THE LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE

CHARITY AND WELFARE:
HOSPITALS AND THE POOR IN MEDIEVAL CATALONIA

JAMES WILLIAM BRODMAN

[100] The medieval effort to feed and shelter the poor and even to care for the sick showed little regard for age or gender. In all but the smallest of shelters, men and women generally slept in separate chambers, but few differences are to be noted in the routine of their care. ⁽¹⁾ Among the few hospices specifically set aside for women and children were those operated by the Order of the Holy Spirit, but not many of these in the Iberian realms. Likewise the sort of shelters reserved for widows, reformed prostitutes, and other women that could be found in the Italian communes or in Paris were mostly an urban phenomenon and, in the Crown of Aragon, would be echoed only in places like Barcelona and Valencia. Indeed, among the medieval needy, whatever privilege or precedence that was accorded to gender most often benefited males. This can be seen mostly easily in the allocation of space. Almost everywhere, more beds were reserved for men, even though the material needs of males were not necessarily greater. For example, statistics from Barcelona's general hospital between 1473 and 1491, the earliest that we have, show that women accounted for only 27.5 percent of the admissions, but 58 percent of all deaths.⁽²⁾ There were two areas, however, in which women were singled out for special consideration: marriage and childbirth.

Marriage and Dowries

For poor women, the chief barrier to respectability, which was acquired through an honorable marriage, was the almost absolute necessity of providing a dowry to the prospective husband.⁽³⁾ In towns like Barcelona and Girona, the dowry was paid in money and goods and tended to be quite high. During the fourteenth century, for example, the almost five hundred [101] dowries recorded in Girona average 995s. In Barcelona, women of the lowest estate, for example, the offspring of slaves, were expected to provide four hundred sous, while the daughters of artisans and sailors were dowered with amounts between three hundred to seven hundred sous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, rising to eight hundred and twelve hundred sous in later Middle Ages. Even in a poor, rural town like Urgell, dowries in working class families averaged between two hundred and three hundred sous, while affluent families paid out as much as two thousand sous. Such expectations precipitated a crisis not only for the very poor, who of course had nothing to give their daughters, but also for families of modest means. The pay of honest, but unskilled workers was barely adequate to feed a family, and often left little if anything available to daughters of marriageable age. Even those workers with some skill often had great difficulty managing the dower payment. Consequently, and perhaps precisely because the need extended upward from the ranks of the miserable poor into those of working classes, the provision of assistance to young girls seeking marriage became a favorite charity in Catalonia and elsewhere. ⁽⁴⁾

Subventions or subsidies for dowries, as the alms list of Barcelona's parish of Santa Maria del Mar reveals, were extended both to honest young girls of marriageable age and to prostitutes in the hope of their reformation. Confraternities, at Vic and elsewhere, would subsidize at any one time dowries for as many as twelve daughters of members. Everywhere this was an important parochial charity; normally money for this assistance came from pious bequests contained in the wills of parishioners. Often, the amounts are but a few sous, but sometimes they were more substantial.⁽⁵⁾ In general, it seems that the dimensions of this charity grew with time. Carme Batlle and Montserrat Casas's study of wills of the thirteenth century from Barcelona and Urgell, for example, show that such bequests were few in number but large in amount, often ranging into the hundreds of sous, and frequently intended for the daughter of some poor relation. Téresa-María Vinyoles's study, on the other hand, shows a remarkably different result for the period 1375-1415, an era that had already experienced depopulation on account of famine, war, and plague and that was especially concerned with the promotion of marriage and families. Here a half of all wills contained alms for dowries. These were true charitable benefactions because only a fifth of the testators specified who was to receive the gift. Likewise, Batlle's own study of fifteenth-century wills in the parish of Sants Just i Pastor confirms that the charity to undowered girls had become the most common benefaction among Barcelona's parishioners.⁽⁶⁾

The Catalan experience is replicated in Italy, where Steven Epstein's [102] survey of Genoese wills between 1150 and 1314 also depicts this to be a charity of the affluent, with only seven testators bequeathing enough money to dower over one hundred women. At Siena, like Barcelona, there was little popular interest in this charity until after the bubonic plague, when the bequests for dowries proliferated and soon became the largest category of pious bequests.⁽⁷⁾

Barcelona, unlike Lleida or Valencia, created no institutions specifically to distribute these legacies and other alms to needy women. Traditionally, the responsibility for their disbursement belonged to the clergy or to individual manumissors. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as parochial charity became organized into plats and bacís, female parishioners could receive assistance in amassing a dowry from these institutions. For example, in 1428, the alms fund of the parish of Santa Maria del Pi gave the grocer Lluis Batlle thirty-nine sous, in six installments, and Arnau forty-one sous, nine diners, in eleven installments, toward the dowries of their daughters. In 1423, this parish contributed approximately 2 percent of its total alms toward the payment of dowries.⁽⁸⁾ While most parishioners, who left only a few sous in their wills for dowries, were content to let the parish or its alms fund decide up the recipient, other benefactors continued to entrust the responsibly to their executors, who seemed to have exercised a great deal of discretion in allotting those funds. Legal records, however, indicate that relatives of the deceased felt that they had some special claim upon such legacies. For example, circa 1350, a man from Vilafranca petitioned the bishop of Barcelona's vicar to be given the dowry money left by a deceased relative and he was given one hundred sous. But the system was also open to abuse, as is attested by the vicar's decision to allocate three hundred sous from this alms fund to two notaries, Bernat Moyhoni and Guillem Vilella, who were regularly employed by the diocese and thus not among the pauperes Christi. ⁽⁹⁾

Another possible source of assistance for young Barcelonan women was the royal almoner. A sample, drawn from the years 1378, and 1381-85, during the reign of Pere III, shows 106 grants to women, including 16 from Barcelona, 8 from Valencia and 4 from Saragossa. Like the parishes, the king preferred to subsidize the deserving poor, rather than dower the truly desperate. Thus, while there were a handful of large gifts, usually to poor relations of otherwise important families, the average subsidy was a mere fifty-five sous. For the most part, these were not for women of the lowest class, for example, ex-slaves, foundlings, or orphans, because in 75 percent of the cases a parent's name appears in the record. Several are children of [103] workers in the royal household. Only about a fifth appear to have been real paupers -- prostitutes or foundlings. Joan I was even less generous to the true poor than Pere III. His registers contain some thirty-two endowments that ranged in size from 275 sous. to 3,000 sous. Most were given to the children of royal functionaries and domestics; of the total, only five recipients were genuinely needy.⁽¹⁰⁾ The policies of Barcelona's municipal government mirror those of the royal almoner, poor shelters, and parish alms funds. Thus, the emphasis was on aiding the deserving poor by subsidizing dowries for girls of good family.

Municipal Assistance to Women

While councilors of Barcelona gave out no alms for dowries, except to the daughters of its own dependents, officials at Lleida were more generous and decided in 1303 to sponsor a municipal institution to dower orphaned girls, and this was given an initial endowment of twenty-five hundred sous by King Jaume II.⁽¹¹⁾ In Valencia, the major responsibility for dowering the poor was assumed by a confraternity composed of the heads of several of the city's leading mercantile families. Called the almoina de los órfenes a maridar , this was established in 1293 by ten merchants with an initial endowment of five hundred pounds. Bernat dez Clapers, the founder of the eponymous hospital, was its majordomo in 1309; other known members were prosperous merchants and professional men. The almoina invested its resources in various properties that yielded, by 1398, a yearly income of some four hundred pounds. From this, each of the ten members of the confraternity was permitted to disburse to young women gifts in the amount of sixty-six sous, with most of the rest used to purchase cloth, out of which trousseaux for brides-to-be could be fabricated. Given the size of the alms funds, it would seem that the confraters were able to help several dozen young women each year. But given the modest size of the confraternity's contributions, the preponderance of aid must have gone to the daughters of the working poor. ⁽¹²⁾

Bordellos

In many respects, the special concern for women's welfare was a negative one, born out of a fear that in certain circumstances innocent girls would [104] turn to prostitution and, as Francesc Eiximenis worried in his Regiment de la cosa pública, keep men from matrimony. Prostitutes (meretrius, dones públiques, or putanes ) are castigated in Catalan documents as viles mulieres, vilissimes mulieres, vils fembres, or inhonestes mulieres, and in Valencia as fembras públicas or fembres pecadrius . In France they were called everything from filles de joie to foles femmes and putains. These terms, however, disguise the reality that there in fact existed many different kinds and degrees of prostitution. There was the practice of older professionals, who lived permanently in brothels or else in fixed areas of town. But many prostitutes were simply younger, unmarried girls -- spinsters, cloth workers, serving maids -- who supplemented their income by soliciting in taverns, at fairs, or on major feasts. In Valencia, these more discreet girls were called fembres escuseres and fembres errades. ⁽¹³⁾ Catalan social policy accepted most of these activities as a fact of life. Prince Joan, for example, wrote to his father King Pere III that "the Church permits bordellos as a way of diminishing sin and preventing more serious evils." Thus, even though prostitutes as individuals were held in low esteem, public policy tolerated certain forms of prostitution and treated harshly only those women who sought to evade civic regulation. ⁽¹⁴⁾ According to municipal ordinances in Barcelona and Valencia, for example, in public prostitutes always had to appear marked as dishonorable women and were forbidden to conceal their identity by wearing any type of cape, wrap, or overcoat, even in winter. Within these parameters, however, women were permitted to live in bordellos, some of which even existed under municipal ownership. But proscribed was prostitution of a more casual nature, the kind that might lure local girls into the profession or deter them from marriage, and its practitioners were subject to severe penalties. ⁽¹⁵⁾

In the realms of Aragon, jurisdiction over prostitutes in the thirteenth century fell to the royal vicar, and afterward to municipal consells . The frequency of complaints in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from groups like the mendicant friars about prostitutes and brothels suggest that their activities were at first generally not regulated or else that restrictions were widely ignored.⁽¹⁶⁾ In Barcelona, the first effort to segregate prostitutes dates from 1328, after a woman who lived near the leper hospice complained to the king that men and women of low estate loitered in the area.⁽¹⁷⁾ In 1330, King Alfons III suggested to the municipal council that dishonest women have their own houses, and in 1332 the council established a curfew for prostitutes. In 1363, King Pere at the Cortes of Monzón decreed that the practice of prostitution anywhere in his realms should be [105] limited to officially recognized bordellos. The first such municipal bordellum in Barcelona, located near the monastery of Santa Eulàlia, surfaced in 1361. Subsequently, a district for prostitution was established at the fringe of the old city, along the Ramblas. This grew into a network of licensed bordellos, each operated by a hostaler, or innkeeper, who was supposed to supply the women with food, drink, rooms, a bed, and bed linen at a reasonable price. Municipal officials, often men of high station, oversaw these establishments and collected rents for the city. ⁽¹⁸⁾ In Valencia, a district located outside the walls near the morería , or Muslim district, began to take shape early in the fourteenth century, perhaps at the instigation of King Jaume II, who in 1325 ordered that all prostitutes live in a designated location. In 1350, the municipal council decreed that all prostitutes should reside and ply their trade within this Bordell (or Burdel or Pobla de les fembres pecadrius) , register themselves with the maestre racional, and observe a certain curfew. Subsequently, for the next four centuries, a distinctively organized community developed here within a walled compound, ruled by a regent appointed by the justicia criminal and a group of hosteleros , that is, men and women who operated the roominghouses in which the prostitutes resided.⁽¹⁹⁾

