BBC: Too Much, Too Young - Children of the Middle Ages

It's 1450.

England is on the brink of civil war.

And the life of one young woman is about to change forever.

In a world dominated by dynastic politics, wealth and power,

her future has been decided.

She's one of the richest heiresses in England.

And by noon, Margaret Beaufort will have married into one of the most powerful families in the country.

But this is no ordinary marriage.

Her husband-to-be is nearly eight years old, and she is not yet seven.

These were children burdened with adult responsibility.

And that, in the Middle Ages, was far from unusual.

It's often said that life must have been tough for medieval children.

And it's certainly true that it was hard enough just to survive.

Roughly half the population would die before they reached 18.

Although children grow up fast,

what's surprising is that the experience of childhood could be richly rewarding.

Contemporaries divided the medieval world into three orders -

those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked.

And this was a view of the world in which everyone had a role,

including children.

'I'm Dr Stephen Baxter.

'I've been studying the medieval period for almost 20 years,

'mostly looking at the adult world.'

But I've recently learned that if we try to see this period through the eyes of children,

we give ourselves a chance to view the Middle Ages in a completely new light.

The medieval period spans more than 1,000 years,

from the collapse of Roman Britain in the 5th century,

right up to the rise of the Tudor dynasty in the late 15th.

During this time, lowland Britain evolved from a world of warring kingdoms

into a nation, England, under one king,

and with a common language - English.

It was an age defined by three great challenges -

the fight for survival, the fight for power and the fight for salvation.

They all demanded lives of hard work and discipline,

from which not even children were exempt.

And each played its role in determining what it was like to be a medieval child.

By the 7th century, Christianity had swept across the country.

The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and peoples had once been pagan,

now they were converted to the Christian faith.

The landscape was being transformed by the monuments of a new religion,

one which was dominated by the idea of a single, all-powerful God

who offered the promise of eternal life.

People were urged to engage in a battle against sin,

to guarantee their place in heaven and escape the torments of hell.

And children were at the heart of this struggle.

There was a real tension in Christian attitudes towards children.

According to some texts, children were inherently evil.

"None is pure from sin,

"not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth."

But other biblical texts stressed the value of children,

adopting the view that children were innately pure,

and possessed the capacity for ultimate wisdom.

"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,

"thou hast perfected praise".

The question of whether children were born with or without sin

was central to Christianity,

as society grappled with how to lead a spiritual life.

And all this was acted out in the defining institutions of early Christian England - the monasteries.

This is Jarrow monastery near Newcastle, founded in the late 7th century.

The monks here devoted their lives to praying for the community at large.

And it wasn't just men's work.

Some monks entered the monastery at the age of seven.

And, for parents, it wasn't like dropping their kids off at school.

"Child Oblates" as they were called, didn't get to go home in the afternoon.

In fact, most spent the rest of their lives in the monastery.

And some never got to see their parents again.

This was a world dominated by sin and the search for salvation,

so the sooner a child engaged in the great battle for the soul, the better.

In about 680, a seven-year-old boy called Bede was sent here.

Just imagine what it must have been like for him when he first arrived.

First he'd have had to swap his clothes for standard-issue monastic garb.

Then he'd have to learn the rules. When to eat, when to sleep,

all in step with the tolling of the monastery bells.

Then he'd have to wake up at midnight, and again at 3am,

trooping inside this chapel for services.

And these were the first of several services held throughout the day,

a routine that was strictly enforced, every day of the year.

Bede is more commonly known as the Venerable Bede,

and despite the rigours of this regime, his intellectual life blossomed.

So much so that he later wrote the very first History of the English.

It's extraordinary to think it's still in print,

and still read, nearly 1,300 years later.

Unlike Bede, the children who didn't conform could be severely disciplined.

"As often as faults are committed by boys or by youths,

"let them be punished with severe fasts, or chastised with sharp blows

"in order that they may be cured."

"Monks who make mistakes in the oratory are to be punished,

"but boys for such faults shall be whipped."

Oblates were often the children of aristocrats.

So how could their parents abandon them to this life?

We might interpret this as callous behaviour by uncaring parents,

but I think to do so would be to misunderstand the medieval thought world.

Precisely because parents loved and cared for their children,

giving them away to a monastery

was just about the greatest sacrifice one could make for the love of God.

So what better than to place a child in the monastery who could pray hard for their salvations?

It was almost like buying an insurance policy,

for their the sake of their own souls, but also, the souls of their children,

and of their families and of their ancestors.

It would never have occurred to their parents to postpone this out of respect for childhood.

Medieval life wasn't just about the fight against sin -

it was also about the fight for survival.

Staying alive was a full-time job.

In the Middle Ages, England was very rural.

