How Medieval Children Actually Grew Up, Stage by Stage
One of the more poignant findings buried within medieval coroner’s records is the way in which children’s development followed a strikingly similar biologically-based pattern to what we’d today recognise, tracked purely via accident’s cause and place of occurrence.
Infants under a year spent the majority of their time in a cradle by the fire, largely passive and sedentary. Accordingly, their accidents were dominated by events involving the cradle’s fire being accidentally ignited, either by a smoldering ember or chicken-borne spark catching the straw. By two and three, this changes radically: toddlers, newly mobile and inquisitive, saw a huge increase in accidents associated with active exploration. The coroner’s records include falls down wells while chasing their reflections, following ducks into ponds and reaching for floating feathers in streams. Notably, the age group of two to three had 38 percent more recorded fatalities than did infancy, and the pattern tracks our own modern experience prior to parents learning techniques of childproofing a house unfit for a toddler – an approach that would have been an impossible task in the period due to the very nature of the domestic environment.
Accident rates dropped off sharply again between four and six, suggesting some level of behavioral instruction was having an effect, children at this age becoming old enough to be able to do simple tasks and yet still closely monitored by their parents. Partly responsible for this apparent drop was the mobility of the child allowing them to follow their parents from place to place rather than remaining at home. Between six and twelve, children took on chores – fetching, minding animals, gathering food – and by their teenage years their accident patterns were increasingly similar, though not identical, to those of adults.
The fact that this pattern held true across centuries and continents is oddly inspirational, in that however different the environments we live in, the stages of growing up remain stubbornly, reliably human.
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