Reformed Prostitutes

Very often towns in the Mediterranean region operated some sort of shelter for women who wished, or who were compelled, to forsake their careers as prostitutes. In France, for example, such women were placed within a type of religious community as nuns. Such institutions served two functions. They rehabilitated women by substituting a regulated religious life for the former life of vice, but they also served as houses of charity, shelters, and places of retirement for women too old or sick to continue in the profession. ⁽²⁰⁾ Barcelona and Valencia, and perhaps other towns within the Crown of Aragon, maintained such shelters as well, with little pretense, however, that they were houses of religion. In Barcelona, the municipal council established such a shelter for penitent women in 1365.⁽²¹⁾ Twenty years earlier, in Valencia, the initiative came from Na Soriana, a Franciscan tertiary who is described as a dona de penitència . In 1345, she established a shelter for reformed prostitutes called the Casa de las Arrepentidas. It was given an initial grant of five hundred sous by the city council, and in 1362 the bishop ordered that all parishes take up a collection toward its support. The casa served two purposes. During Holy Week, and later on certain Marian feasts [106] as well, it sheltered prostitutes who were rounded up, invited to meditate on their sinful lives, and fed at municipal expense. At other times of the year, the casa accommodated women who sought, for reasons of age or personal betterment, to give up prostitution. Those who ran the shelter, however, had little trust in these women's resolve because discipline in the house was extremely stringent. Upon entering, women would have to submit to total seclusion for at least a year; afterward they could leave the house with permission, but under the threat of expulsion and a public whipping should they ever return to their former habits. For those women who persevered, found a husband, and reentered society in an honorable estate, the municipal council agreed to provide a dowry.⁽²²⁾

And at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Consell de Cent of Barcelona, perhaps following the example of Valencia, also sought to prohibit the practice of prostitution during Holy Week.⁽²³⁾ From Wednesday of that week until mass on Easter Sunday, all the prostitutes of the city were to be confined in shelters on the street of les Egipciaques, where under the eyes of honest widows they were to be fed and invited to convert their lives through attendance at mass, sermons, and confession. To prevent escape, the women would be confined in rooms with bedding, firewood, and a serving girl who would fetch meals. At other times of the years, the shelters of les Egipciaques became a detention center for women and girls who plied their trade outside of the strict boundaries set by municipal regulation.⁽²⁴⁾

Children

Perhaps the neediest segment of any society is its children, who depend upon adults for sustenance, shelter, and education. A study of medieval Girona and its environs, which is suggestive of all of Catalonia, concludes that the average family of the fourteenth century contained two children. The average is higher for patrician families (3), and for rural households (3.5). Urban artisans, on the other hand, seemed to have had fewer children, averaging between 1.3 and 1.8 per family. Perhaps as many as a fifth of all couples had no children at all.⁽²⁵⁾

In order to understand the treatment of children in the Middle Ages, contemporary social scientists have discussed the attitudes of medieval people toward children and childhood, and particularly the amount of affection that parents exhibited toward their children and whether childhood was regarded as being a distinct stage of life. Out of this discourse has developed [107] the "indifference and neglect" thesis, which argues that medieval society lacked affection for its children, and consequently parents did not bond with their offspring. Other writers, however, have rejected this view and argued that the primary differences between modern and medieval treatment of children has more to do with the much greater levels of poverty and mortality due to disease in the Middle Ages than to any difference in levels of affection. While this discussion, for the most part, has dealt with children who belonged to functional families and has not centered on the neediest children, it nonetheless bears upon the issue of why medieval people, individually and collectively, contributed to charities that assisted children. If the "indifference and neglect" thesis is correct, then such aid can be explained only in religious and ritualistic terms. If societal emotions, on the other hand, were more complex and closer to modern values, then a whole panoply of religious and social factors would have to be taken into account. ⁽²⁶⁾

Among medieval authors, it was customary to divide childhood into several stages: infantia, which lasted from birth to the age of seven; pueritia, which for boys encompassed the ages of seven to fourteen, and for girls seven to twelve; and adolescentia, which lasted until the onset of adulthood, which usually coincided with marriage and economic independence. The Furs de València, for example, established twenty as the age of majority.⁽²⁷⁾ Normally the rearing of children, particularly during the first two stages, was the exclusive responsibility of parents or other relations, and so medieval communities did not become concerned with their welfare unless or until they became orphaned. Then efforts were undertaken first to insure their survival, and afterward to provide them with the means to grow into functioning adult members of society.

Child Abandonment

Infantia, when children were at their most vulnerable, received the most attention from medieval authorities, primarily because of the problems of infanticide and child abandonment. There is not much direct evidence for the former, but it surely existed.⁽²⁸⁾ Legend has it, for example, that the sight of the bodies of children floating down the Tiber River motivated Pope Innocent III in 1202 to call Guy of Montpellier to Rome and to entrust the Hospital of Santa Maria in Sassia, which was located on the banks of the Tiber, to his Order of the Holy Spirit. ⁽²⁹⁾ In 1294, a Florentine communal [108] commission argued that the asylum of San Gallo played a vital role because, by providing shelter to foundlings, it helped the region "to avoid the many crimes committed against infants." Furthermore, several anecdotal studies of sex ratios among medieval children show an abnormal bias in favor of male children, suggesting the possibility that within some communities female children were murdered. In Spain, municipal legislation, aimed particularly at unwed mothers, suggests that deliberate neglect was a method employed for getting rid of unwanted children. ⁽³⁰⁾ Furthermore, a synodal statute from Barcelona, dated 1354, reserved to the bishop's penitentiary the duty to absolve parents who found their children dead, next to them in bed, suggesting that smothering was yet another means. ⁽³¹⁾ Much better documented, however, and undoubtedly more prevalent is the phenomenon of abandonment.

Child abandonment is generally a product of illegitimacy and/or economic hardship, although Brian Pullan believes that medieval society itself was more conditioned than ours to accept the legitimacy of the abandonment of children into foundling homes because its social elite farmed its own children out to wet nurses.⁽³²⁾ Other historians cite factors of population growth and the loosening of sexual mores in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as contributing factors, but it seems that a worsening of economic conditions in the thirteenth precipitated the problem of abandonment.⁽³³⁾ The immediate reasons that led a parent to expose a child are varied. Poverty, ill ealth, deformity, or the death of a mother or both parents are well-known reasons. Some individuals abandoned children out of a sense of shame -- to hide, for example, a sexual encounter that occurred during some forbidden period like Lent, or during menstruation, or else out of the fear that the progeny of illicit sex would have deformities. Among the more prosperous, in regions like Spain and Italy, where customs of partible inheritance prevailed, too many heirs could seriously dilute a family's wealth. Philip Gavitt, in his study of Florence's Hospital of the Innocenti during the fifteenth century, argues that a majority of the children who can be identified were connected in some fashion to prominent Florentine families, frequently the illegitimate offspring of a family member and a slave. ⁽³⁴⁾

Notes left alongside children abandoned at Barcelona's Hospital of Santa Creu in the first half of the fifteenth century, or earlier at Valencia's Hospital of En Clapers, add texture to these general observations. Genís Gil, abandoned in 1428 at eighteen months after she had been weaned, is the legitimate child of a married couple "who are poor like Job." ⁽³⁵⁾ Ramon de Pla brought his eight-month-old son, Andreu Marc, because his wife, Na Johana, was sick and in a hospital. Baptized by hospitallers as Joan de [109] París, another infant was the son of a Barcelona slave, owned by the silversmith En Trullàs, and a French barber. Perhaps to prevent his son's enslavement, friends of the father stole Joan away from his mother and took him to the orphanage. Shortly thereafter, however, the administrators returned the child to his mother, but at the insistence of her master, who evidently saw Joan as more of a liability than an asset, he was brought back a second time to Santa Creu, where he survived until the age of two. Eulàlia, a girl of nine months, was abandoned by a mother who was sick with fever and whose husband was absent on a journey. A Valencian wet nurse ran off with a male servant, leaving a daughter at En Clapers. Aldonça de Sant Boi, the six-month-old daughter of a dead Aragonese beggar, was brought to the hospital, sent out to a wet nurse, who died in the epidemic of 1441, and then contracted to a squire as a serving girl until the age of eighteen. In 1384-85, Na Maria, widow of Martí d'Argent, left her daughter at En Clapers in Valencia; another widow, from the town of Cardona, abandoned her two-year old daughter named Joneta.

As today, women who had lost their husbands were particularly vulnerable to poverty and so were put into the position of being forced to give up one or more of their children. This problem was exacerbated by a change in Catalan law at the Corts of Perpignan in 1351 that penalized women who remarried. In that eventuality, a widow would lose the lifetime usufruct of the first husband's property and retain only the initial sum of her dowry. Consequently, in Catalan towns like Girona, few widowed women, even those with children, felt able to remarry. With diminished resources, further eroded by inflation, such women might easily fall into poverty, and if she had a child, be forced by desperation to abandon it. Added misery was induced by the periodic famines that struck Catalonia in the years after 1333.⁽³⁶⁾

Society seems to have accepted the legitimacy of abandonment, at least to some degree. Instances of legal prohibition are rare, and hospitals even encouraged the practice by affording those who left children the protection of anonymity.⁽³⁷⁾ Still it is interesting that the care of foundlings, like that of other social outcasts such as lepers, prostitutes, and vagrants, was the responsibility of hospitals and not of the parish alms funds that assisted the honest poor. While, in the main, such children were regarded as innocents and thus not personally responsible for their situation, nonetheless they were also in some fashion tainted by their supposed illegitimacy. The law, both canon and civil, which was influenced by the tradition of Roman law, confined itself to the legal consequences of abandonment. For the child, it meant the severing of any legal tie to the parent; parents were condemned [110] and suffered the ecclesiastical penalty of excommunication. ⁽³⁹⁾ In some instances, however, the law provided parents with a justification for abandoning children. For example, Alfonso X of Castile's Las Siete Partidas argues that, while fathers and mothers in general have the responsibility to rear their offspring, they may be excused from doing so for reasons of poverty; in addition, a man has no obligation to support children who are born of a woman who is not his wife or an openly acknowledged mistress. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ In a similar vein, Frederick II's Constitutions of Melfi (1231) severely penalized any Sicilian mother who sold her daughter into prostitution, but made an exception for poor women; and Castile's Fuero real imposed the death penalty only on those parents whose children died as a result of their abandonment. Other law codes, such as those from France, seem to have no interest in deterring the practice, and thus ignore the entire question of abandonment.⁽⁴¹⁾ Because the Roman and Germanic traditions of adoption, which made adoptees full heirs to property, became rare after the eighth century, not to be revived until the nineteenth, the typical response to the phenomenon of abandonment was some form of institutional effort to provide shelter and care for the child, usually in a foster home. A series of early church councils like Vaison (442) required that priests announce to the community the discovery of children abandoned at churches; and ninth-century French bishops prescribed that unmarried women should bring their children to church for adoption by the faithful. When Gratian compiled his Decretum in the twelfth century, he merely reiterated this early legislation that suggested churches as appropriate points of abandonment. The earliest example of an asylum to house such children is said to have been founded by Bishop Dateo of Milan in 757. ⁽⁴²⁾ It is difficult, however, to find further references to the care of exposed infants, either in law or practice, until the twelfth century, and concern does not appear to have become general until the thirteenth. Then, several thirteenth-century ecclesiastical councils in England, and also in France, began to address the issue, primarily out of a concern that such children be properly baptized. Indeed, Salimbene di Adam's Cronica consigns to hell hospital administrators in thirteenth-century Milan who permitted such orphans to die without baptism.⁽⁴³⁾

