This is a speech that I delivered to the Marlowe Society in Canterbury on 8 June 2013:
An early Jacobean swaddled baby
A very important birth took place in Canterbury in
the 1560s. It was that of modern English midwifery. Three years after the first
son of John and Katherine Marlowe arrived in the parish of St. George the
Martyr, the ancient profession finally received recognition and regulation. In
the chapter house of Canterbury Cathedral, Archbishop Matthew Parker
administered the first English oath of its kind to a woman named Eleanor Pead.
The content of this oath, recorded in Strype’s Annals of the Reformation,
illuminates the nature of childbirth in the period that Katherine bore her
family, particularly post-Reformation concerns regarding the customs and
superstitions of the lying-in room. It raises questions of baptism, witchcraft,
violence, deception, illegitimacy and poverty in Christopher Marlowe’s city,
which will form the basis of this talk. By 1567, Eleanor was an established
practitioner: she may have been the midwife recorded as living near the
Marlowes in their house on the corner of St George’s Street and St George’s
Lane, or an associate of hers. There is even a chance that her experienced
hands helped bring Christopher and his siblings into the world.
This portrait is reputed to be of Christopher Marlowe
Katherine’s childbearing record is typical of its
times. Over a period of fourteen years, she bore nine children. Five of them
reached adulthood. The average interval between the birth of one and conception
of another was thirteen months, suggesting that she was breastfeeding for the
recommended period of a year, although these intervals did vary. For example,
after Christopher’s birth, her next recorded conception, with her daughter
Margaret, did not occur for over two years, whereas, after the deliveries of
both Jane and the first boy called Thomas, she fell pregnant again in only
three months. This was a fairly punishing physical regime, with each additional
child increasing her risk of mortality, taking a further toll on her body and adding
to her domestic workload. In enduring this, as well as the general contemporary
perils to health and the virulent outbreaks of bubonic plague that decimated
the Marlowe’s parish by a third in 1564 and again, by a half in 1575, Katherine
proved herself to be a survivor. Others in her immediate circle of family and
friends were not so fortunate.
The twenty year old John Marlowe arrived in
Canterbury in 1556, having grown up in nearby Ospringe. Three years later he
was apprenticed to shoemaker Gerard Richardson and two years after that, on May
22 1561, he was married to Katherine Arthur of Dover. Their first child was
conceived three months later. This again, was typical. My analysis of the
parish records of a number of Essex towns and villages indicates that around
one in five brides were already in their first trimester at the time of
marriage, a further one in eight conceived around the time of the ceremony,
giving birth almost exactly nine months later, whilst a quarter, like
Katherine, fell pregnant in the first three months. Medical texts of the era
did describe the act of love, giving clues about the way performance and ritual
could influence conception but I prefer to let John and Katherine’s son draw a
more poetic veil over the occasion. So, taken from his translation of Ovid’s
fifth elegy:
“Stark naked as she stood before myne eye
Not one wen in her body could I spy.
What arms and shoulders did I touch and see
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me!
How smooth a belly under her waist saw I
How large a leg and what a lusty thigh.
To leave the rest, all liked me passing well,
I clinged her naked body, down she fell.”
The Marlowes' house, destroyed by bombing in 1942.
There were no over-the-counter pregnancy tests in
Katherine’s day. Doctors may have diagnosed her condition by examining her urine,
with one text of 1552 describing that of a pregnant woman as a “clear pale
lemon colour leaning towards off-white, having a cloud on its surface.” The
practise of mixing wine with urine may actually have produced reliable results,
as alcohol does actually react with some elements of urine. Other sources
recommended observing a needle left to rust or a nettle turning black when
placed in the liquid. Without reliable diagnostic tools, Katherine would have
begun to wonder if she was expecting in the summer of 1561 yet she could not be
absolutely certain until her quickening, at around five months, that October.
Some women mistook the signs altogether. As recently as 1555 and 1557, Queen
Mary had undergone two phantom pregnancies, sadly, producing no child from her
swollen belly even though the first reputed birth was reported and celebrated
in London. The Marlowe’s daughter, Mary, arrived a year after their wedding and
was christened in the church of St George the Martyr on 21 May 1562, the day
before their first anniversary.
