Foundlings, children abandoned by their birth parents and raised by strangers, are common in myth and legend. In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell writes of the “ubiquitous founding foundling”, referring to the many founders of nations, religions, and dynasties whose stories included childhood abandonment: Ishmael, Moses, Romulus and Remus, Scyld, Knut. Even the king of the Greek gods, Zeus, was left in foster care as an infant to save him from his murderous father. Medieval romances take up this theme from their ancient precursors, giving heroic destinies and happy endings to children who seem at first to have been bereft of everything. But the foundling child is hardly a creature of myth, like a fairy or satyr. However fanciful or far-fetched the fates of the protagonists may be, the premise of child abandonment has a firm footing in reality. “Difficult social problems especially within the family - incest, rape, abandonment, illegitimacy - as well as issues of the larger community - inheritance, exile, orphanage, poverty, violence, social mobility, punishment, rehabilitation, territorial disputes - are subject to analysis and transformation.” (Laskaya and Salisbury 6) These stories are both a mirror and coping mechanism for real hopes and fears that the people who told and read them dealt with in their lives.
Does the frequency of child abandonment in medieval literature align with its occurrence in real life? Or is it, like amnesia, so useful as a plot device, that its common use in fiction belies its actual rarity? Accurate demographic information from the Middle Ages is very difficult to come by, and there would have been wide variation depending on the year and region. However, judging from canonical laws, religious writings addressing the issue, and information about populations at other times but in similar circumstances, the conclusion that parents often gave up their children is unavoidable. We have detailed records, for example, for late 18th century Toulouse, which show that a quarter of all the children born are known to have been abandoned. In poor areas this number was closer to forty percent. (Boswell 15) The circumstances in the Middle Ages were similar in that the majority of the population was very poor and there were no reliable means of birth control available. Canonical decrees compiled by Regino of Prum in 906 reiterate pre-existing Roman statutes concerning found children. The child could be raised as a free member of the household or as a slave. The abandoning parent could reclaim the child if they compensated the finder the cost of the child’s upkeep. Few laws exist from the Middle Ages that place legal penalties on the parent for abandoning or even selling the child. The extant laws mostly deal with whether and when the child can be reclaimed. There is particular sympathy expressed by many clerics for parents who are forced by poverty to part with their children. There seems to be a general acceptance that such abandonment is unfortunate but often necessary. (Boswell)
The children abandoned in the literature, though, are not often from poor families. Their parents are nearly always high born and wealthy. But the motivations of these elite literary birth parents were not unfamiliar to actual medieval lords and ladies.
In Lay le Freine, a mother gives birth to twins. She is of the nobility and can certainly afford to care for them, but she is afraid of being accused of adultery. Ironically, it is she herself who, envious of another woman, promulgated the idea that twins are the result of two different fathers. The idea that anything unusual about a birth suggested sexual immorality on the part of the parents was prevalent. (Laskaya and Salisbury 62)
The impulse to abandon one of a set of twins may also reflect a particular anxiety of the nobility in the Middle Ages about division of inheritance. We see it expressed also in Yvaine, in which the elder of two sisters wishes to claim the entire inheritance for herself. There was often such strife between siblings, and families worried that their power would be weakened if they had to divide their estate among too many children. Most noble parents in the early Middle Ages seem to have limited the number of legitimate children they kept to about three. The practice of oblation, offering a child to the service of God in a monastery or convent, was the most common outlet for the superfluous children of the nobility. Formal oblation required the presence of the parents and, in the later Middle Ages, often required a gift to the monastery. However, when a parent wished to dispose of a child discreetly, an anonymous “donation” might be made, as in Lay le Freine, in which the child is left in a tree outside an abbey. (Abandoned children were often left suspended in trees to protect them from being killed by wild animals until they were found.) Children might also be deliberately delivered into the care of a particular religious person, as Degarre was when left at the door of a holy hermit. (Boswell, 253) For several centuries oblation was considered binding on the child, even if they wished to leave once they were grown. However, by the 13th century oblates were given the (at least theoretical) opportunity to leave once they reached adolescence. Such strictures certainly do not seem to have come into play in the stories of Degarre, who left with the hermit’s blessing, or Le Freine, who did have to sneak away from the convent but did so with little difficulty and no repercussions.
At the time the lays were composed, society had implemented some solutions to the problem of dividing estates. “In most of Western Europe between about 1000 and 1200, legal, social, and cultural structures began to incorporate mechanisms to allow the maintenance of estates in the hands of a single heir, thereby greatly reducing the need to limit the number of legitimate children in wealthy households.” (Boswell, 271) The numbers of children in these wealthy households rose (272), but this created another problem. “With no land to inherit and little left to win in battle, the growing throng of cadet nobles in a Europe implementing rules of primogeniture and entailment found themselves restless and redundant, reduced to fighting mock battles in tournaments or joining foreign crusades for land and glory overseas.” (319) While sons were less frequently being handed over to the religious orders, many daughters of the nobility continued to be sent to convents. This caused a shortage in the numbers of noble maidens available for marriage to sons who were not the first born. To this large cohort of frustrated, discontented younger brothers, the world of romances like Yvaine - a literary landscape full of lands and ladies waiting to be won by anyone brave, strong, and worthy enough -must have been extremely appealing. These young men may have gladly traded places with a literary hero like Degarre, a young man with no family name but plenty of opportunity.