Orphanages

The first solid evidence for the institutional care of abandoned children dates from the twelfth century. Among the religious orders, the statutes [111] promulgated by Roger Molins in 1181 for the Hospital of Saint John in Jerusalem acknowledged as one of the order's responsibilities the reception and care of orphans; and chapter 41 of its rule committed the Order of the Holy Spirit to the care of both orphaned infants and pregnant women. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ The earliest civic facilities to care for orphans and foundlings appeared in Italian towns. At Milan, for example, there was an eighth-century asylum, which seems to have endured until the 1070s, the late-tenth-century orphanage at San Celso, and a foundling home established at Broglio in 1145. During the next century, other shelters that accepted children were established in Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Mirandola. Information about these becomes more abundant at the end of the thirteenth century. Florentine records show Santa Maria de San Gallo functioning as a foundling home in 1294, and records from nearby Prato are extant from 1333. The port city of Genoa had a hospital and a laic confraternity of free aliens and freed slaves that took charge of abandoned children and orphans from their own community. In the fifteenth century, substantial foundations devoted entirely to the care of abandoned children were established in Florence (1445) and Bologna (1450). ⁽⁴⁵⁾

In France, as in Italy, municipal shelters also seem to have taken in orphans and abandoned children, but here there seems to have been less willingness to do so. For example, some municipal shelters, such as those at Troyes and Angers, refused to admit any children on the grounds that these were too numerous for institutional resources, and that orphans were a parochial responsibility. In a similar vein, the Hôtel-Dieu of Saint-Pol, near Châtillons, would support only children actually born within its precincts. Paris, given its large size, accommodated parentless children in a number of ways. The Hôpital du Saint-Esprit-en-Grève was founded in 1363 to house orphans, but not abandoned or illegitimate children; in the next century, however, its administrators came under royal and municipal pressure to admit foundlings as well. Because Saint-Esprit had a capacity of only fifty children, other abandoned children had to be taken to the municipal shelter, the Hôtel-Dieu at Notre Dame, while others were assigned to the care of the parish in whose territory the child was first discovered. Capitular records of the fifteenth century show that some children were placed in foster homes and their guardians paid some sort of subsidy. In northern France, bishops and chapters also aided children, called here bons-enfants, through the distribution of alms in the form of coin, food, and clothing, presumably also to foster parents; the clergy also reared some children as choirboys. Approximately twenty-four hospices for children, dating from the 1240s and [112] patronized both by prelates and laypeople, have been discovered in northern France and in the Low Countries. Outside of Paris, they seem to have served male children between the ages of nine and sixteen, who studied Latin and religious chant. In Paris, these shelters seem to have served an older clientele of young undergraduate students at the University of Paris, including those of foreign origin. In Montpellier, on the other hand, municipal authorities accepted responsibility for children, but otherwise adhered to the general pattern of seeking out paid foster parents from among the women of the town rather than institutionalizing the children. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

In Castile, shelters for abandoned children began to appear in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Among the earliest known is the Hospital de Santo Tomé in Astorga, which was functioning in 1344 and which, according to later sources, took in children abandoned at the door of the cathedral. The Church of San Pedro and San Ildefonso in Zamora in the mid-fifteenth century maintained the capellanía de los enechados for abandoned children, and in the sixteenth century the cathedral canons assumed responsibility for their care. Palencia in the sixteenth century had the Hospital San Antolín, and in the towns of Salamanca and Valladolid caring for abandoned children was the work of various confraternities.⁽⁴⁷⁾

The pattern of care in the Aragonese Crown followed the Italian and French models. At first, abandoned children were the responsibilities of the community shelters that housed the broad spectrum of the needy. At Barcelona, these children, infants de comú as they were called, were parceled out in the fourteenth centuries among the hospitals of En Marcús, Sant Macià, Santa Eulàlia, and En Colom; and in Vic they were housed in the hospitals of Sant Bartolomeu and Ramon de Terrades. At Valencia, the hospitals of La Reyna, En Clapers, and Sant Vicent counted children among their inmates; in Lleida, abandoned children were housed alongside the insane and penitent women in the hospital of the Order of the Holy Spirit. Another hospital of the Holy Spirit, but operated by the Trinitarians, was established at Palma, in Majorca, circa 1270, and this served abandoned children. After the foundation of Barcelona's general hospital of Santa Creu in 1401, children became one of its responsibilities. Shelters specifically for children came late -- in Valencia not until the establishment of the Hospital de Ignoscents in 1409, and in Barcelona with the hospital established circa 1370 by a resident named Guillem de Pou. It is doubtful, however, that these new foundling homes were ever adequate to the need. In Valencia, for example, between a third and a half of all children under care continued to be housed in the hospitals of En Clapers and La Reyna throughout the fifteenth century. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

Public Wardship

[113] In addition to hospitals and shelters, municipal governments and the king, through the establishment of an official entitled the pare dels òrfens, acknowledged a responsibility toward needy children. The earliest example of this is the directive addressed by King Pere III on March 6, 1338, to the magistrates of Valencia. In this, the king accepted an obligation to protect the children of poor beggars and to ensure that they be reared in such a fashion that they become useful citizens. To this end, he ordered the council to name suitable curadores to ensure that minors, with or without parents, be profitably employed according to their wish and aptitude. Clearly the king's intent was to reduce begging, since the penalty demanded for those who refused work was expulsion from the city. In May of 1338, the council, which had requested Pere's intervention, appointed two citizens and charged them to deter youths from becoming thieves, drunkards, and gamblers; in 1351, or just after the plague, these officers were empowered to compel parentless children to take a master. By the end of the century, the official charged with the oversight of children was called the pare dels òrfens; virtually all of its incumbents were merchants of the city. The idea, based on an Italian model, spread to other towns in the Crown of Aragon, such as Castelló de la Plana (1376), Saragossa (1475), and Lleida, as well as to various Navarrese towns. ⁽⁴⁹⁾

Foundlings and Orphans

Recent studies have given us some idea of the social origins, and even identities, of the children who were abandoned. Gavitt's study of Florence's Hospital of the Innocenti, for example, reveals that 90 percent of the children admitted were received between a few hours and three weeks old, 56 percent were female and 44 percent male, and 60 percent born of a mother who was a domestic servant or slave. Because most of these seem to have been connected to some prominent family, the possibility existed that the birth father would eventually acknowledge his offspring and reclaim the child from the orphanage. This happened to 10 percent of the boys, but only 3 percent of the girls. The children of nonresidents also seem to have been born to those of high rank, so despite a rough correlation between grain prices and admissions, poverty here does not seem to have been the principal reason for abandonment at Florence.⁽⁵⁰⁾

[114] The records of Santa Creu in Barcelona, which are roughly contemporaneous to those of the Innocenti, indicate a somewhat more diverse population. Indeed, Santa Creu did not discriminate on the basis of residence, condition, race, health, or social status, although the vast majority of admissions were the children of Barcelonans.⁽⁵¹⁾ As at Florence, most children were no more than a few days old, and some were still covered in blood and attached to the umbilical cord. Only 23 percent of the children were older than a month; 18 percent were between one and twelve months; and only 4 percent were older than a year. For the most part, abandonments were spaced fairly evenly throughout the year, indicating that cyclic factors like the weather and the availability of food were not prime factors in the decision to give up a child. At Valencia, a study of children assisted at the Hospital of En Clapers shows little difference of gender: 52 percent girls and 48 percent boys.⁽⁵²⁾

Among the approximately forty children received by Santa Creu each year, there were seven categories of children, according to the study of Téresa-María Vinyoles and Margarida González. As at both Florence and Valencia, the largest group was composed of illegitimate children. Rubio Vela notes, for example, that bort or bastard is the usual synonym in Valencian records for parentless children; typically, medieval and premodern society throughout Europe assumed that foundlings were illegitimate. These infants for the most part were poorly dressed and abandoned at a very young age, often hours after birth. Their birth mothers favored names like Bonaventura or Ventura; a few were the offspring of clergy. Among legitimate children, there were genuine orphans, the sick and retarded, children of the desperately poor, those with mothers who for various reasons could not care for them, and those with honest fathers (pobresvergonyants) who temporarily left their children until economic conditions improved. Records at Valencia in 1396-97, for example, speak of the children of poor women who were physically unable to breast-feed. There were also children such as Catalina who became En Claper's responsibility when her mother, a patient at the hospital, died without known family, or those temporarily entrusted to the hospital for nursing by widowed fathers. Barcelona also accepted the offsprings of slaves, who were sent to the hospital to spare the birth father embarrassment and responsibility, or on the initiative of the slave mother to save her offspring from servitude. Among a group of fifteen for whom the reason for abandonment is known, five had foreign fathers, two were children of women recently widowed, another was the son of a female slave, two were children of battered wives (one of whom was beheaded by her spouse), [115] two more were orphans, and another was an illegitimate child brought to the hospital by friends of the birth father. This small sample suggests a multiplicity of motives, but there is a sense that at Barcelona economic deprivation was a more significant factor than at Florence. Poverty, whether that of the beggar or widow, is a stated issue in several cases. There is also the sense that many abandonments were the result of some temporary emergency because the rate of reclamation at Barcelona is also higher, 10 percent as opposed to 6.3 percent in Florence, or even more impressively 30 percent of all children who survived the hazards on infancy. ⁽⁵³⁾