All that remains of the church of St George the Martyr, where the Marlowe children were baptised
Almost
exactly a year later, Katherine conceived for a second time. This interval is
highly suggestive. Setting aside the more complex questions of fertility,
abstinence and rudimentary birth control, it implies that like most women outside
the aristocracy, Katherine Marlowe breastfed her baby. Royalty and noblewomen
usually hired wet nurses to allow them to resume their duties earlier and for
their fertility to more quickly return. Breastfeeding was convenient, safe and
reliable for infants of the Marlowe’s class and, in theory, its contraceptive
benefits could protect the recovering mother from conceiving again too quickly.
In Christopher Marlowe’s plays, the breast is often synonymous with life. In
Tamburlaine, “life and soul hover” in the breast, and it is frequently offered
as a place which will accommodate a weapon or death-wound, resulting in the
loss of life. Dido claims that Aeneas was suckled by “tigers of Hercynia,”
echoing the belief that babies could imbibe the characteristics of the creature
that suckled them, in this case, a fierce cruelty. More mundanely, Elizabethan
advice warned the suckling mother to avoid harsh flavours such as garlic and
spices and not to drink strong alcohol.
Katherine may also have used some of the folklore
remedies from this time to assist her milk flow, such as wearing a gold or
steel chain between her breasts or following the strange ritual of sipping milk
taken from a cow of a single colour and spitting it out into a stream. Equally
she may have used common herbs such as mallow, mint and even bitter wormwood to
soothe sore breasts or lain cabbage leaves on them. Baby girls were
traditionally suckled for less time than boys, as they were considered to be
more independent. Their brothers often continued at the breast for up to two
years, so it is interesting to note that after Christopher’s birth in February
1564, Katherine is not recorded as having conceived again for twenty-five
months. She fell pregnant with their third child, Margaret, in March 1566.
For Katherine, six more children would follow. Of
them, the next three would be lost before reaching adulthood; two sons born in
October 1568 and the summer of 1570 would die soon after birth. Within weeks of
the first loss, Katherine had conceived her daughter Jane, who arrived between
these two, on August 20, 1569. This new baby survived the process of delivery,
and the dangerous years of childhood, only to die at the age of thirteen: I
will be returning to her fate later. Other mothers in Canterbury and the
surrounding areas experienced similar patterns of conception to Katherine. The
wife of Harry Finch, also resident in the parish of St George the Martyr,
delivered six surviving children in nine years, with an average interval of a
year between each one. Anne Finch of nearby Faversham conceived more quickly
after delivery, at around ten months on average, whilst Dorothee Finch, also of
Faversham, had a longer average conception interval of fourteen months. These
records though, do not include the losses that women sustained when pregnancies
did not reach full term or resulted in stillbirth.
Infant mortality rates
during the Elizabethan period were shockingly high. A regular feature of parish
registers is the record of an infant’s birth and death taking place on the same
day, when circumstances necessitated christening by the midwife at home. Part
of Canterbury midwife Eleanor Pead’s oath required her to swear to use the
phrase, “I christen thee in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost,” rather than using “profane words” and to perform the baptism with plain
water, instead of than the more fashionable rose or damask perfumed water.
Otherwise, like Christopher, the Marlowe’s later children were baptised in the
thirteenth century octagonal font in the nearby church of St George the Martyr.
An early Jacobean baby, William Larkin, dressed in his finery
The Marlowes were more lucky with their final
children, Anne, Dorothy and Thomas number two, who were born in 1571, 1573 and
1576 and all lived to adulthood. In fact, the family’s rate of infant
mortality, losing one in three as children and a further daughter in her teens,
was better than many. The gap of three years between the final two children
could perhaps indicate the dwindling of Katherine’s fertility, as a similar
pattern can be seen in other women’s childbearing records, such as Anne Finch
of Faversham, whose final baby came almost four years after her penultimate
one. Perhaps the Marlowes assumed there would be no more children and were
caught out. There is also the possibility that other pregnancies occurred
during this time but were not carried to term and would not therefore, be
recorded, or that the pair deliberately practised some form of birth control or
abstinence. This period did coincide with a virulent outbreak of the plague in
the city, so survival rather than reproduction may have been the priority. In
the previous outbreak, John Marlowe had seen his friend Harman Verson’s entire
family wiped out.
