When You Think Of The Middle Ages You Think Of Kings Essays

1 When you think of the Middle Ages you think of Kings and castles, knights in shining armor saving the princess, and savage warfare to coincide with horrible diseases and plagues taking lives. For the most part that was true, but we are forgetting about the majority of the population, otherwise known as "the commons". These people can easily be compared to you and I living in these times. The peasants were not a part of the noble class or associated with the clergy, but just lived plain and simple lives and tried to get by with what they had. In those times they did not have a lot. Since all of us would be considered peasants in those times, I am going to take us back to that era and compare the life of a peasant to our lives now. From the day they are born all the way to their death. I will go over the different types of commoners, go over how they grew up, what they ate, and even what they did for fun back in those days. Childbirth in Medieval times were much of the same as they are now. I say this in the biological way only of course. Birth was not in the hands of a physician, but entirely up to a midwife. The only reason there would be a doctor there is if there was a pathological complication. The setting for childbirth was different as well. All of the childbirth's would take place at the home, as compared to 2hospitals in today's times. Hospitals were predominantly used for long-term care for the poor. Another huge difference in childbirth was the risk to the mother. The closest estimate of childbirth deaths was about 14 deaths for every 1,000 childbirth's. This is very high in modern standards. In 1988, Nigeria was reported to have a rate of 8 deaths in every 1,000 births, which was unusually high even for a Third World country.(Singman,McLean p40) The first formal event that an infant had to go through was the ceremony of baptism. This is true for Christians in today's times as well. This was the single most important of the rituals administered by the Church. Without baptism the child could not enter into heaven. In those times Baptism was so important that everyone was encouraged to learn the basic words of the ritual. In Middle English the words were, "I crystene thee in the nome of the Fader, and the Son and the Holy Gost. Amen. The Christening would usually take place a week within the birth of the child. It all depended on how healthy the child was. In today's times, everyone is invited to the Baptismal celebration of their newborn. Back then the godparents were summoned and the rest of the family would proceed to the church without the mother being present. The reason for that was because it was custom for her not to enter the church prior to her own ceremony of"purification", which is supposed to cleanse her from the 3spiritual stain of childbirth. Today we are given two godparents. They were given two godparents of the same sex and one of the opposite. The godparent's role in the child's life was a very important one. They were to play the role as the religious instructors towards the child. (Singman,McLean p41) For the most part Baptism marked the child as part of the church as well as society. Church and society were considered to be equal. After this ceremony the child would receive the most important symbol of its public identity: a name. Just like today people had a wide variety of names to choose from. Most of the names, however, were ones of saints or those that had a French origin. The girls had very few saints names to choose from so they choose anything excluding the names of Mary or Martha. Just like in any society during any period, the shape of an infants life depended on its social background. The mothers had no option of weather to get baby formula so all medieval mothers breast fed for the first two or three years. There was an interesting technique that was practiced in medieval times. It was called "swaddling". This was done because of the tenderness of the limbs, the child may easily and quickly twist and bend and take abnormal shapes. To prevent this the child's limbs would be bound with strips of cloth and other suitable bonds. This also kept the infant 4warm as well as out of trouble. During the first few years of life the child was almost always under female care.(Singman,Mclean