Despite the fact that municipal hospitals did not appear to discriminate against the children of noncitizens, foreign communities, especially those of a servile character, organized protective benevolent associations that collected, fed, and attempted to find foster homes for children within their group. At Valencia and Barcelona, for example, there were confraternities of freed black slaves called respectively the Cofradia de San Jaime Apostol de Negros Libertos, and the Confratia Nigrorum Libertate Datorum Civitatis Barchinione.⁽⁵⁴⁾ At Barcelona, it is impossible to estimate the number of orphans who were the offspring of slaves or of ex-slaves because the municipal orphanage kept no record of the mother's social status, out of a concern that any servile condition would pass onto the child. Nevertheless, the proliferation of female slaves in Barcelona after 1270 and their utilization as domestic laborers in the city's wealthiest households certainly created an environment conducive to the production of unwanted and socially embarrassing offspring. ⁽⁵⁵⁾

While in most instances, it was the decision of parents whether to rear or to abandon their children, in the case of slaves the authority resided in the hands of the master. The child could remain within the household, be abandoned at the gate of the municipal hospital, or be placed somewhere else. In some instances, a master might apprentice the offspring of a servant to someone else, as Elisenda, widow of the Barcelonan merchant Jaume Texander, did in 1412. She handed over the young infant daughter of her slave Magdalena to one Francesca, on the understanding that the young girl serve until the age of twenty when she was to be freed, married, and given a dowry. In another instance, also at Barcelona in 1401, the widow Juana sold the two young daughters of her slave Caterina to the butcher Francesch Ferrari, who had fathered them. ⁽⁵⁶⁾

Whenever possible hospitals sought to avoid undertaking full responsibility for the care and rearing of a child. In order to empower parents who might otherwise be unable to raise their own children, hospitals such as En [116] Clapers in Valencia and Sant Macià in Barcelona were willing to pay a small subsidy in money directly to the parents. Thus, evidently when some parents were discovered leaving their children at the hospital's gate, hospitaller officials attempted to persuade them to keep the child and return home with the promise of a certain amount of ongoing assistance. While such care was certainly less expensive for the hospital, it could only be applied to children within functional families. In the case of children abandoned anonymously, the hospital at times attempted to discover the mother's identity, or that of a parent's family. But evidently, fewer than 16 percent of those assisted had relations willing to rear their kin. Nonetheless, hospital administrators would go to some lengths to avoid taking on a child by attempting to convince others to undertake its care. For example, a newborn son of a Majorcan woman, who was on the verge of death, was brought in 1374 to En Clapers by her neighbors. But the administrator refused to take the child and instead suggested that the neighbors, in return for a small subsidy, rear the child themselves. ⁽⁵⁷⁾

In the majority of instances, however, hospitals could not turn away the children, who then had to be given into a type of formal care. In doing this, hospitals pursued three principal objectives: the salvation of their souls through the sacrament of baptism,⁽⁵⁸⁾ their survival through the provision of care and nourishment, and, if they lived through the perils of infancy, enough training to transform them into productive members of the community. The Hospital of Santa Creu at Barcelona was typical in its procedures for receiving abandoned children. The prior, the principal religious official, maintained llibres d'infants, in which registrars recorded all the information that could be discerned about the foundling: a name if any, age, date and time of discovery, clothing, the presence of any other objects or food, a verbatim copy of any accompanying note, and signs of whether the child was baptized. At Valencia's En Clapers, scribbled notes accompanying the child could reveal not only the baby's name but the fact of baptism; in one instance in which the child was not baptized, the note requested that the child be given the name of Tristan. The purpose of this examination was twofold. If there was no evidence of baptism, the infant was immediately given the sacrament conditionally and named frequently after the staff person who stood as godparent or else for the saint of the day. Subsequently the record of admission could be used as a means of identification should a birth parent or relative seek to claim the child, and as a justification for the hospital to charge a child's family for expenses should it ever be identified.⁽⁵⁹⁾

Wet-Nursing

[117] In most instances, the hospital's first priority, after baptism, was to see that the infant was fed. Because the use of animal milk was rare, this meant that a woman would have to be employed to nurse the child. Although a majority of women who belonged to the rural and urban laboring classes nursed their own child, wet-nursing in the Middle Ages was common enough at both ends of the social scale.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Alfonso X of Castile, in his Siete Partidas, troubled himself to describe at length the qualities of the nurses who would tend the male and female offspring of the royal family.⁽⁶¹⁾ The well-to-do in Italy, Germany, and Catalonia would purchase slaves or employ live-in women recruited from town or the countryside. ⁽⁶²⁾ Montpellier, which in the fifteenth century had no orphanage, regularly employed local women to nurse orphans and abandoned children for a year or so.⁽⁶³⁾ In Florence, children were retained at the orphanage and nursed by rented slaves or by country women for six to twelve days, and then sent out to rural villages until they had attained the age of eighteen to twenty-four months. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ In Iberia, the principal restriction imposed on wet nurses was a religious one. Castilian law, for example, forbade Muslim and Jewish women from nurturing Christian children, and Christians from suckling the children of non-Christians. ⁽⁶⁵⁾

For urban hospitals that took in children, wet-nursing was obviously a major preoccupation. At Florence, the Hospital of the Innocenti had a few resident wet nurses (some were slaves and others local women under contract), who fed the children temporarily until they could be placed in foster care with a wet nurse; in large measure, this seems to have been the practice in Catalonia as well. Mortality rates for these children were extraordinarily high. At Florence's Innocenti, between 27 and 55 percent of infants died within their first year; and at Santa Creu in Barcelona, between 52.2 percent and 67 percent had perished before the age of two. Valencia's En Clapers had a mortality rate of 42 percent. Gavitt contrasts these elevated mortality rates with an average of 20 percent for Florentine children sent out to wet nurse by their own parents. Compared with an overall estimate of 50 percent mortality for all children in preindustrial Europe up to the age of five, and specific sixteenth-century estimates of 20 to 30 percent for England and 57 percent for France, however, these medieval institutional statistics seem slightly less horrific. Nonetheless, the discrepancy between institutional and general rates of medieval child mortality has led scholars to pay particular attention to the institution of the wet nurse.⁽⁶⁶⁾

At Barcelona, the Hospital of Santa Creu always maintained at least [118] one wet nurse on hand to feed children until they could be placed with someone else, usually a farm woman. The picture that emerges here is one of great instability. While some children stayed with their nurse for as long thirty or forty months, many stayed less than a month; consequently, many who survived infancy must have been passed from woman to woman. The llibres d'infants , in fact, record an average of three or four wet nurses per child. In 1426, for example, a farmer's wife named Francesca nursed an infant named Antoni for eight days, then Lancelot for four days, Eulàlia for a day and a night, and then Joan Robi for six months. The death of the child was most often the cause of this turnover, but lack of milk, illness and pregnancy on the part of the wet nurses also contributed to the instability. ⁽⁶⁷⁾

In Valencia, the hospital of Sant Vicent itself housed nursing children; En Clapers, with the help of a broker, farmed them out to wet nurses in the community, but continued to provide clothing, medicine, and even medical care to the child. The women employed as wet nurses were a mixture of rural and urban; some were slaves rented out by their masters. Some seem to have been full-time wet nurses; Na Salvadora, the daughter of a manuscript illuminator, for example, received a new child on May 15, 1375, the day after the one previously in her care had died. As at Barcelona, babies were often shunted back and forth due to the condition of either the nurse or the child. In one instance, and racial reasons, Benenguda, a black child abandoned in June 1396, had ten nurses over the next ten months. The administrator noted that "the child was as black as a cooking pot and no wet nurse wanted to have her." After the children had been weaned, at around the age of three, and introduced to solid food, they were returned to the hospital. ⁽⁶⁸⁾

There is no way to know why so many children died, but contemporaries were ready to suspect negligence on the part of the nursing women. Castilian town law, for instance, imposed fines and banishment on nurses who fed contaminated milk to infants.⁽⁶⁹⁾ By all accounts, most nurses undertook their work for pay, but the amount was low and the supervision of their care minimal. In Florence, for example, these women earned only between two-thirds and three-quarters of what the lowest paid hospital worker was given and would be visited by the hospital's chaplain at most once or twice a year. Barcelona women seem to have fared somewhat better. Town nurses were paid one and a half sous per day for short-term care; resident nurses as well as rural women received about twenty sous per month for full-time care. Here there was no system of on-site inspection, but children were supposed to be returned to the hospital for this purpose [119] annually on All Saints' Day (November 1). Thus, there was a fear that a nurse, unsupervised, underpaid, and poor, would accept more children than she could feed or else give priority to her own children over those receiving foster care. Consequently, the commune of Florence in 1415 forbade wet nurses to stop breast-feeding a child before the age of thirty months, subject to a fine or public whipping. In fact, because the principal documented fraud seems to have been the nurse's failure to report the death of a child in order to keep collecting the monthly stipend, neglect alone is not an adequate explanation for the high rates of mortality. ⁽⁷⁰⁾

Another aspect of that issue which has received considerable attention is the higher mortality of female, over male, infants. At Florence's Innocenti, for example, between 1445 and 1466, girls represented 60.4 percent of the recorded deaths, somewhat in excess of the 56.4 percent that was the female proportion of admissions for the same period. Richard Trexler has argued that the differential might be explained in two ways: infanticide through the suffocation of girls, or better care for boys. He believes that a higher percentage of girls were sent out into the countryside to be nursed, where presumably they might be neglected by unsupervised wet nurses. On the other hand, because there was a greater expectation that male infants might be reclaimed by a parent and the hospital thus reimbursed for their upkeep, boys were more likely to receive residential care at the hospital itself. Gavitt dismisses both arguments but does see a difference in the quality of care that resulted from the larger number of female infants entrusted to the hospital. At Barcelona, however, the situation may well have been different. Because the Hospital of Santa Creu did not attempt to collect accrued expenses from parents who reclaimed their children, there was not only a higher rate of reunion but less incentive to discriminate by gender. ⁽⁷¹⁾

Disease, particularly the plague, was an important cause of childhood death in the Middle Ages. Some studies in Italy, for example, have shown that half to two-thirds of the victims of the plague were children. ⁽⁷²⁾ This situation is confirmed in the records of Barcelona. For example, in the first half of 1430, some twenty-three children died of a disease variously described as granuloma or the plague in and around Barcelona. Between April and September of the following year another eighteen children perished from the plague. The plague was an important factor in infant deaths in Valencia as well; here the records of the Hospital of En Clapers show elevated mortality rates during May and June 1383, a period of plague. Another recurrent malady, although less fatal, was ringworm, a fungal inflection of the skin or hair, but the most serious of all childhood diseases [120] were dysentery and diarrhea. Such illnesses, however, were difficult to diagnose, and most children were not treated at all because they were in foster care. Most often the only concrete evidence that we have of a child's fate is the certificate of burial wet nurses were required to produce for charges who had perished. ⁽⁷³⁾

On average, wet nurses cared for children during the first two years of life. Social status does not seem to have been a factor in setting this term, since it appears to have been the same for the infants of the Catalan royal court and the charges of Barcelona's municipal hospitals. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ Once weaned, children might remain in foster care, in which instances the subsidy paid for their care was reduced by half or more. Records at Barcelona, and also at Montpellier, indicate that this stage of care might last until the age of eight; French and English hospitals acknowledged a responsibility for children up to the age of seven, at which time they were sent out into homes. At Florence all the children were returned to the hospital after weaning to await adoption. Thus, the Hospital of the Innocenti had a large resident population of 20 nursing children, and some 150 older boys and girls, as contrasted to Barcelona's resident population of some 25 children between the ages of two and six. These institutionalized children would be clothed and fed under the supervision of female attendants (Barcelona) or married couples (Florence).⁽⁷⁵⁾ At Valencia, however, children rarely stayed for more than a few days at hospitals like En Clapers. Immediately after nursing, the hospitaller sought out a family to take the child on, and only the sick and handicapped would actually be housed at the hospital for any length of time. ⁽⁷⁶⁾

Apprenticeship and Child Labor

Guillem de Pou, the founder of an orphanage at Barcelona in 1370, expressed what must have been an important sentiment that explains why his society provided continuing care for orphaned and abandoned children: "Many children and other adults, who might die of hunger and become wicked and men of a depraved life, are with time honorable men, choice and good workers. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Thus, once a child had been baptized and supported through the vulnerable years of infancy, steps had to be taken to make sure that the individual would become a useful member of society. For boys, this usually meant an apprenticeship of some sort; girls, on the other hand, were pressed into domestic service, often with the promise of marriage and a dowry at the end of its term.