*
What was the process of delivery like for an
Elizabethan mother like Katherine ? She would have borne her children at home,
which was not as routine as it sounds. Some young wives chose to labour in the
homes of their parents but Katherine’s Dover roots, although not prohibitive,
made a Canterbury birth easier. She probably lay in a four poster bed, with its
flock mattress and curtains hanging from rods, an example of which is listed in
a 1605 inventory of her goods. In the days leading up to her confinement, she
would have waddled across to St George’s church to take communion, the blessing
of which would extend to her unborn child during the approaching period of
danger. And it was a very real danger, which mother and baby would be lucky to
survive.
Even though she knew what to expect by the 1570s,
Katherine’s chances of injury, infection and death increased with each child
she bore, and mindful of the danger, she may have turned to some of the
birthing talismen or charms of the day. Women typically used a variety of items
such as gem stones, pieces of tin, cheese or butter engraved with charms, belts
hung with cowrie shells, as well as potions including such strange ingredients
as powdered ants’ eggs. As there was no pain relief in the modern sense, these
may have acted as a panacea by giving a woman some limited degree of control or
sense of ownership over a frightening and painful ordeal. Anything that helped
the mother to relax, as far as possible, could have contributed to an easier
labour.
Also used as birthing aids were girdles, of a real
or symbolic nature. Mephistopheles makes Dr Faustus invisible by the use of a
magic girdle, which was the traditional item that English queens used to wear
to assist labour before the Reformation. Elizabeth of York and Catherine of
Aragon wore the Westminster girdle of Our Lady but the destruction of relics
and icons in the 1530s and 40s substituted their reputed healing power with
something more sinister, which Marlowe exploits in the play.
Dr Faustus and the Devil
According to custom, John would have been excluded
from the birth room and Katherine would have put herself in the capable hands
of a midwife and several attending women, or gossips. So long as the child
presented itself head first and everything else was relatively
straight-forward, her labour would have progressed well. If the baby was
breech, or an arm or leg showed first, then her chances of survival began to
decrease. As part of her oath, Eleanor Pead swore that she would “be ready to
help poor as well as rich women in labour” and that she would not “dismember,
destroy or pull off” the limb of any child during the process. Sometimes, when
a son was desired, the baby was stillborn or a live child was born with what
was considered some form of defect, it was substituted for another. The bizarre
case of Agnes Bowker, in 1569, saw her and her midwife claiming that she had
delivered the skinned body of a dead cat, in circumstances and for motives that
are still unclear. Two years earlier, Eleanor had sworn not to “suffer any
other body’s child to be brought to the place of a natural child.”
Labouring mothers were
also thought to be vulnerable to supernatural influences as they hovering on
the margin of life and death and in the eyes of the church, midwives were
uniquely placed to exploit this. Clergymen worried about the use of charms and
old practises associated with witchcraft, magic and Pagan rites, suspecting
them of making extra money by supplying witches with items for their cauldrons.
Shakespeare's witches from Macbeth
Eleanor’s oath forbade
her from retaining such items as the caul, placenta and umbilical cord, even
body parts, like Shakespeare’s “finger of birth-strangled babe,” delivered in a
ditch. There
was a particular traffic in cauls, as these were believed to have powers to
protect the bearer from drowning, so they were much sought after by
sailors. We also have Faustus at one
stage proposing to build an altar and a church to Beelzebub and offer him
“lukewarm blood of new born babes.” Many of the herbs associated with
childbirth, which were used by midwives came with associated rituals, such as
being picked in moonlight or at midnight whilst a charm was muttered. Thus, the
midwife, who was usually a woman of experienced years, also a repository of
women’s secrets and skills, could easily attract an accusation of witchcraft. In
1566, when the future James I was born in Scotland, an attendant to his mother,
Mary Queen of Scots, is reputed to have used sorcery to attempt to divert her
labour pains to another woman.
In Elegy eight, Marlowe
depicts a matchmaker called Dipsas, a medical woman or witch, whom he calls a
“trot,” after the twelfth century female doctor Trotula, also Chaucer’s Dame
Trot:
“She magic arts and
Thessale charms doth know
And makes large streams
back to their fountains flow.
