Tag: family life

…The Islamic geographer and scholar Yaqut (d. 1229 [C.E.]) tells a distinctly uncharming story of life in [the Mongolian] steppe lands.

If a man begets a son, he would bring him up and provide for him and take care of him until he reaches puberty. Then he would hand him a bow and arrows and drive him from the family home crying, ‘Go fend for yourself!‘ Henceforward he would treat him both as a stranger and a foreigner. There are also among these people those who will sell their sons and daughters.

There are always harsh customs in hard lands…. Surplus children were an encumbrance to the survival of the family unit and the boys might become a possible challenge to the authority of the paterfamilias. Indeed, one way of reading Yaqut’s passage is that if you are prepared to kick your adolescent son out of your home and never acknowledge his existence thereafter, you may as well receive some profit from his departure and from your investment in his young life….

— Knights of Islam, Chapter 1

Indeed the medieval magnates had surprisingly little to do with their children. Almost immediately after birth, they were handed over to the care of a nurse whose duties, as described by Bartholomew the Englishman, included not only the physical care of the child, but also the display of affection which is now considered essentially maternal. According to Bartholomew the nurse’s duties were very extensive. She was ordained to nourish and feed the child, to give it suck, to kiss it if it fell, and comfort it if it wept, and to wash it when it was dirty. The nurse was also to teach the child to speak by sounding out the words for him, to dose him with medicines when necessary, and even to chew the toothless child’s meat so that he could swallow it. The mother must have been a rather remote figure. Discipline was always considered the father’s primary duty. Bartholomew specifically insisted that the father must treat his child with harshness and severity. He should teach him with scoldings and beatings, put him under wardens and tutors, and, above all, show “no glad cheer lest the child wax proud”. The old adage of “spare the rod and spoil the child” was firmly entrenched in all medieval treatises on the proper upbringing of children.

— A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century, pp. 45-46