The Child and Childhood in Anglo Saxon England

Oct 15, 2011
Sharon Brookshaw

Anglo Saxon Woman and Child - Allan Barton

Was there a concept of childhood in Anglo Saxon England? Did Early Medieval parents see their children as being different from adults?

Childhood – the concept of children occupying a special place in society, and not being treated merely as miniature adults – has only recently been studied as a social history of its own, distinct from but related to the conventional history of adult life. The history of childhood, however, is one that is plagued with problems, mainly because children rarely leave written records themselves, and so there is a dependence on indirect references and reflections from adult sources. This is compounded by the existence of a patriarchal society in the Early Medieval (Anglo Saxon) period, where the responsibility of recording the present was invested in adult males.

Therefore, children (traditionally the province of women) became marginal to the records, with female children virtually disappearing into obscurity - the only exception to this rule was perhaps the idealised childhoods of saints and heroes. Despite these difficulties, however, it is possible to draw some general conclusions regarding children during the Anglo Saxon period in England.

Ariès and the History of Childhood

The first real attempt at documenting the history of children came with the influential publication Centuries of Childhood in 1960, in which the theory that attitudes towards children are progressive, and evolve over time with economic change and social advancement, were set out.

In the Anglo Saxon period a high infant mortality rate is assumed, given that this is a pre-industrial society without access to modern medicine. This, according to Ariès, would force parents into having larger families in the hope that more children will survive, and to take little interest in each individual child because the fragility of its existence would not be worth the investment of time, love and care. Furthermore, the theory claimed that people in this period did not distinguish between child and adult, that there were no threshold ages or “rites of passage”, no concept of a transition from childhood to adulthood and that infants too young to contribute to adult life “did not count” (Ariès 1960: 125).

This theory still has its supporters, such as Lawrence Stone, who argues that a concept of childhood does not begin until the emergence of a formal education system, and Lloyd De Mause who labelled this time the abandonment phase of parent-child relationships.

Language Evidence for Anglo Saxon Childhood

There is a substantial case for a notion of children being distinguished from adults, however. Firstly there is linguistic evidence, as the words cildhad (childhood), waepcild (“weapon child” or boy), wifcild (“weaving child” or girl) and geogo? (youth) all appear in the Anglo Saxon language, and would simply not exist unless the authors of the texts they appear in had some concept of a transition from child to adult.

Perhaps even more importantly, contemporary vocabulary contained words for describing behaviour relevant to children, such as cildisc (childish), cilgsung (childishness), and umborwesende (being a child), as well as for items belonging to the world of children, like cildcradol (child’s cot) and cildfostre (child’s nurse) for example. Secondly, there is the suggestion from historical sources that there was an age of maturity (at around age 10 to 12 years) marking the boundary between children and the attainment of full adulthood.

Documentary Evidence for Anglo Saxon Childhood

A distinction between child and adult is also hinted at in other ways in some of the documentary sources that survive from this period. An example of this can be seen in texts referring to child monks and nuns (oblates), who were seemingly common all over Europe from the sixth century onwards (although the initial texts on this trend should perhaps not be taken at face value given their early date). While such a social feature would seem to support the view that children were nothing more than miniature adults, further evidence points to them being seen and treated differently from the other monks and nuns – the fact they were given an (adult) master for supervision, and that Asser (the biographer of King Alfred the Great) was aware that they were “children who by reason of their tender age could not yet choose good or refuse evil” (Kuefler 1991: 825).

Other documents surviving from this time show that some Anglo Saxon writers noted that children differ from adults in their behaviour. Bede, for example, wrote in his biography of St Cuthbert: “he loved games and pranks, and as was natural at his age loved to play with other children” (Kuefler 1991: 827). Even allowing for exaggeration on behalf of the author, the behaviour of the child is clearly distinguishable from that of adults.

In addition to this, there is evidence from the Anglo Saxon lawcodes that there was both an age of criminal responsibility, and that the basic rights of children were protected – they were guaranteed support from their father’s family if he died when they were young; support from their father if their parents separated, and support from the crown if abandoned. This legislation may have served the purpose of ensuring the next generation of labour survived to become adults, rather than reflecting any social conscience or common attitudes towards children, though, but does at least show that in legal terms children were being distinguished from adults. Further to this, it is an interesting point that some Anglo Saxon art – such as the Harley Psalter - depicts women holding children’s hands and apparently treating them in an affectionate way.

Conclusion

From this outline of sources, it can be seen that children in Anglo Saxon England were probably seen as being distinguishable from adults in at least some ways, and that there did seem to be some concept of childhood at this time. However, it should perhaps be kept in mind that the documentary sources referred to here were written by those privileged enough to be educated, and not by the ordinary people. Although they appear to indicate a concept of childhood among the elite of the Anglo Saxon world, this is not necessarily proof that this ideology had filtered down to the rest of society.