She knows with grass,
with threads on wrong wheels spun
And what, with mares’
rank humour may be done.
When she will, clouds
the darken’d heaven obscure,
When she will, day
shines everywhere most pure.”
When Christopher was seven years old, a Mother
Hudson, of the parish of St Mary’s, near the Donjeon, not too far removed from
the Marlowe’s home, was presented before a Grand Jury under suspicion of
witchcraft. No doubt such a case would have been the subject of local gossip.
Later, the playwright would depict Faustus being seduced by the concealed arts,
which he considers enticing, challenging and superior; “both law and physic are
for petty wits, ‘tis magic, magic, that ravished me,” and he feeds or “surfeits
upon necromancy.” The elegy’s trot, Dispas, “with long charms the solid earth
divides” and can “draw chaste women to incontinence.” Midwife Eleanor swore “I
will not use any kind of sorcery or incantations in the time of travail of any
woman.”
Returning to births in
the Marlowe family, it transpired that Katherine’s daughter Jane, born in 1569
was less fortunate than her mother. She married young, at just twelve and died
in childbirth the following year. While such an experience feels horrific to a
modern audience, it was not uncommon at the time, being determined by the onset
of puberty in the girl concerned, in line with the contemporary age of consent.
Jane Marlowe’s age, or
perhaps her correlative size, could well have been factors in her death.
Equally though, she could have been the victim of circumstances or the
imperfect contemporary understanding of hygiene. Roger Schofield’s essay “Did
the Mothers Really Die?” estimates that just under one per cent of Elizabethan
mothers died in childbed, although in cities, such as London’s densely packed
Aldgate, other studies indicate the figure was more like 2.35 per cent. Ian
Mortimer, author of the popular Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England,
places it at two per cent, or one in fifty. Having lost siblings, Christopher
was aware of the fragility of life, a common Elizabethan motif that finds its
way into the literature of the times; perhaps most apt is Tamburlaine’s comment
“our
life is frail and we may die today.” When it came to saving the lives of mother and
child, a midwife’s interventions in such cases could range from the minimal to
the downright harmful. The Elizabethans believed that illness and infection
were transmitted through smell, hence the use of elaborate nosegays and
pomanders as well as the beaks of later plague doctors, yet there was little
understanding of the need to wash hands and prevent cross-contamination. The
dirty hands of midwives must have cost many maternal lives.
*
One of the reasons for the introduction of Eleanor
Pead’s oath was illegitimacy. Her vows were drafted in tandem with the new
phase of Elizabethan Poor Laws and were part of a wider attempt to track down
the fathers of such children and make them accept social and financial
responsibility. Illegitimate children would have been cared for at the expense
of the parish in which they were born, so the church was keen to ensure that
parents were held accountable. Eleanor’s oath is placed between the 1563 law to
categorised the different types of poor, and the 1574 imposition of compulsory
taxes to support those in need. Illegitimacy was a problem in Elizabethan
England; not necessarily of epic proportions but it was a culture that was very
conscious of an individual’s origins.
Contemporary image of an Elizabethan beggar
When Christopher Marlowe uses the words “born” and
“birth” in his plays, it is primarily to identify a person’s social rank,
indicating when upstarts are attempting to overreach their station. The next
most common occurrence is when a character is described as base-born, of lowly
birth and, as a result, of a crude and vulgar disposition. In some cases in his
works, individuals identify the correlation between the positions of the stars
in the heavens and the moment of their birth, inferring some greater destiny,
beyond their mean origins. In Marlowe’s time, baseness and illegitimacy were
considered key indicators of a person’s worth. In the Baines Note, the Harley
Manuscript testimony of Richard Baines, which reputedly contained “the opinion
of one Christopher Marley concerning his damnable judgement of religion and scorn
of the word of God,” perhaps the worst blasphemy of all, is the assertion that,
(and I quote) “Christ was a bastard.”
The midwife could be a
figure of dread to an unmarried mother, playing an increasingly central role in
court paternity examinations and the report of illegitimate births, such as the
1573 labour of spinster Agnes Hollway in Canterbury, which was reported to the
ecclesiastical court. One of the key duties of the new
profession was the attribution of paternity in cases of babies born to unmarried
mothers. The midwife was expected to take advantage of the woman’s debility and
fear, in the most extreme moments of labour, to cross-question her and
ascertain the father’s identity. For the labouring mother, afraid and often
deserted by the father, it meant that the one person on whom she was most
hoping to rely, was also the one she could least trust. The court rolls include
phrases from examinations such as “when
she was in peril of her life and to her thinking more likely to die than to
live” and “being in very grievous pain and great peril of death before the
midwife until her deliverance.”
