[Sca-cooks] baby clothes

[Stefan li Rous]

Sieggy commented:
>     Did they differentiate baby genders back then? Given that infant
> mortality rates were horrendous by modern standards, and that you might have
> to have several to get one that lived to maturity, I would tend the think
> that baby clothes would be pretty generic in nature.

In some ways you are correct, but not for the reason(s) you give. At
least for the lower classes, once they were out of swaddling clothes,
they tended to be dressed alike, in tunics and just that. The differance
from today is no diapers. Diapers take a lot of water and energy to clean.
Neither of which was readily available. Confine the kid to a particular
area which is easy to clean and go back to your household chores. If
I remember correctly an area just outside the cottage door, usually
covered in cabbage plants got named for this.



There is a good book on medieval children called something like "The
Ties that Bind" that I got this info from. It has a lot of interesting
info, much of it drawn from parish death records. For those interested,
I suspect you can find more info on this book in the files in the
CHILDREN section of my files. I can't find my copy right now and I'm
afraid I don't have time right now to search the Florilegium for it. :-(

--
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris            Austin, Texas         StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****