Medieval orphans

 Medieval parents, like modern parents, loved their children (one sometimes hears that they didn't, but this is based on a complete misunderstanding of medieval society, as I have discussed previously).  But who is going to raise the children?

Even today an awful lot of children are not brought up in the stereotypical way, by Mom and Dad (married to each other of course).  Single parents and divorced parents are raising a lot of children.  But these days there aren't many widowed parents raising children.  With the much lower life expectancy of the Middle Ages,  on top of single parents and divorced parents, the chances were much lower of a child being raised by her two biological parents.

In the Italian Renaissance, for which we have at least some good glimpses into demography, children might lose a parent to the Black Death (a feature of the Renaissance) or another disease, have the surviving parent remarry, then lose the second biological parent, and end up being raised by a married couple, to neither of whom the child was related.

Because few medieval adults made it very far out of their 50s, there were an awful lot of orphans among adults, but it was the orphan children who were worried about.  One hears the phrase now, "It takes a village to raise a child," and medieval people certainly would have agreed with that.  Relatives would routinely take in a child who had lost his parents.  If there were no nearby relatives, neighbors would take in the child.

For the powerful, it was considered an appropriate act of charity to take in an orphan.  The child might end up doing menial chores, but that was true of all children unless they were the pampered heirs.  For most of the Middle Ages, Europe was underpopulated, and children were thus valuable.

Medieval Europe did not have orphanages or formal systems of fostering or adopting.  If one took in a child to raise, he was part of the family (though often on a lower rung than the biological children).  Romans had had formal adoption systems among the elite, intended to clarify inheritance, but medieval people did not bother with that.

For that matter, formal adoption processes are quite recent.  Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had "Homes" for orphans and abandoned children, including one large one in Nova Scotia.  If someone in the eastern part of the country wanted a boy or girl to help on the farm or around the house, they would send off to the Home and be sent one, pretty much no questions asked, no wait time or home inspections or anything.  In the Anne of Green Gables stories, Anne is a "home-girl," and she lucked out in ending up with the Cuthberts.  A lot of home-boys and home-girls essentially became servants, fed and clothed and given a place to sleep but certainly not paid.  Medieval orphans might well end up in a similar situation, but they would not first have to take a long train ride to somewhere they'd never been.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval families, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.