Cases in East Kent indicate that illegitimate births
were not uncommon. In the parish of Rolvenden, in the Kent countryside but
still in the Canterbury diocese, Margery Deedes, a midwife and four other women
who had attended the delivery of Anne Jones were summoned to the local court to
answer concerning the child’s paternity. Another baptismal record there, of
1570, contains the additional note “the mother has confessed before the midwife
and other honest women at the very birth of the child.” One Canterbury man, a
baker from the Westgate area, called John Davison, was summoned to appear and
answer concerning being the reputed father of a bastard child born to Annis
Ferriman, a spinster of Chartham. The punishments could be severe, with fathers
being required to make weekly payments until the child reached a certain age,
sometimes thirteen, or whenever they could earn their own living. The parents
could expect to be stripped to the waist and flogged in the streets, often in
front of the church or market place after evening or Sunday prayers. One grisly
ruling required that both were whipped “until the blood shall flow”.
In Canterbury, women considered to have been living
wanton lives were publicly shamed. In 1537, the wife of John Tyler, was
presented before the Grand Jury for “living viciously… for the which her
husband hath forsaken her and the Jury desire she may be banished by the feast
of St James next, under the pain of open punishment in the ducking stool.” The
year after the Marlowes were married, the jury were presented with “the wife of
Stephen Colyer, for that she is not of good name, nor fame, but liveth
viciously; for the which she hath been divers times banished, out of one ward
into another, and in conclusion banished by all the Council of the Shire of
Canterbury; and that, notwithstanding, she is abiding in the city, viciously
and idly using herself.” It is interesting that neither woman is identified by
their given name, instead being called “the wife of,” as their behaviour was
reprehensible for the shame it cast upon their husband and the institute of
marriage.
Christopher Marlowe’s fourth elegy depicts an
adulterous relationship, through the eyes of a male protagonist lusting after a
married woman:
“Thy husband to a banquet goes with me
Pray God it may his latest supper be
Shall I sit gazing as a bashful guest
While others touch the damsel I love best?”
“Mingle not thighs nor to his leg join thine
Nor thy soft foot with his hard foot combine.”
Clearly there was a fair bit of thigh mingling going
on among the bachelors and spinsters of Canterbury. Whilst mothers who produced
illegitimate children could not deny the fact, men who were judged to have
fathered illegitimate offspring could be fined and jailed if they refused to
comply. Another of the many inequalities in the expectations of male and female
behaviour governed the question of rape. Women were thought only to be able to
conceive if they had experienced pleasure during intercourse, so if a woman
fell pregnant as a result of a forced encounter, her allegation was considered
invalid. It is not surprising then, that some resorted to desperate measures,
attempting to bring about a self-inflicted abortion by the use of certain
herbs, which might have no effect at all or sometimes result in the death of
the mother herself. Sadly, there were also cases of abandonment and infanticide
in the city, prompted by social pressure or misunderstood post natal
depression. If proven by witnesses, these could result in the sentence of death
being passed on the perpetrator, who was usually the mother.
To explore the childbearing record of Katherine
Marlowe, in the context of the oath sworn by Eleanor Pead, is to open an
Elizabethan dialogue of paradoxes. It evokes the nature of pregnancy and birth
as characterised by questions of life and death, frailty and survival,
suffering and rejoicing. During delivery, women experienced real and
inescapable fears about their own survival, which, for unmarried mothers
translated as an uneasy relationship with their midwife, of dependency, denial
and exploitation, legitimacy and illegitimacy, acceptance and rejection,
nurture and abandonment. In attempting to gain some degree of ownership over
their labouring bodies, women like Katherine may have employed some of the old
superstitious methods, against which the church reacted in a battle of religion
against magic. In the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral, with the potential abuses
of midwifery considered worthy of legislation, Christopher Marlowe and his
siblings arrived in the world at a significant moment.
