page_title: Childhood in Scotland in the Middle Ages
section_title: Birth and infancy
hierarchical_section_title: Childhood in Scotland in the Middle Ages / Birth and infancy
caption_attribution_description: English: Stone font in St Ternan's Banchory
context_page_description: Childhood in Medieval Scotland includes all aspects of childhood within the geographical area that became the Kingdom of Scotland, from the end of Roman power in Great Britain, until the Renaissance and Reformation in the sixteenth century.
  Childhood mortality was high in Medieval Scotland. The archaeology of burial sites suggests that childhood illness were common. Many individuals in Scottish urban society were affected by childhood disease and accidents that significantly affected their life chances. Wet-nursing had become common by the fifteenth century. Fosterage was common among Highland clan leaders. From the age of three children took part in imaginative play and more formal games such as football, golf, archery, and various bowling games. The rich may have taken part in hunting and hawking and there is evidence from the sixteenth century of bear-baiting, cock-fighting and dogfighting.
  In Gaelic society there were schools for bards and after the introduction of Christianity schools developed as part of monasteries and other religious institutions. There were also petty schools, more common in rural areas and providing an elementary education.
context_section_description: Childhood mortality was high in Medieval Scotland. Children were often baptised rapidly, by laymen and occasionally by midwives, because of the belief that children that died unbaptised would be dammed. It was more normally undertaken in a church and was a means of creating wider spiritual kinship with godparents.
  Cemeteries may not represent a cross section of Medieval society, but in one Aberdeen burial site 53 per cent of those buried were under the age of six and in one Linlithgow cemetery it was 58 per cent. The diseases that are easiest to spot in the archaeological record are those that caused a "metabolic insult" evident in surviving bones and teeth. These were common in children up until about the age of four. These may have been due to increased risk from disease once the protective antibodies in a mother's milk ended after weening. There was also greater exposure to hard and soft tissue trauma, and subsequent infection, as children became more mobile by crawling and toddling. Iron deficiency anaemia was common among children, probably caused by long-term breastfeeding by mothers that were themselves deficient in minerals. Common childhood diseases included measles, diphtheria and whooping-cough, while parasites were also common. The most badly affected individuals rarely made it beyond the age of 25, thus many individuals in Scottish urban society were affected by childhood disease and accidents that significantly affected their life chances.
  In Lowland noble and wealthy society by the fifteenth century the practice of wet-nursing had become common. In Highland society there was a system of fosterage among clan leaders, where boys and girls would leave their parent's house to be brought up in that of other chiefs, creating a fictive bond of kinship that helped cement alliances and mutual bonds of obligation. "Rait's Raving", a poem by a fifteenth-century gentleman, describes young children up to the age of three as only concerned with food, drink and sleep.
caption: Stone font in St Ternan's Church, Banchory
exif: {}