Degarre, like Le Freine and nearly every other literary foundling, was abandoned by a high born parent. Actual illegitimacy, rather than the fear of being accused of it, was the motivation for Degarre’s mother, who was raped by a fairy knight. Fairy knights were obviously not a common feature of life for young women, but rape certainly was. An attempt to avoid the shame and diminished marriage prospects that would accompany a pre-marital loss of virginity was likely a common motivation for giving up a child. Sometimes such illegitimate children were the result of incest. It is telling that Degarre’s mother is afraid that her own father will be believed to be the father of her child. The theme of incest becomes central to the story when Degarre, in the course of his search for his parents, bests his grandfather in combat and unwittingly wins his own mother as a bride. At least he is in good company. Pope Gregory and St. Alban both accidentally marry their mothers (and are themselves the offspring of incestuous relationships), according to medieval literature. “Medieval incest stories are so numerous that it is impossible even to mention them all,” observes Elizabeth Archibald in Incest and the Medieval Imagination. The spectre of unknowing incest is frequently raised by Church jurists and theologians, whose peculiar preoccupation with it seems absurd to our modern sensibilities. Hostensius, in his commentary on canon law concludes, “the exposing of infants might be a great sin because, the [child’s] relatives being in many cases unknown, he could have relations with a sister, or some other relative, and marry her.” (Boswell, 334) Why was there this bizarre preoccupation with accidental incest? One possible explanation is the difficulties created by newly instituted rules imposed by the Church prohibiting a wider range of “consanguinous” unions. Many of the prohibitions did not even depend on actual blood relationship. Some marriages undertaken in good faith were found to violate the broad new guidelines unbeknownst to the husband and wife. Such marriages could be annulled and their offspring declared illegitimate regardless of their age or number, and the parents’ conviction that they had been truly married notwithstanding. Of course this could be disastrous for the patrimony as well as for the future prospects of the individual children. (Boswell)
Yet stories of foundling children were not ultimately about catastrophes like inheritance disputes, illegitimacy, and incest. These stories may begin inauspiciously, but they nearly always have a happy ending. “The single most characteristic feature of high medieval abandonment literature is its hopefulness.” (Boswell 394) For Le Freine every incident after her abandonment is “a nearly steady progression away from isolation and toward connection and legitimacy within the secular community.”( Laskaya and Salisbury 62) The climactic moment of the abandoned child’s story is the anagnorisis, the moment when they are recognized and reunited with their natal family. Thus the foundling child’s story follows perfectly “the general pattern of romance - separation and reunion.” (2) This eventual reunion is made possible by a very real feature of medieval abandonment. Parents did often leave “tokens” and sometimes even instructions with the abandoned child. (Boswell, 126) The purpose of such tokens may have been hope that the child might receive better treatment or the assuaging of guilt, but it is clear that at least in some cases future recognition and reclamation was on the mind of the abandoning parent. The many laws that address the reclaiming of abandoned children suggest that it was not uncommon for parents to later seek them out. The fairy knight instructs Degarre’s mother to leave with him tokens specifically intended to allow him to find them: gloves and broken sword. These tokens also prevent Degarre from tragically reenacting the story of Oedipus. Gloves that will only fit his mother prevent him in the knick of time from consummating an incestuous marriage. His father retained the point of the broken sword. Degarre is prevented from repeating Oedipus’crime of patricide when his father recognizes the sword and produces the point. Of course they fit perfectly. There is swooning and a reunion. Le Freine is recognized when she offers the expensive blanket she had been wrapped in when left as a wedding present to her sister. Her mother, who had abandoned Le Freine expressly to avoid scandal, confesses all when she sees the blanket and Le Freine also produces a ring she was left with. It is typical in these stories for the joy of the recognition and reunion to somehow render irrelevant any previous shame or misfortune.
For joy as everyone knows
Lets sorrow soon be forgotten.
- Yvain, Chretien de Troyes
It is not only the parents and children who are reunited in these stories. Often the children bring their parents together and are made legitimate by a lawful marriage. Degarre urges his father to come to his mother who is “in gret mourning”. This little guilt trip works and his father and mother are wed. Gawain, in an account of his life from the 1100’s, is the illegitimate son of Arthur’s sister Anna and the son of a neighboring ruler who has been taken by their father King Uther as a hostage. He is abandoned as an infant, but “eventually he is reunited with his natal parents, whose irregular liaison is justified, at least in the storyteller’s eyes, by the nobility of their offspring.” (Boswell 371)
Thus, in the end social values are confirmed and the world is set right. “Plausible social contexts lend the poems an air of realism”(Laskaya and Salisbury 5) and somewhat less plausible happy endings ease anxieties common in the culture and offer hope. Similar stories of recognition and reunion have continued to fill this function. The 1930’s was the height of popularity for the comic strip about little orphan Annie. At that time economic desperation and lack of birth control were forcing many parents to make wrenching decisions like those of their medieval counterparts about whether to support and raise their child. A happy, hopeful fiction about an abandoned child fulfilled a cultural need. “To question the likelihood of these events is to overlook the real message they convey; the need of the societies that composed them, and of individuals within those societies, to believe that abandonment could result in a better life for their children, a need obviously created by an even more basic necessity - the necessity, in the absence of any other acceptable means of family limitation, of abandoning children” (Boswell 394) In the 1961 film The Parent Trap, the anagnorisis of separated twin sisters results in the remarriage of their divorced parents. At a time when divorce was increasingly a part of everyone’s life and a major source of cultural anxiety, it was relatable and realistic as a premise. However, as in the stories of Degarre and Gawain, the reuniting of the parents reaffirms traditional values. Abandonment narratives move the audience from a stark reminder of how things are to an idealized world in which everything is as it should be: the worthy find land and love, parents are married, and families are united.
.
Works Cited
Archibald, Elizabeth. Incest and the Medieval Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001. Print.
Boswell, John. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe
from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Print.
Chrétien de Troyes, and Burton Raffel. Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
E-book.
Laskaya, Anne, and Eve Salisbury. The Middle English Breton Lays. Kalamazoo, MI: Published
for TEAMS (the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in Association with the U of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan U, 1995. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment