Medieval Parents Loved Their Children Much as We Do
A popular 1960s theory cast medieval parents as cold and distant, but historians now say they were much like us.
The Works in Progress Newsletter · The myth of medieval childhoodGrowing up, Samuel Hughes, the author of a recent essay on medieval childhood, absorbed a bleak lesson about the past. Medieval people, he was told, regarded youngsters as broken or unfinished grown-ups and withheld the kind of love we give ours, perhaps to blunt the pain of frequent infant death. Only later did he attach a name to the idea: Philippe Ariès, the French historian who made the claim in the 1960s.
After decades of research across Europe, Nicholas Orme, the author of Medieval Children, the leading study of childhood in England, says the theory should be retired. “It cannot be overemphasised that there is nothing to be said for Ariès’s view,” Orme writes. It is mistaken, he adds, “not simply in detail but in substance. It is time to lay it to rest.”
Hughes argues that the distinction matters because the myth made medieval people seem cold and strange. In fact, he notes, a typical household raised just three or four offspring, with affluent couples averaging a little above that and the poorest a little below, not the enormous broods of popular imagination. Ariès never won full acceptance among scholars, Hughes writes, but his idea proved vastly influential with the wider public, and the supposed emotional distance as protection against loss simply was not true.
Orme concludes, “I believe they were ourselves, five hundred or a thousand years ago.” Hughes takes that likeness as a warning. How, he asks, could youngsters have lived through such a harsh and risky era unless their mothers and fathers cared for them deeply, and next time a scholar claims that some group of people is incomprehensibly unlike us, we should ask similar questions.
Questions people ask
Who was Philippe Ariès and what did he actually argue?
Ariès was a French historian and demographer, best known for his 1960 book Centuries of Childhood. Drawing largely on old paintings and diaries, he argued that childhood as a distinct stage of life was invented in early modern Europe, and that earlier parents were emotionally distant.
Who is Nicholas Orme and what evidence did he use?
Orme is a retired professor of history at the University of Exeter and a leading authority on medieval England. His work draws on court rolls, wills, letters, toys, clothing, schoolbooks, and church records, as well as accounts of births, deaths, and daily family life.
How could medieval families stay small without modern contraception?
They married late, often in their mid to late twenties, breastfed for a long time, and lost about one quarter of babies in the first year. Those patterns held completed family size to around three or four children, so the typical child grew up with one sibling, much like today.