Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/71

 and Sentiments. penetrate to the innermoft recefles of domeftic life. The Poenitentiale of archbifhop Theodore direds that " if a woman place her infant by the hearth, and the man put water in the cauldron, and it boil over, and the child be fcalded to death, the woman mufl do penance for her negligence. No. 36. Mother and Child. but the man is acquitted of blame."* As this accident mull: have been of very frequent occurrence to require a particular direftion in a code of laws, it implies great negligence in the Anglo-Saxon mothers, and feems to fhow that, commonly, at leall: at this early period, they had no cradles for their children, but laid them, fwaddled as they were, on the ground clofe by the fire, no doubt to keep them warm, and that they left them in this fituation. We are not informed if there were any fixed period during which the infant was kept in fwaddling-cloths, but probably when it was thought no longer neceifary to keep it in the arms or in the cradle, it was relieved from its bands, and allowed to crawl about the floor and take care of itfelf. Walter de Bibblefworth, the Anglo-Norman writer of the thir- teenth century already quoted, tells us briefly that a child is left to creep about before it has learnt to go on its feet : — Le cnfaunt coTer.t de chatouner A-vaunt ke Jache a pees ahr. miserit, et ebuUita aqua irifans superfusus moituus fuerit ; pro negligentia mater poeniteat, ct ille homo securus sit. When
 * Mater, si juxta focum infantem suum posueiit, et homo aquam in caldarium