[121] The age at which children entered service varied according to opportunity and circumstances. In Florence, the "adoption" of boys typically occurred between the ages of five and ten, but in Barcelona (perhaps because Santa Creu was less equipped for a resident population of children) and Valencia the age could be considerably younger. Fifteenth-century examples show Catalan children as young as six months being contracted as apprentices, with 31.5 percent of all children apprenticed being under the age of five. At one extreme are Mateu Esteve, a poor orphan of six months who was admitted on April 29, 1427, and apprenticed to an apothecary on July 29, and Caterina Llorença who was apprenticed to a seamstress at the age of six months. At Valencia's En Clapers, all children who survived nursing and attained the age of three were either returned to their families or to other members of the community. At Barcelona, the oldest children awaiting families were ten and eleven, but these might well be juveniles whose initial contracts had not worked out well. In theory, at least, the boys would enter an apprenticeship that would last between nine and sixteen years, during which they were to learn a trade, receive food, clothing, and shelter at the master's home, and earn a modest stipend that would be paid at the termination of the apprenticeship. Boys, at times, were also taught to read, but girls never were. Unlike Florence, where many girls wound up in the cloth industry, Barcelonan girls rarely learned a trade; most became domestic servants. At the age of eighteen, young men and women would be given their freedom, the former with enough money to buy a suit of clothing and perhaps some tools, and the latter with a sufficient dowry.⁽⁷⁸⁾

In general, foundlings and orphans appear to have been apprenticed or contracted at a younger age than the children of artisans, who normally seem to have started nearer the ages of eleven or twelve. The term of an apprenticeship itself was the product of a number of variables. It would vary, for example, by craft, by locale, and by social status. The Livre des métiers of thirteenth-century Paris established a term of only two years for cooks, but ten years for silversmiths. Here and in England, crafts like glove making, butchering, and tanning required between seven and eight years. In Tuscan towns, however, terms were nearer three or four years, and in fourteenth-century Girona they varied by craft -- only one year for leather workers, but three for a glove maker, six for those who fabricated bags or parchment, and as many as twelve for shoemakers. Because apprentices were a source of cheap labor, the length of the contract, furthermore, could be shortened if the parent was willing to make a cash payment to the master. Because foundling homes were eager to reduce their own expense and certainly were unwilling to make extra payments, the terms for these children, as with the [122] offspring of laborers, tended to begin earlier and last longer. Similarly, the terms of domestic service for girls seem to have extended to the age of eighteen, a year or two beyond the usual age of marriage. ⁽⁷⁹⁾

Apprenticeships, whether arranged by a family or a caritative institution, were the subject of detailed contracts that outlined the mutual responsibilities of the master and the child.⁽⁸⁰⁾ For Valencia, Rubio Vela has studied a series of 161 charters of apprenticeship that were negotiated by the municipal pare dels òrfens between 1379 and 1389 on behalf of orphans and abandoned children. Most of these (72.7 percent) dealt with boys because, Rubio Vela speculates, they were harder to place than girls and so were more likely to need the intervention and assistance of the municipality. Almost 86 percent of the children are identified by family, which suggests that in Valencia orphaned children outnumbered abandoned ones. Furthermore, in many cases the mother or some relative is alive; it was the death of the father that led families to seek assistance. While most children were not abandoned, many, in this city of immigrants, were the children of outsiders. Of those who can be identified, only 29 percent were offspring of natives. Thirty percent had parents from Castile, 20 percent from elsewhere within the Kingdom of Valencia, 8 percent each from Catalonia and Aragon, and others from France, Portugal, and Andalusia. Those who were not identified by family (14 percent) were abandoned children, the children of slaves, and the children of Muslims and Jews who, once abandoned, had been baptized.

Only five of the contracts speak of the children's age, and most of these were very young, between one and three years. Undoubtedly most children were far older, to judge by the terms of service that were specified. Over three-quarters of the boys were obligated for between one and six years, and of all contracts only 9 percent were for terms longer than ten years. Thus, boys in the main do not seem to have served apprenticeships appreciably longer than the offspring of artisans. Girls, on the other hand, tended to be apprenticed earlier and to serve for longer periods as domestics. Francesca, for example, who was of Jewish background, was sent to the household of the notary Berenguer de Peramola for a full ten years.

Of those individuals who took in these children, 85.6 percent were Valencian males of diverse professions, with textiles (cloth-cutters and weavers) being the most prevalent. Another 6.8 percent of the contracts were negotiated with widows, who usually requested orphaned girls. In two instances, wet nurses gained custody of children that they had nursed for the Hospital of En Clapers. While there was no formal adoption in the [123] legal sense, a girl Alienor was taken as if she had become a daughter. Most girls, however, became mere domestic servants; boys were taught a trade. Only three contracts required instruction in reading and writing. Children were obligated by the city to complete their terms of service and would be apprehended if they ran away. Some children were evidently mistreated, but, despite legislation in 1350 that permitted the curadores to remove abused children from the custody of their masters, Ramon de Palou, the pare dels òrfens in 1374, claimed that he lacked the economic resources to care for boys and girls who had suffered from harsh treatment. Apart from the obligation that the child be supported, there are few details concerning the period of service itself; presumably this passed much as would any apprenticeship. But, at the end of the contract, the master had certain obligations toward the youths. Girls received dowries, a substantial sum that averaged about fifteen pounds. Boys were rarely promised much, if any, money but were to be provided with a complete wardrobe (tunic, long gown, hat and shoes) and in a few instances the tools of a trade.⁽⁸¹⁾

In terms of modern values, the character of medieval social policy toward women and children was very conservative and traditional. At its heart was the promotion of marriage and the family, the ideal state for Christians who had not entered some form of the religious life and for the citizen who would thereby be a productive and contributing member of the community. Just as disease, physical handicaps, or indolence might prevent a man from assuming his proper role as a husband, an inability to offer the expected dowry kept some women from becoming wives. Without marriage, the individual would lose status, become a burden on society, and be marginalized as an outcast or criminal. While various punishments -- whipping, banishment, and so on -- were devised to keep men from crime, women were assisted in a more positive fashion. Young girls, particularly those from established families, could receive assistance toward a dowry; orphans and foundlings could earn the same reward, but at the price of long years of domestic service. Women who were forced or fell into prostitution as an alternative to marriage had at least some prospect for rehabilitation, if it was desired. Those who continued as prostitutes certainly did not have a pleasant life in brothels, where they were often financially exploited by their housemasters, but legally they were tolerated, if segregated and regulated. Little of this, however, was for the benefit of women, who by accepting this [124] status had lost their honor. Like Hawthorne's Hester, their shame was marked on their clothing. For men, however, many of whom were presumably married and honorable members of the community, legalized prostitution offered an opportunity to enjoy sex without obligation.⁽⁸²⁾

The attitude toward children is ambivalent, although it does not seem to have been one of "indifference and neglect." On the one hand, children had an unconditional right to life and survival. Infanticide was condemned, and there is little indication that Catalan society absolutely refused help to any orphans or foundlings, whatever their origins or circumstances. This assistance, furthermore, was owed to the child until he or she reached the age of marriage and entry into world of work. On the other hand, however, this obligation had limitations. There was the prejudice, often true, that the child under care was illegitimate; the term bastard, in the Middle Ages or in our society, is not one of endearment. Then there was the question of finance. Hospitals, even those with municipal affiliation, were supported in the main by private alms and could not afford full-time institutional care for their charges. Consequently, a makeshift system of wet nurses, foster parents, apprenticeships, and contract labor had to be stitched together. It is difficult to gauge exactly how children fared under this system. There is little doubt that their prospects for survival were somewhat worse, particularly in the early years, than for children from the general population. It would be interesting, but undoubtedly impossible, to know how well foster care prepared them for entry as adults into the world.

Notes for Chapter Six

1. The Hospital of Santa Creu maintained a separate ward for females, under the supervision of a woman. But the routine of care -- tending to the needs of patients, keeping them clean, dispensing food and medicine -- differs not at all from that of the male ward: Ordinacions, xx.

2. For reasons that have yet to be adequately examined, medieval shelters, wherever they were located, generally allocated more beds to men than to women. For instance, in Burgos, the Hospital del Rey housed twenty-nine men and twelve women, and that of the Emperador had nine and three (Martínez García, "Asistencia material," 350-51). Sant Macià in Barcelona had twenty-two for men and only six for women (Roca, Sant Macià , 4-15). In Italy, Florence's Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova contained one hundred beds in the male ward, and seventy in the women's section, despite the fact that the latter area seems to have been more crowded (Park, "Healing the Poor," 36). The large Constantinopolitan hospital of the Pantocrator reserved only twelve of sixty-one beds for women, and assigned two of the thirty-five staff physicians to their service (Constantelos, Byzantine Philanthropy, 129-30). The evidence of the alms fund for Barcelona's parish of Santa Maria del Pi suggests that doles were allocated on the basis of class and gender, that is, widows of notable personages received larger allotments than other women, and men were given more money than women (Cabestany and Claramunt, "Santa María del Pí," 166-67). The Order of the Holy Spirit established such a hospital in Lleida in 1214, to serve single mothers and abandoned children (Tarragó, Lérida, 49-50). In larger cities like Paris, on the other hand, the situation was more complicated. Here the large general shelter, the Hôtel-Dieu of Notre Dame, housed pregnant women and orphans, alongside poor cripples, the mentally ill, and the sick, but shelters specifically reserved for women also existed, such as the Hôpital Sainte-Madeleine, established in 1316, as a shelter for homeless women, or the Hôpital Sainte-Avoie and Les Haudriettes for widows, or the Hôpital de Sainte-Catherine. Florence had the Orbatello, a shelter established by a wealthy merchant in 1370 to house several dozen widows (and their children) of honorable estate in separate apartments. See Geremek, Margins of Society, 171; and Richard C. Trexler, "A Widow's Asylum of the Renaissance: The Ortabello of Florence," in Old Age in Preindustrial Society, ed. Peter N. Stearns (New York, 1982), 119-49. On Santa Creu, see Danon, Visió històrica, 82.

