As historians of childhood, we are fascinated with early advice literature and what it tells us about what children ate in the past. There are many other useful sources, such as menus and paintings, which also give us some sense of children’s diets in earlier times. But hard evidence of what children actually ate is often hard to come by, particularly from the distant past. This is changing. We report here on two studies which are enhancing our understanding of children’s diets by usefully bringing together the multidisciplinary expertise of historians, archaeologists, and scientists.
Emerging scientific evidence looking at the remains of children living in medieval times is helping to flesh out our understanding of infant feeding and the diet of young children. In a study led by Patrick Mahoney from the University of Kent 3D imaging was used to look at the teeth (notably the microwear on the enamel) and the jaw bones of children who were buried between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries (Mahoney et al, 2016). The team have examined the remains of 44 children aged between one and eight years who were buried in St Gregory's Priory Cemetery in Canterbury. Their findings show that children were weaned on a pap-like mixture. However, the wear on enamel showed that children from four to six ate a distinctly more abrasive diet which probably included grains. It would seem therefore, that children were eating the meat, vegetable and milk pottages that were also a staple of adult diets.
Interestingly, the children's teeth from the medieval period did not seem to vary according to socio-economic status in this study: something one would expect with adults at that time. Higher status adults tended to eat white bread for example, whereas poorer adults ate rougher quality bread which would be more abrasive to the enamel of teeth. In addition, one might expect to see signs of tooth decay in the remains of richer adults, as, unlike today, sugar was something for the rich rather than poor owing to its prohibitive cost (Mintz, 1985). (It is worth noting here that sugar had come to Britain with soldiers returning from the Crusades in what is now known as the Middle East in the11th century but it was a rarified luxury, only for the wealthy, for many centuries). Therefore, whilst the poorer children would seem to have eaten what poorer adults ate, there seems to have been a qualitative difference in richer households in the diets of adults and children. We might speculate one of two reasons for this: that white bread and sugar were regarded as unhealthy for children, or perhaps that such foods were seen as too good - and too expensive (in the case of sugar) - to waste on children.
Research also points to there having been regional variations in children’s diet. In Nicole Burt’s (2013) research, the rib collagen of 51 children and eleven adult females in the late medieval Fishergate House cemetery in York (England) has been analysed to try to get some sense of the children’s weaning age and diet (up to age of six years). Despite coming from a low socio-economic group, once weaned at about the age of two years, these children’s remains showed higher levels of protein when compared to the women in the study. It seems they received lots of fish and meat when weaned, rather than a diet based primarily on grains: the diet of choice for children in other areas. .
All research raises new questions of course. And we’d love to know what a study of adult men’s physical remains would show in comparison to children and women in terms of their diet. Textual studies have shown preferential feeding of the male breadwinner within households in terms of receiving more meat, better quality meat, and sometimes additional vegetables, eggs and cheese (de Vault, 1991). A scientific analysis employing the methodology of Burt’s study – looking across age and gender - might give some indication of the extent to which this happened in practice.
We say studies like this provide ‘hard evidence’ because the science enables us to make claims as to what children actually ate, albeit the kind of research we refer to here often draws on very small research samples. It avoids over-reliance on information from advice literature and from menus from institutions. Such sources tell us much about what was deemed suitable for children to eat in the past and also about the ideas about childhood that informed such views. However, as anyone who has ever tried to feed a child knows, children may well have been presented with food by their caregivers which they did not actually eat. Perhaps they only ate selected elements of what was given or swapped food surreptitiously with others or played with food rather than swallowing it. Our own research looking at children today has certainly shown this. Studies such as the two outlined in this post show is the value of bringing together different disciplines such as the sciences, history and archaeology. Through such collaborations we can hopefully develop a more nuanced understanding of just what children (and indeed adults) ate in the past.
References
Burt, Nicole, M. (2013) ‘Stable Isotope Ratio Analysis of Breastfeeding and Weaning Practices of Children From Medieval Fishergate House York, UK’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 152, pp. 407–416.
De Vault, Marjorie (1991) Feeding the Family: The Social Organisation of Caring as Gendered Work (London: University of Chicago Press).
Mahoney, Patrick and Christopher W. Schmidt, Chris Deter, Ashley Remy, Philip Slavin, Sarah E. Johns, Justyna J. Miszkiewicz, and Pia Nystrom (2016) 'Deciduous Enamel 3D Microwear Texture Analysis as an Indicator of Childhood Diet in Medieval Canterbury, England', Journal of Archaeological Science 66, pp. 128-136.
Mintz, Sidney, W. (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Penguin).
Image reference
A bioarchaeology workshop (Archaeology Department at Silesian Museum, Katowice, 2024), from Wikimedia Commons. File:02024 0840 Bioarchaeology Laboratory Workshop.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
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