Life in 1348: Breastfeeding and Nursing Babies — How Medieval Women Nurtured Their Newborns

PART 2:

Rags heated in boiling water, held in place until they cooled, reheated, and applied again. Cabbage leaves, surprisingly effective at drawing heat, pressed flat against the skin beneath the clothing. Continued feeding despite the pain because emptying the breast was the only thing that prevented the infection from deepening into abscess.

If the abscess formed regardless, a hard fluctuant mass beneath the skin, the midwife would lance it with whatever blade she had available, drain it, pack the wound with honey-soaked linen, and instruct the mother to continue feeding from the other side. Women survived this. Many did. But it cost them in ways that left marks that never fully healed.

The second failure was supply. Some mothers simply did not produce enough. The infant fed constantly and gained nothing. >> [snorts] >> Its cry thinning from hunger. Its face taking on the pinched look that every woman in the household recognized and dreaded. The herbs came out. Fennel seeds boiled into a thin tea.

 Fenugreek ground and stirred into broth. Blessed thistle steeped in warm water and drunk three times a day. Oats. Barley water. Whatever the accumulated knowledge of the village suggested. Some of it worked. The mechanisms were not understood, but the observations were real. Certain plants genuinely supported prolactin production.

 And medieval women had identified them through generations of trial and observation long before any physician thought to record the fact. Some of it did not work. And when it didn’t, the household faced a decision that had no good answer. The mother who could not feed looked at her infant and understood with a clarity that required no medical knowledge at all exactly what was at stake.

She had carried this child through nine months and survived the birth. She would not lose it now to something as simple as hunger. She began asking around the village for help. In 1348 England, the wet nurse was not a luxury. She was a lifeline. When a mother’s milk failed entirely through illness, through supply failure, through death in childbirth, the infant survival depended on finding another woman who could feed it.

This search was urgent, unglamorous, and conducted with a speed that left no room for hesitation. A newborn without milk had days, not weeks. [crying] Everyone in the household understood this without it being said. The wet nurse was typically a woman who had recently given birth herself, whose own supply exceeded her own infant’s needs, or whose own child had died and whose body continued producing milk that now had nowhere to go.

She was found through networks that operated entirely by word of mouth. The midwife knew who had recently delivered, who had lost a child, who might be willing. A neighbor’s cousin, a woman three streets over, someone from the next village if the situation was desperate enough. For wealthy families, the arrangement was formal.

 A wet nurse hired into a merchant or noble household was a contracted employee, fed well, housed, paid. Her own infant often brought with her or left with her own family. She was evaluated before hiring, her milk tasted, her character assessed, her diet examined. Medieval physicians believed that a wet nurse’s moral character passed directly into her milk, and from her milk into the infant’s developing soul.

A woman of loose character, it was believed, produced milk that would corrupt the child. A wet nurse who was angry or frightened produced milk that would give the infant colic. The hiring of a wet nurse in a wealthy household was therefore both a medical and a moral transaction. For poor families, the arrangement was nothing like this.

 It was a desperate informal negotiation conducted between women who had almost nothing to offer each other except survival. A peasant woman with a living infant and excess milk might agree to feed a neighbor’s child alongside her own out of kindness, out of community obligation, out of the understanding that the favor might one day need to flow in the other direction.

There was no contract. There was no payment, usually. There was only the recognition that children died without milk and that women in the same village shared a responsibility to each other that the men around them rarely acknowledged or recorded. What happened when no wet nurse could be found was something medieval households faced with a quiet devastating practicality.

 Pap, a mixture of bread, water, and sometimes animal milk chewed soft by the mother or a caregiver, and fed to the infant from a finger or a cloth, was the last resort. It kept some infants alive. It was not enough for many others. The medieval infant mortality rate was not simply the result of disease or difficult births. It was the result of a world in which feeding a child required a functioning body, available knowledge, and a community willing to share what little it had.

 When any one of those three things failed, the outcome was written in the silence of households that had one fewer mouth to feed by spring. The women knew this. They had always known it. They fed their children anyway with everything they had for as long as they could.