About 90% of its people lived in the countryside.

They were constantly at the mercy of weather ruining their harvests

and many of them had to pay cripplingly high rents to their landlords.

Like here in Barrington,

a Gloucestershire village clustered around this large green.

We know from Domesday Book that one of the people who held land here in 1086 was Aelfsige of Farringdon.

We know that he looked after several of the King's manors in this part of the world

after the Norman conquest.

He was an Englishman who made good after the conquest. Why? Because he was good at picking up rents.

So one can imagine him being a rather loathed figure among the peasant families of this village,

and probably a rather feared figure among the children.

Domesday Book also reveals it was a complex and hierarchical society.

There were about 65 peasant families living here towards the end of the 11th century.

There are 31 villani - that's a medium class peasant,

eight bordari - a much poorer peasant, and 25 slaves.

There's also a priest. But, of course, they were all adult males.

Where are the children?

This place must have been teeming with children,

and yet there's simply no mention of them in Domesday Book.

And that's not unusual.

They're invisible in most medieval documents,

because society then was dominated by men.

But there's one place where remarkable evidence can tell us how hard children fought to survive.

A village called Wharram Percy used to stand on this Yorkshire hillside.

Now, down in the valley, this is all that's left.

This is a beautifully atmospheric place.

A ruined church, surrounded by humps and bumps in the ground

where medieval houses once stood.

But it's also rather a melancholy place - to think that this is all that remains

of a once thriving village.

Graveyards are normally out of bounds to archaeologists.

But here, they were allowed to excavate the cemetery.

And they uncovered the largest burial ground of medieval village children ever found in England.

Their remains reveal the harsh realities of medieval life in extraordinary detail.

At the English Heritage laboratory in Portsmouth,

Dr Simon Mays has spent 20 years analysing their bones.

When we looked at the child skeletons, one of the first things that struck us

was how small they were, compared with modern children.

I've laid out here the skeleton of a ten-year-old from Wharram Percy

and the one we've got to compare it with is the same size

as a modern ten-year-old is.

So you can see the size difference between the two.

That's extraordinary.

So in theory, a child of ten ought to be that big.

That's right. So what accounts for the difference between the two?

I think primarily it's nutrition. It's the quality of their diet.

These people are not eating a very nutritious diet.

So diet helps explain the difference between these two bones.

This being the ten-year-old from Wharram Percy.

This being what they should have been at about that age.

And that translates to about a nine-inch difference in standing height -

at that age, that's quite considerable.

Was this child unfortunate to die so young? Was that common at Wharram Percy?

Well, quite a lot of them did die during childhood.

About half of the skeletons we have from the church yard

are of people who've died before they were in their late teens.

Half? Half, that's right. That's terrifying mortality rate.

50-50 chance of actually making it to adulthood.

Roughly speaking, that's right. Gosh.

With stunted growth caused by poor nutrition and half the children dead by their late teens,

these bones can tell a story that Domesday Book doesn't reveal -

just how often children lost the fight for survival.

As an historian, I usually work on documents, artefacts,

buildings, things left behind by adult males.

And it's frustratingly rare to hear the voices of children

in evidence that they themselves left behind.

So it's been very moving to come here

and see the physical remains of children at Wharram Percy.

Despite the high infant mortality rate, this was a very young society.

Roughly half the population was under 18.

So there weren't enough adults to work the land and to feed and clothe everybody.

Children had to be enlisted into the great challenge to survive.

They helped with everything, from looking after the animals to separating the wheat from the chaff.

So it's not quite child's play, but it is something that a child could do.

Chris Russell has been using traditional medieval farming methods for over 20 years.

You started at seven in the morning, and you went on. Yeah.

The children would have gone through this, it's a really boring job.

And just made sure that everything was taken out.

Despite being undernourished and often sick,

children were doing what we would now consider to be adult work.

And relatively young boys were expected to do hard manual labour.

So how old would you need to be before you'd be allowed to do this sort of work?

You'd have been nine, ten years old as an ox boy.

Because the ox man, as it were, the chap, he may have been on the plough behind.

So the boy would have been doing all the running and stumbling over the plough.

You've got to be quite energetic to keep them all in a straight line as well.

In the constant struggle to make ends meet, children worked hard and died young.

Does this suggest that medieval life was so tough

that parents didn't care about their children as we do today?

The answer lies at the National Archives at Kew in west London.

These are some of England's earliest coroner's rolls.

They were first put together in the 1270s,

so they're nearly 750 years old, and you can really tell that

working on them, the ink is beginning to fade.

And to be honest, the script's pretty tough to read, too.

And reading it isn't exactly a joy, either, because it tells a lot of tragic stories.