The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The first sacrament in the life of a Christian was baptism. Baptism was the rite that incorporated the
newborn child into the Church and Christian society (Christendom), and it was a sacrament of faith.
Without baptism there was no salvation, and the unbaptized child was consigned to limbo, forever
denied heaven and the beatific vision. Every child was born innocent but with a proclivity to sin
which was the inheritance of the Fall, and if unprotected by baptism, a child was prey to the Devil.
And the Devil was believed to be real, not a metaphorical, presence of evil in the world. Within the
rite of exorcism in which the priest cast out the Devil from the child. Exorcized at the church door,
the child was carried into the church to the font and there immersed in baptismal water, anointed
with holy oil, and marked on the forehead and breast with the sign of the cross, becoming a member
of Christendom, endowed with the promise of salvation and with the duties of the faith.
Since baptism was essential for salvation it could in an emergency be administered by anyone.
The midwife - the 'gracewoman' - knew the effectual words of baptism: 'I christen thee in the name
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.'
At baptism, the child was handed by the priest to his godparents as his Christian kindred or godsibb.
They made vows on the child's behalf and bound themselves to bring up the child in the 'ways of
God and godly living', Priests were sometimes asked to act as godfathers, in the hope of true spiritual
guidance for the child, but godparents were often chosen more for the help they could give in the
ways of this world than of Heaven. Choosing godparents was a way of creating affinity and formalizing friendships, for at baptism not only the child but the child's parents became related to
the godparents. A christening was a time for celebration and thanksgiving, a time to invite friends
and neighbours to feast. Another sacrament offered grace to the child: the vows of baptism were
reaffirmed in the sacrament of confirmation. Time was when the child had waited until the age of
spiritual discretion before confirmation, but by the early sixteenth century the child was brought
from baptism to confirmation as soon as the bishop was available, and long before he or she could
rehearse the elements of the faith. Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn,
was baptized and confirmed when three days old. That a tiny child needed to be protected by a
double sacrament shows how much people believed in the power of the sacraments and in the
immanence of evil.
One person was notably absent from the christening in church: the infant's mother. Since before the
child's birth she had been secluded among her women friends, at a lying-in as luxurious as she
could afford. Great excitements, or great disappointments, attended the birth of a child.
In January 1537 it became known to her friends and servants that Lady Lisle was expecting a baby;
a 'man child', a Plantagenet heir, they hoped. Night gowns, bonnets, cramp rings and a cradle were
ordered. In March John Hutton, governor of the Merchant Adventurers in Flanders, wrote asking
her 'to recommend me to your little boy in your belly, the which I pray God to send into your arms,
to your comfort and my lord's'. By July the baby had not arrived, nor by August; the pregnancy was
a false one. Lady Lisle's 'very friends' were sad, and she was distraught. Her servant consoled his
mistress in this private tragedy: 'If it be His pleasure He spareth neither empress, queen, princess
nor duchess . . . good madam, put your whole trust in God, and leave these sorrows.' Women friends,
neighhbours and midwives were with the mother at her delivery. In the agonies and danger of labour,
a mother implored 'Our Lady [to] help her in her most need' and perhaps borrowed a girdle supposedly
worn by Our Lady herself; she called upon pilgrimage saints like St Anne of Buxton and, to ease
her pains, leant upon the staff of St Modwyn of Burton-upon-Trent. Since every childbed might be
a deathbed for both the mother and her child, the mother should be contrite and have confessed, and
water must be ready for the urgent christening of the child. Baptism was believed to be essential
not only for the child's soul, but as a preservative to allow the baby to survive and thrive.
The newborn child was wrapped tight in swaddling clothes and tucked in a cradle, as though to
exchange one womb for another.




The new mother remained secluded, still among women, until a few weeks after the birth, when she
was taken, veiled and gazing downwards, by her women friends for her churching or purification.
Taboos, usually unspoken, were associated with pregnancy. When, just before Christmas 1553,
Anne Williamson dared to enter St Mary Magdalen, Old Fish Street in London 'unchurched',
'contrary to womanhood', and refused to leave, she horrified the 'most devout and worthy' of the
parish. The vicar-general ordered her to undergo purification, to sit in the churching pew and to
do public penance. The Church might insist that the ceremony was for thanksgiving not for
purification, but many people believed otherwise.
Thanksgiving for a safe delivery was certainly due, for at every childbirth the sense of morality was
acute. Making his will, a Somerset husband bequeathed five marks to 'the child in my wife's womb,
if God fortune it to have christendom and live'. A woman's risk of death in every pregnancy was
perhaps one in a hundred, and she might expect to be pregnant six or seven times in her life.
Her child's prospect of dying in the hours and days and weeks after birth was even greater.
There was a name for baptized infants who died within a month of birth; they were called 'chrishoms'
after the cloth which was tied around the anointed cross on their foreheads. The first year of life was
the most dangerous. Between one in six and one in five of all children died before reaching their

first birthday. In the unhealthiest times and places infant morality was higher still. In the crowded
slums of St Botolph Aldgate in London in the late sixteenth century of every hundred babies born
only about seventy would live to see their first birthday. Endemic infectious diseases - bronchial in
the winter, enteric in the summer - carried off the most vulnerable. Perhaps a quarter of all children
born between 1550 and 1649 failed to reach the age of ten. Death was not reserved for the old.
Newborn children at any time are most vulnerable, most constantly in need of care if they are to
survive. Mothers were advised to breastfeed their own children, in order to inculcate virtue along
with their milk, but richer mothers chose to send their children to wet-nurses - often for years,
because a child was not weaned until the age of two. Women were taught to keep their children
from all danger, not to lay them in their own beds 'while they be of tender age', nor leave them
near water or fire. Records of coroners' inquests testify to childhood catastrophes - toddlers falling
into fires or wells, falling out of windows - sometimes through parental neglect, but more often
not. The experience of infancy and childhood was conditioned by the circumstances of the parents.
Children brought up in homes deserted daily by fathers who had to go out to work, and looked
after distractedly by mothers who worked at home, spinning or knitting, or in the fields, had a
different upbringing from those children cared for in households where the whole family, and their servants, lived and worked. Children grew up in families, but not in extended families for it was
rare for relatives to live together; they were brought up with their parents, brothers and sisters,
but not with grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins living in the same house.