3. For a general discussion of the evolution of the dowry in Catalan society, see Bensch, Barcelona, 260-76.

4. For skilled and unskilled workers, the dower payment could represent as much as two years' wages or more. In 1414 a municipal official in Barcelona complained to the city council that his salary was insufficient for him to support his sons and dower his daughter Constança. See Téresa-María Vinyoles i Vidal, "Ajudes a donzelles pobres a maridar," in La pobreza , 1:297-98; Guilleré, Girona al segle XIV, 2:436-40; Bensch, Barcelona, 356. Ramon Llull, in the Blanquerna, argues that poor women had two alternatives to prostitution: a position as a servant or the gift of a dowry (Blanquerna: A Thirteenth-Century Romance , trans. E. Allison Peers (London, 1926), 283-84). See also Batlle, Urgell medieval, 143. While there is no comprehensive study of the geographical origins of Barcelona's prostitutes, studies in southeast France show that for the most part they were girls of local origin, pushed as teenagers into prostitution by the loss of a parent, public rape, or the poverty of their family. See Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Oxford, 1988), 32. Vinyoles, however, argues that the situation in Barcelona was markedly different -- that pimps and prostitutes were mostly outsiders. But the evidence that she cites is less than clear. Of the twenty-one pimps expelled from the city on August 20, 1404, for example, only three are identified as being non-Catalan, with five others from the Catalan towns of Tarragona, Tortosa, and Terrassa. She cites anecdotal examples from the same era of prostitutes from Seville, Galicia, Lisbon, and Sicily, but undertakes no general survey of women who plied this trade. The evidence for Valencia is similarly ambiguous. Of the 676 women, whose origins are identifiable and who were charged before the Valencian court between 1367 and 1399 with offenses related to prostitution, fully 92.8 percent were non-Valencian. Of these, 53 percent came from Castile. But this number represents only 12.3 percent of the entire sample; over 87 percent of these women cannot be identified geographically. Thus, these studies do not invalidate the argument that Catalans had concern that poor, local girls might turn to prostitution. See Vinyoles, Vida quotidiana, 120, 124-25; and M. Carmen Peris, "La prostitución valenciana en la segunda mitad del siglo XIV," in Violència i marginació en la societat medieval, Revista d'història medieval 1 (1990): 191-92.

5. These small bequests have not been collated or studied, but they do appear in the lists of pious bequests made by Barcelonan testators as puellas maritandas or puellis maritandis. As examples, see the will of Larrentius, a canon of Barcelona, redacted in 1267, or that of Guillem, a shoemaker, in 1305 ( ASPP, carp. 24, perg. 333; ACB, calaix 32-B, perg. 157). See also Ana Magdalena Lorente, "El Plato de los Pobres Vergonzantes de la parroquia de Santa María del Mar," in La pobreza, 2:168. This charity is also found in Jewish wills. See the will of Sayt Mill of 1377 that bequeathed the substantial sum of two hundred pounds for the dowries of two needy Jewish girls (Pons, Judios del reino, 2:134). For Vic, see Ollich, "Les entitats eclesiastiques de Vic," 94.

6. At Urgell, of 127 wills dated from 1287-91 studied by Batlle, only 5 left money for this cause, but several more remembered the daughters of specific friends, neighbors, or relatives (Batlle, Urgell medieval, 143). See also Batlle and Casas, "Caritat privada," 1:157; Vinyoles, "Donzelles a maridar," 1:328-35; 355; Batlle, "San Justo," 1:64.

7. Steven Epstein, Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150-1250 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 185-86; and his Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 185-86. Between 1376 and 1400, Sienese testators gave more money for dowries than they had in the previous 170 years, and in the fifteenth century the amounts grew. In 1400 this charity represented 6.8 percent of pious bequests, 11.6 percent in 1425, and 11.9 percent in the years after 1475 (Jeremy Cohn, Death and Property in Siena, 1205-1800 [Baltimore, 1988], 28). In Florence after the plague, dowries also became the favorite charity of charitable confraternities like the Orsanmichele, which in the 1350s is said to have assisted in as many as 20 percent of all marriages (Henderson, Piety and Charity, 340).

8. A certain amount of this charity was private and individual, wherein decedents empowered executors to distribute a sum of money to needy girls whom they knew. An example is the will of Master Larrentius, a canon of Barcelona's cathedral. His will of 1267 left the residue of his estate to orphans, widows, captives, and girls of marriageable age, the money to be handed out by his manumissors (ASPP, carp. 25, no. 333). Cabestany and Claramunt, "Santa María del Pí," 1:171; Vinyoles, "Donzelles pobres a maridar," 1:319. At Urgell, young ladies also received partial subsidies. Here the amount of assistance ranged between twenty sous and one hundred sous, at a time when dowries began in the range of two to three hundred sous (Batlle, Urgell medieval, 143).

9. Utterback, Pastoral Care, 181.

10. Pere III's largest grant of eight hundred sous went to the daughter of the royal scribe; two hundred sous were given to a poor relation of the powerful Morell family. See Vinyoles, "Donzelles pobres a maridar," 1:300-10.

11. Vinyoles, "Donzelles pobres a maridar," 1:322-23.

12. Agustín Rubio Vela, "Infancia y marginación. En torno a las instituciones trecentistas valencianas para el socorro de los huérfanos," in Violència i marginació en la societat medieval, Revista d'història medieval 1(1990): 120-26.

13. Canon law defined a prostitute as one who offered her body in return for remuneration, or any woman who made any sort of public display of herself, who dressed extravagantly, or who simulated love. See Katherine L. Jansen, "Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants: The Preaching of Penance in the Late Middle Ages," Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995): 20. In Dijon, for example, women in bordellos were typically around twenty-eight years old, while those who freelanced or worked in private brothels were between seventeen and twenty. For a discussion of the types of prostitutes, see Geremek, Margins of Society, 215-28; and Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution , 5-8, 33; for Barcelona usages, Mutgé, Ciudad de Barcelona , 62; for Valencia, see Peris, "Prostitución valenciana,"180, 188-89.

14. Vinyoles, Vida quotidiana, 121. The principal taboo for Muslims, Jews as well as Christian authorities involved sex with a woman of another religion. Jews and Muslims were absolutely forbidden sex with Christian prostitutes. Christian men who sinned with a Muslim woman risked whipping, and burning for sex with a Jewish woman. Nirenberg argues that a gallows was erected just outside the Valencian brothel as a warning to those who might be tempted to cross an interfaith boundary (Communities of Violence, 136-46).

15. Many prostitutes in Paris had married as a way of assuming some of the external signs of respectability. See Geremek, Margins of Society , 231. Barcelona's prostitutes, on the other hand, were exempt from sumptuary laws that prohibited decent women from wearing pearls, silver jewelry, and silk. Indeed, given the association in canon law between luxuria and prostitution, such rich display would mark women as prostitutes. In Valencia, the council passed an ordinance in 1334 that, like that of Barcelona, forbade prostitutes to wear capes or other wraps; but in 1384 it also forbade luxurious adornments like furs. See Vinyoles, Vida quotidiana, 125; Jansen, "Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants," 20; and Peris, "Prostitución valenciana," 184.

16. For complaints that the Franciscans of Daroca, Huesca, Saragossa and Valencia made to the king in the early fourteenth century, see Webster, Els menorets , 80, 147. The problem, however, was evidently of long standing, for as early as 1247 King Jaume I was asked by the Dominicans of Majorca to issue an injunction forbidding prostitutes of the city from congregating outside their house. See Documentos de Jaime I de Aragón, ed. Ambrosio Huici Miranda and María Desamparados Cabanes Pecourt (Valencia, 1976-88), 2:265-66, no. 461 (June 7, 1247).

17. Mutgé, Ciudad de Barcelona, 162-64.

18. Vinyoles, Vida quotidiana, 120-23.

19. In Valencia, 15.8 percent of those arrested for offenses related to prostitution between 1367 and 1399 were charged with working outside the bordell . See Vinyoles, "Donzelles pobres a maridar," 1:316; Peris, "Prostitución valenciana," 183-84, 186; Vicente Graullera, "Los hosteleros del Burdel de Valencia," in Violència i marginació in la societat medieval , Revista d'història medieval 1 (1990): 201. In France, Louis IX issued a number of edicts ordering that prostitutes be expelled from all towns and villages, but in 1256 allowed that at a minimum such persons should be kept out of good neighborhoods and away from ecclesiastical establishments. Later in the century, districts for prostitution became established in Languedoc. Hot Street was established in Montpellier in 1285; similar red-light districts existed in Toulouse at the end of the century, and in Narbonne in 1334. Between 1350 and 1450 most towns of southeast France, including Dijon, Orange, Lyons and Arles, established a prostibulum publicum, a brothel that was actually owned by the municipality or other local authority and leased out to a manager. Paris, as early as 1226, had established a shelter for former prostitutes, called the convent of Filles-Dieu; Louis IX subsequently gave it a substantial endowment worth four thousand pounds a year; in 1360, it was joined to the shelter for homeless women, the Hôpital de Sainte-Madeleine. See Geremek, Margins of Society, 171, 212-15; Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society, 27-34;Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution , 4-5, 59-61. The numbers of prostitutes in Valencia, to judge by the level of fines actually collected, seems to have been quite substantial. The majority of these were Muslim, suggesting that it was far easier for Christian men to cross the boundary of religion than it was for Muslim men. See John Boswell, The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 1977), 70-1, 349-50.

20. There was the House for Repentant Prostitutes of Saint Mary Magdalene in Avignon, established in 1280, and significantly expanded in the later fourteenth century. It received former prostitutes, aged twenty-five or older, who were still capable of attracting men to "voluptuous pleasures" (Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, 202-4). Other institutions of various types existed widely throughout France; some had a profoundly religious character, some were shelters, and a few even were more like prisons. See Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society, 72-6; Jansen, "Mary Magdelan and the Mendicants," 21.

21. Elsewhere, the mendicant friars demonstrated a particular interest in rehabilitating "Mary Magdelenes," but, in the Crown of Aragon, no evidence of this apostolate survives in the records of the Franciscans who, to the contrary, frequently complained about prostitutes loitering near their convents. See Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, 47; and Webster, Els menorets, 147, 186-87.

22. This might have been a refuge of last resort for women who survived in the brothel until the age of forty or so, and who were not able to ascend to the position of hostelero in the bordell. See Rubio Vela and Rodrigo Lizondo, "Els beguins de València," 330; Peris, "Prostitución valenciana," 197-98; and Graullera, "Los hostaleros del Burdel," 203, 210.

