the Monasteries

There was of course, no police force, so crime was an enormous problem, tackled by extreme punishments designed to act as a deterrent. More than 70,000 people were executed during the reign of Henry VIII, many for what we would consider minor offences. Stealing was a hanging offence, and begging outside your home area was punishable by being tied to a cart and flogged, or locked in the stocks to be pelted by passers-by.

Village Stocks in Beetham Lancashire

There were so many beggars that a law was passed in 1547 which stated that anyone who was homeless could be made to be a slave for a period of two years. Should they run away from their master, they would then be branded with a 'V' and committed to slavery for life. This law was, unsurprisingly, extremely unpopular, and was revoked three years later in 1550. The 1563 Act reaffirmed the policy of whipping able-bodied beggars, but to prevent offenders from persistent begging a further Act stated that vagabonds should be burned through the right ear and, if they were arrested again, they could be imprisoned and executed. These policies of ear-boring and hanging remained the law until 1593.

With draconian punishment the order of the day, many turned to crime. A book published in 1552, 'A Manifest Detection of Diceplay' gives the first written evidence of the criminal underworld operating in Tudor London, and says that 'sleight and crafty deceit ... is common in every corner.' There were five prisons in London, to house the burgeoning number of petty criminals: The Clink, The Compter, The Marhalsea, The King's Bench and the White Lyon. The underworld looked to its own, however, and specific areas, such as Alsatia, and Southwark, became known as places where those on the run from the law could find refuge. And of course they were also the places where any rich man needed to guard his purse.

Beggar being whipped through town

The Poor Relief Act of 1576 was supposed to be the solution, but in fact it divided the poor into two categories:

The Deserving Poor This category was for those people who wanted to work but were unable to find suitable employment. The first category included the old, the sick, and widows, who were provided accommodation in almshouses and orphanages with a productive but sedentary activity such as spinning or weaving, by which they earned their Poor Relief, which was provided by each parish through taxation.
The Undeserving Poor Also called 'sturdy beggars', this category was for those who were physically able to work but chose not to. They gained no sympathy and were to be whipped through the town until they learnt the error of their ways. Many poor workers were harried from town to town as they sought work, and many feigned sickness in order to fall into the category where they would qualify for Poor Relief. The alternative for these people was the 'house of correction', where the able-bodied but persistently unemployed or in debt could be punished.

The first house of correction was Bridewell in London, and many other such institutions were called 'bridewells' after it. Bridewell was opened in 1533 in a former royal palace on the banks of the Fleet River and also housed homeless children. Because of this, it also became the first major charitable institution. The picture below shows it in Tudor times - after the Great Fire of London in 1666, it had to be rebuilt.

Bridewell 

However, the main purpose of a house of correction was to punish offenders, so they would correct their behaviour, and not just to be a depriver of liberty. Punishment was usually either hard labour, or whipping which could be observed as entertainment from the public gallery. The most common charges against prisoners were prostitution, petty theft, and something called 'loose, idle and disorderly conduct'. More than two-thirds of the prisoners were female, and many were recent migrants to London. These women, often widows trying to support their families, were also put to hard labour, and a common task for female offenders was beating hemp to make linen. 

The 1597 Act required each town to provide a prison, such as Bridewell, for vagrants and thieves, and paid for by local taxes. In the Tudor mind, there was barely a distinction between a beggar and a thief. Beggars caught offending were punished and then returned to their native parish.This system caused a great burden on parishes where harvests had failed, and whole populations were condemned to one area, unable to seek sustenance elsewhere. Surprisingly, most prisoners in houses of correction were released within a week of their imprisonment, so they could return home and to make room for others who needed this short, sharp shock of a punishment. 

Matters were made worse by a series of bad harvests in the 1590s, and the fact that during the reign of Elizabeth I, the population grew by a third - from three to four million people. By now, London was the biggest city in Europe with a population of somewhere between 130,000 and 150,000. To deal with this, The 1601 Poor Law consolidated all these various acts and laws to form one cohesive whole. It remained largely in place until the 18th-century workhouse movement began at the end of the 17th century. 

Giacomo Ceruti 1720  Little Beggar Girl and Woman Spinning

* Jags - Slashes or slits exposing material of a different colour, and popular during the Tudor period.

Sources:

The Elizabethan Underworld by Gamini Salgado

Everything You Wanted to Know about The Tudors, But Were Afraid to Ask by Terry Breverton
Life in Tudor England by Penry Williams 

BBC The Tudors
Pictures from Wikpedia, or my own unless otherwise linked.

Deborah Swift is an ex-costume designer for the BBC, and the author of four historical novels, and three more for young adults. She lives in the north of England in a 17th century village, with her husband and lucky black cat. Find out more on her website www.deborahswift.com , where she has a historical fiction blog or follow her on Twitter @swiftstory

You might also like Lowlifes of Elizabethan London, also on this blog.