23. This custom appears to have imitated practices in neighboring Languedoc. In 1357, for example, the consuls of Uzès decreed that five prostitutes from the municipal brothel were to be taken by town officials to spend Holy Week in the local hospital of the poor. At Toulouse, in the early sixteenth century, such women were required to stay at some house other than their brothel from Palm Sunday until the Tuesday after Easter. Prostitutes in Perpignan during the Holy Week of 1442 were less fortunate in their relocation, to the municipal leper house! Albi, Dijon, and Arles, on the other hand, seem to have preferred paying public women to refrain from their activities during Holy Week to sequestering them. The Hospitaller Order of the Holy Spirit, whose houses were widespread throughout Europe, provided shelter for prostitutes during both Holy Week and the Octave of Easter. In southeast France, the leases of municipal brothels frequently expired at the beginning of Lent, so that the period of penance could be used to settle in the new tenants who presumably would open for business just after Easter. See Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society, 85-87; "Regula ordinis S. Spiritus," PL , 217:1146, cap. 46; and Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution , 8, 63.

24. Vinyoles, Vida quotidiana, 125-26; and Vinyoles "Donzelles pobres a maridar," 1:320.

25. Guilleré, Girona medieval, 53. Girona's demographic profile was similar to that of Florence, where families in 1325 seem also to have averaged two children: Henderson, Piety and Charity, 263.

26. Philippe Ariès, for example, has argued from artistic evidence that childhood was not regarded as a separate stage in life until the seventeenth century, when children were first subjected to a special regime of discipline. Until that time, he argues, families avoided developing any special attachments to children, probably because of high levels of infant and child mortality. See his Centuries of Childhood, 33-49. His general thesis has been accepted by writers like Lawrence Stone, Edward Shorter, and François Lebrun, as well as by popularizers like Elisabeth Badinter. For a critique of the "indifference and neglect" school, see Stephen Wilson, "The Myth of Motherhood a Myth: The Historical View of European Child-rearing," Social History 9 (1984): 181-98. Other writers like Shulamith Shahar disagree with the neglect interpretation; see her Childhood in the Middle Ages , 2-3. For an overview of the discussion, see Gavitt, Charity and Children , 19.

27. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 22; Furs de València , ed. G Colon and A. Garcia (Valencia, 1980-), 2:215, 2.13.1.

28. For a discussion of infanticide, see Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 126-39.

29. This story is not found in any thirteenth-century documentation and undoubtedly is apocryphal (see PL, 215:377-80; 217:1131-36); instead it is based on a fifteenth-century illustration discovered in Dijon (Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 416).

30. See Richard C. Trexler, "Infanticide in Florence: New Sources and First Results," History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (1973): 100-101; Mary McLaughlin, "Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries," in The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd de Mause (New York, 1974), 122. Cemetery evidence from eastern Europe, for example, shows medieval male/female sex ratios to be between 112 and 122 to 100, as opposed to an expected ratio of 105 to 100. Some limited German evidence has a ratio as high as 147 to 100. In Spain, the Kingdom of Aragon had similarly high ratios in the twelfth century, and a study of two regions in the Aragonese Pyrenees in 1429 and 1470 documents the existence, respectively, of 77 male children to 20 female, and 76 to 20, which extrapolates to a figures of 385 and 380 to 100! See Josiah C. Russell, The Control of Late Ancient and Medieval Population (Philadelphia, 1985), 190, 211-12. See also Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300 (Cambridge, 1984), 209.

31. Otherwise unexplained deaths brought a sentence of excommunication, which then presumably could be lifted after some sort of inquiry (Utterback, Pastoral Care, 38, 162-63). There were also accidents. The Hospitaller statutes of 1181, for example, require that "little cradles should be built for the babies of women pilgrims born in the House, so that they might lie separate, and that the baby in its own bed may be in no danger from the restlessness of its mother." The Rule, Statutes and Customs of the Hospitallers, 1099-1310. ed. and trans. E. J. King (London, 1934), 35.

32. See Pullan, "Orphans and Foundlings," 3: 10.

33. Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 274-76. Interestingly enough, the institution of prostitution was not viewed as serious cause of unwanted children, probably because of the widely held belief that prostitutes, for various reasons, were sterile (Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine , 25, 64, 81, 190).

34. Of the foundlings whose parentage is known, 60 percent had a mother who was a slave or servant. See Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 336-40; and Gavitt, Charity and Children, 20, 207. In another study in Florence, of the 7,584 children identified as being abandoned in Florence between 1385 and 1484, 1,096 or 14 percent were the children of a slave: Jacques Heers, Esclaves et domestiques au moyen âge (Paris, 1981), 228.

35. Teresa M. Vinyoles i Vidal and Margarida González Betlinski, "Els infants abandonats a les portes de l'Hospital de Barcelona (1426-1439)," in La pobreza, 2:273.

36. Téresa-Maria Vinyoles i Vidal, "La violència marginal a les ciutats medievals (exemples a la Barcelona des volts del 1400)," in Violència i Marginació en la societat medieval, Revista d'històriamMedieval 1 (1990): 161-62; Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:215-20, 273, 278; Guilleré, Girona medieval, 53; Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 172-73.

37. Italian orphanages, for example, had a revolving box, or shelf, called the ruota or tour or scaffetta, into which foundlings could be placed out of sight of hospital personnel. Pullan, "Orphans and Foundlings," 3: 9.

38. In Norway, abandoning children was forbidden, but for practical not intrinsic reasons. Evidently the sparseness of churches, the usual point of abandonment, raised concerns that children would be left far from the ministrations of clergy and thus would not be baptized (Boswell, Kindness of Strangers , 292). Among Castilian towns of the twelfth century, children were evidently too valuable a resource for abandonment to become a serious problem; only the fuero of Soria, which prescribes the death penalty, addresses the issue. See Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest, 209.

39. Such a ruling is found among the decretals of Pope Gregory IX; it also appears a few decades later in Alfonso X's Fuero real (ed. Gonzalo Martínez Diez [Avila, 1988], 4.23.1, p. 501), and in his Siete Partidas, 4.20.4. See also Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 325-27; and Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 126.

40. See Las Siete Partidas, 4.17.8; 4.19.2-5; 4.20.4.

41. Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 326-31. Fuero real, 4.23.3, p. 502.

42. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 124; Lloyd de Mause, "The Evolution of Childhood," in The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd de Mause (New York, 1974), 28; Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 277; McLaughlin, "Survivors and Surrogates," 121.

43. Baptism, preferably within one week of birth, was generally regarded, despite the development of the idea of limbo by twelfth-century theologians, as necessary to the salvation of a child who might die. Furthermore, many believed that a baptized child had a better chance for survival in this life. For a discussion of medieval practices of infant baptism, see Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 45-52; and Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 323, 362.

44. Statuts d'Hotels-Dieu, 14; "Regula ordinis S. Spiritius de Saxia," PL, 217: 1146; Rule, Statutes and Customs of the Hospitallers, 38.

45. Orphanages in Florence have been particularly well studied. In addition to San Gallo, the asylum of Santa Maria della Scala was established for the poor sick and infants in 1316 and Santa Maria degli Innocenti just for foundlings in 1445. See McLaughlin, "Survivors and Surrogates," 122; Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 415-17; Heers, Esclaves, 227; Nicholas Terpstra, "Apprenticeship in Social Welfare: From Confraternal Charity to Municipal Poor Relief in Early Modern Italy," Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 103.

46. Among the earlier foundling homes in France was one at Marseilles, and another, the Hôpital du Saint-Esprit-en-Grève (1363), in Paris; in Germany, there were those at Ulm, Freiburg. and Nuremberg. See Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 361, 415; Rubio Vela, "Infancia y marginación," 121; Statuts d'Hotels-Dieu, 25, 115, 124; Heers, Esclaves , 226; Leah L. Otis, "Municipal Wet Nurses in Fifteenth-Century Montpellier," in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 83; Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:192; Paule Bavoux, "Enfants trouvés et orphelins du XIV^e au XVI^e siècle," in Assistance et assistés jusqu'à 1610. Actes du 97^e congrès national des sociétés savantes. Nantes, 1972 (Paris, 1979), 359-69. Foundling homes were very rare in medieval England; children instead were included within the inmate population of hospitals and other shelters (Cullum, Hospitals , 192). For student hostels, see J. M. Reitzel, "The Medieval Houses of Bons-Enfants," Viator 11 (1980): 179-207. In 1334, four Italian residents of Paris established a shelter for "poor Italian scholars" who were studying in the faculties of arts and theology (Manno Tolu, "Pauperum scolarium," 49-56).

47. Sanchez Herrero, "Cofradías," 28-29; Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400-1700 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), 58.

48. Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:192; Rubio Vela, "Infancia y marginación," 121, 127, 133; Tarragó, Lerida , 50; Sanahuja, Beneficencia en Lérida, 29; Santamaría, "Asistencia a los pobres en Mallorca," 386. The municipal council of Valencia in 1473 attempted to consolidate care for foundlings at the Hospital de la Reyna, but in 1476 abandoned the effort and resumed sending children to En Clapers (Gallent Marco, "Instituciones hospitalerias," 83). Childcare was an important activity at En Clapers; accounts indicate that between 1374 and 1397 this activity consumed between 15 and 20 percent of the total budget (Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 164, 167).

49. Rubio Vela, "Infancia y marginación," 128-33, 144; Ubieto Arteta, "Pobres y marginados," 8.

50. See Gavitt, Charity and Children, 20, 188, 204, 207, 210. Boswell to some degree disagrees with Gavitt in arguing that the population of abandoned children in Florence was split roughly equally between those who were illegitimate and those whose parents had suffered some sort of social catastrophe (famine, poverty, war, death of a spouse, and so on); see his Kindness of Strangers , 419.

51. Children of mixed religious heritage, for example Christian-Muslim or Christian-Jewish, were assumed legally to be Christian. Nirenberg argues that the stigma that attached itself to converts in later centuries simply did not exist in the Crown of Aragon in the fourteenth century. See his Communities of Violence , 150.

52. Older children seem to have had handicaps with which parents were unwilling or unable to cope. For example, Martina, who was mute and disturbed, was left in 1437 when she was seven, and another without a name was abandoned in 1428 at the age of five with similar afflictions. Joan de València, however, admitted at the age of five in 1428, was just poor, the illegitimate son of a beggar. The child evidently resisted abandonment and had to be chained to a tree. Fragmentary records from the 1420s and 1430s show an average of 3.3 abandonments per month, with March (3.8), April (4.4) and July (4.4) having the most, and June (2.2) and February (2.4) the fewest. Vinyoles y González, "Infants abandonats," 2:202, 204-6, 240-54. For Valencia, see Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 165.

53. The surviving Llibres d'expòsits contain admission records for five complete years, with the indicated number of entries: 1427 (48), 1428 (45), 1436 (33), 1437 (36), 1438 (40). Economic distress, for example, likely caused Pere de Mura, a candlemaker, to abandon his son at birth, and improving conditions likely explain his reclamation two years later. Similarly, a leather worker, Francesc Vallès left Antonia, his daughter, at Santa Creu in 1428 and reclaimed her in 1430. Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:207, 215-21, 239-54. Valencia's principal hospital, En Clapers, received on average twenty children each year during the second half of the fourteenth century; in one sample, over 85 percent of these were either illegitimate and/or abandoned (Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 163, 166-67, 172-73). Castile's Siete Partidas (4.20.4) forbade the return of any children to parents who had deliberately abandoned them, but such a custom evidently did not exist in Catalonia or in the Italian communes. For a discussion of foundlings and illegitimacy, see Pullan, "Orphans and Foundlings," 3: 10, 16-18; and Joan Sherwood, Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Spain: The Women and Children of the Inclusa (Toronto, 1988), 95-124.

54. The Hospital of Sant Joan in Perpignan in 1456 employed some fifty wet nurses to feed the children of slaves; a complaint of 1455 made the point that most of the revenues of this hospital served the illegitimate offspring of the town's well-to-do citizens. Italian institutions also served such populations. Genoa, for example, had a hospice for freed captives and their children and another that cared for the children and orphans of former Greek slaves. See Heers, Esclaves, 227-28; Miguel Gual Camarena, "Una confradia de negros libertos en el siglo XV," Estudios de edad media en la Corona de Aragón 5 (1952): 457-66.

55. Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:217; evidently the stricture contained in the Siete Partidas (4.20.4) that automatically freed any slave child who was abandoned by his master did not pertain in Catalonia or else was difficult to enforce. For domestic slavery in Barcelona, see Bensch, "Slavery in Catalonia and Aragon," 80-85.

56. Heers, Esclaves, 230. At Florence, between 1434 and 1446, Stefano Moronti sent four infants whom he had fathered by slaves to the Hospital of Santa Maria della Stella because as free children they could not easily be pressed into domestic service; for other examples, see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "Women Servants in Florence during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 69-70.

57. The savings are apparent from the fact that the 16 percent who were aided in this fashion consumed only 2.7 percent of the amount expended on childcare, despite the fact that the subsidy was often equivalent to what would be paid to a wet nurse for a few months. For example, Sant Macià gave twenty-two sous in one month, and eleven sous in another to a woman for her daughter Antinoga; and between twenty and thirty sous to Campderá for her girl Eulalia. In one of the rare instances when En Clapers was able to ferret out a mother's identity, she turned out to be a mentally disturbed emigrant from Majorca, scarcely able to cope with her child. But, in another instance, where the child was the illegitimate offspring of a father who had died and a mother who had fled from Valencia, the hospital was able to identify the father's family and force it to support the child. Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 165, 171-72, 186; Roca, Sant Macià , 26. A variation of the subsidy has been documented in prerevolutionary France, where mothers, desperately poor, abandoned their children but arranged to be hired by the foundling home to nurse their own children (Wilson, "European Child-rearing," 196).

58. While abandoned children might have diverse backgrounds, in order to receive care in Barcelona's hospitals, they would have to be Christian. In a similar vein, decrees of the provincial synod at Tarragona in 1330 forbade Christian women to serve as nurses or wet nurses for the children of Jews on penalty of excommunication, an enactment that in effect forbade Christian orphanages and shelters to serve Jewish children. Utterback, Pastoral Care , 75.

59. The presence of salt and evidence in a note were possible signs of baptism. Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 420; Gavitt, Charity and Children , 187-88; Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:193-201; Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 167-70; Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 48; Ordinacions, xii.

60. This meant, of course, that the greatest number of children were nursed by their own mothers (Wilson, "European Child-rearing," 195). The alternative to nursing, that is, feeding children animal milk, was exceedingly rare in the Middle Ages, because children so nourished were thought to have little chance for survival. Nonetheless, there are instances of bottle-feeding when breast milk for various reasons was not available. For example, the records of Barcelona's Hospital of Sant Macià have several examples of the administrator purchasing a goat when a wet nurse could not be found for a child (Roca, Sant Macià, 26). The Italian Hospital of Brescia in the 1580s employed a dozen nurses to feed nineteen children, supplementing their human milk with that of twelve goats (Pullan, "Orphans and Foundlings," 3: 9}.

61. The nurses were to be of good family, well-formed, healthy, with good habits, and a calm disposition. Beauty and grace would allow them better to control the children; above all they should have abundant milk. See Las Siete Partidas 2.7.3, 11.

62. For an overview, see Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 59-64.

63. A study of wet nurses here in the middle decades of the fifteenth century shows that 99 percent of the women were town residents, and 88 percent were married (another 9 percent were widows), the wives of carpenters, bakers, masons, tailors, and dyers. For these women, this was not a regular source of income since 91 percent were never assigned more than one child. Approximately a fifth of the children were kept between one and three years, another fifth for three to five years, and a tenth over five years. The remainder nursed their children for less than a year, suggesting a high rate of mortality (Otis, "Municipal Wet Nurses," 84-87).

64. Gavitt, Charity and Children, 163-67; 189.

65. Joseph F. O'Callaghan, The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia, 1993), 100; Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest , 207. Elsewhere, restrictions were aimed against Christian women who nursed Jewish children (Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 58, 279 n. 30).

66. Gavitt, Charity and Children, 217, 237; Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:232-33; Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 181; Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 35, 149. A recent study of Madrid's foundling home, the Inclusa, for the eighteenth century shows that 58 percent of children died before they were sent out to nurse, and only 11 percent of the children survived until the age of seven (Sherwood, Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Spain, 174).

67. Thirty months or so seems to have been the norm for wet-nursing in Barcelona, but slight variations were likely caused by the varying circumstances of the individual children and of their wet nurses. Three newborns were each received into Santa Creu in October 1426 (Joan Cristòfol, Joan Robí and Agnès Valterra), and each had the good fortune to survive and be returned to the hospital between March 29 and May 2, 1429, indicating terms of thirty or thirty-one months of nursing. Antònia Magdalena, abandoned on January 6, 1427, had twenty-seven months, and Cristina, received on February 15, 1427, enjoyed thirty-three months (Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:223-24, 240-41). The shuffling around of children can also be seen in the records of the smaller Hospital of Sant Macià. For example, a child was discovered on May 20, 1389, at the cathedral. It was unclear whether the girl had been baptized, and so the rite was performed at the nearby parish church of Santa Maria del Pi. Margarida, as she called, was then nursed within the hospital for twenty-three days, during which her background was investigated. After it had been determined that her origins were foreign and thus she had no local family to be located, she was given out to nurse, first to Na Puig who kept her for the month of August, and then to Na Ladona who gave the child to her slave to suckle. See Roca, Sant Macià, 29.

68. Saint Vicent Ferrer, in one of his sermons, recommended that when a child turned three his mother ought to tempt him with grapes, cherries, figs, and bread (Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 174-79).

69. Among the causes of contamination were believed to be sexual intercourse and bad diet. See Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest, 178-79, 209.

70. The Hospital of Sant Macià at times had a live-in nurse. In 1386, for example, the administrator rented from Bartolomeu Poal of Martorell his slave Maria for seven months at a cost of seven pounds ( Roca, Sant Macià , 25). See also Trexler, "Infanticide in Florence," 100; Gavitt, Charity and Children, 228-31; Otis, "Municipal Wet Nurses," 88-89; Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:225, 229.

71. Trexler, "Infanticide in Florence," 101-3; Gavitt, Charity and Children , 210-14. At Barcelona there are examples of both girls and boys being restored to their parents. Digna, an infant of three months, was left at the hospital and reclaimed by her father thirteen months later, while Pere Bertran, a newborn abandoned in January 1435, was not reclaimed by his father until mid-1437; see Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:221-22, 244, 249.

72. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 305-6 n. 51.

73. Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:229, 233-34; Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 181-82.

74. Castilian law established the age of three as an important point of demarcation in a child's life. Up until that age, the baby was to be under the tutelage of the mother, presumably to be nursed, but afterward the child was under the jurisdiction of the father. See Las Siete Partidas 4.19.3. For royal children, see McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague, 19.

75. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 121. The children's diet of bread, meat, legumes, and cheese at Florence would appear to have been more appetizing than the porridge and meat that constituted the diet at Barcelona. Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:225, 228, 230; Gavitt, Charity and Children, 172-73, 189; Ordinacions, xx-xxi.

76. On June 24, 1374, for example, sixteen sick adults and two children were in residence (Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil, 175).

77. Rubio Vela, "Infancia y marginación," 133.

78. As an example, Agnes, the widow of Ramon de Vall, a citizen of Barcelona, took on two eight-year-olds, Joan-Pere and Gràcia-Ventura. The former she promised to teach to read, while the latter was to be given twenty-five pounds as dowry ( Vinyoles and González, "Infants abandonats," 2:235-36, 241-42; Gavitt, Charity and Children, 248-50, 257). The unwanted children of slaves could in similar fashion be given out by their masters. In 1394, for example, a merchant of Barcelona gave Gabriela, the six-year-old daughter of his Muslim slave Marguerita, to another merchant; and in 1412 Elisenda, the widow of the merchant Jaume Texander, gave the infant daughter of her slave Magdalena to a Barcelona resident named Francesca on the understanding that the girl remain in service until the age of twenty, when she would be given a dowry to marry (Heers, Esclaves, 229-30). Children in general seem to have been a source of cheap domestic help for society's elite. The 1427 census at Florence, for example, reveals that 41.5 percent of male servants and 34.2 percent of female servants were children between the ages of eight and seventeen (Shahar, Children in the Middle Ages, 240). The French houses of bons-enfants, which in some ways functioned as training schools for future clergy, typically housed youths between the ages of nine and sixteen (Reitzel, "Bons-Enfants," 189).

79. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 227-40; Guilleré, Girona al segle XIV, 1:314. There was evidently no great consistency to apprenticeships, for the evidence from medieval Montpellier is different still. Here there is no direct correlation between the length of the apprenticeship contract and the particular craft; furthermore, children typically entered their training even later than in Catalonia, around age fourteen for boys and twelve for girls. See Kathryn L. Reyerson, "The Adolescent Apprentice/Worker in Medieval Montpellier," Journal of Family History 17 (1992): 355-56.

80. For a general discussion of apprenticeship, see Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 232-37.

81. Rubio Vela, "Infancia y marginación," 134-43; idem, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 183-85. Apprenticeships for the boys of Girona, for example, commenced generally between the ages of twelve and fourteen and lasted for terms of two years (hatters, bag makers, and shoemakers), three years (apothecaries, blacksmiths, and tanners), four years (furriers and sword makers), and six years (silversmiths and blanket makers) (Guilleré, Girona medieval, 80-81).

82. The social acceptance of prostitution might be tied to the medieval idea that it was sexuality without consequence, that is, that because prostitutes were considered to be sterile there could be no children (Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, 154).