The institution of fosterage was widely practised in medieval Ireland and was of great importance in establishing bonds within and between kin groups and in underpinning social ties. It involved arrangements for the maintenance and education of children — during at least a period of their childhood — by custodians other than their biological parents, had a very definite political aspect and is mentioned in some of the earliest literature produced in Ireland.Footnote 1 In Tírechán’s seventh-century account of the Christianisation of the island, for example, St Patrick is questioned as to the number of fosterers Jesus had,Footnote 2 and the fragmentary law tract Cáin Íarraith (‘The law of fosterage-fee’) (c.700) regulates many aspects of the conduct of fosterage and of the rights and responsibilities of both fosterer and fostered.Footnote 3 The practice has been the subject of much scholarly discussion, a great deal of which has been centred on the evidence of the early legal sources. Meanwhile, Thomas O’Donnell’s recently published monograph has as its focus the emotional ties formed between foster relations as revealed by medieval Irish narrative literature.Footnote 4 The anthropologist Peter Parkes has also found much of interest in comparing the practices that prevailed in Irish society with those elsewhere.Footnote 5
This article considers the positions various scholars have taken on the age at which fosterage began in medieval Ireland. It will emerge from this overview that there has been a lack of consensus on the matter. Several of those who advocated for the commencement of fosterage in infancy were writing in the first half of the twentieth century, while some of those who have taken a similar position in recent years have put forward evidence that does not always stand up to scrutiny. The article also considers the social convention known as milk kinship, whereby relationships were formed stemming from the nursing of children by a non-biological mother. Milk kinship was an institution common in societies where cattle breeding was central to the economy.Footnote 6 Such kinship may be based on literal or symbolic suckling. The latter type appears to be found in the famous passage in Patrick’s Confessio (fifth century), in which the saint refuses to suck the sailors’ breasts while attempting to flee Ireland.Footnote 7 Jacqueline Borsje suggests that the act of sucking may be a remnant of a pre-Christian ritual whereby a contract is made leaving the one who sucks subordinate to the one whose breast is sucked.Footnote 8 In return for his subjugation, the subordinate party may expect to be defended by his superior.Footnote 9 Dorothy Bray says the following of an incident involving Fergus mac Léti, when a dwarf sucked his breast: ‘[t]he aspect of suckling here is clearly ritualistic in its function and contractual in its effect, involving as it does the seeking and acquiring of protection’.Footnote 10 Neither here nor in the case of Patrick is there any ‘hint of a nurturing role’.Footnote 11 It remains to be pointed out that Sharon Arbuthnot makes a compelling argument that the dwarf did not suck Fergus’s breast. She sees a symbolic reference to friendship, alliance and trust in certain rituals in Irish literature involving the taking of a male’s breast in the hand.Footnote 12
Customs associated with breast-sucking apparently evolved from practices which promoted ‘interdomestic allegiance and tributary patronage’, and related hierarchical foster relations were common in peripheral regions of Europe, vestiges of which survived until quite recently. In a study founded on field work undertaken in the Balkans in the mid twentieth century, Eugene Hammel describes milk kinship in Serbia as ‘the fictive kinship relationship between two children suckled by the same woman, but otherwise unrelated’. Islamic law recognises three different kinds of kinship, founded on blood (nasab), affinity (musahara) and milk (ridā’a). In her research into the custom in the Arabic world, which had declined or even become obsolete among the urban elite by the time of her field work in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, Soraya Altorki writes of the historical practice that a relationship developed not only between the children suckled, but also between woman and child: ‘[ridā’a] denotes the relationship between a child and a woman, not its own mother, who nursed it’.Footnote 13
In medieval Irish society, as in certain others, milk kinship created a relationship between those involved, and certain relatives of theirs, which entailed the same rights and responsibilities as pertained to blood relatives.Footnote 14 According to Cáin Lánamna (c.700), the law governing relationships, the relationship between foster mother and foster son is on equal terms with that between biological mother and son.Footnote 15 Parkes suggests that Hammel’s analysis can be broadened to treat of other kinds of ‘constructed kinship’ in the historical ethnography of Europe and Asia.Footnote 16
The implications of the semantic range of the Old IrishFootnote 17 verb ailid (‘fosters’) are of importance to this discussion, as are the ways in which relationships between biological parents and their infant children are presented in the literature. Instances of wet-nursing in the literature will also be highlighted, to consider whether it was commonly part of the fosterage arrangements. There was no universal approach to fosterage in medieval Ireland, and to gain a better understanding of the institution it is necessary to give some thought to the various types of fosterage for which provision was made under law. This will also entail reflecting on when fosterage began and on the different stages in the period of fosterage which are provided for in the law tracts. Fosterage was a resilient institution which survived the medieval period persisting into the modern, so it is also worth considering late references to milk kinship, particularly those of foreign observers. Finally, several references in the medieval literature to men purportedly nursing children will be adverted to, since this may speak to the degree to which the role was expected of those who took custody of infants. This examination will rely on the extant legal material and narrative literature to provide a better understanding of both women’s history and the history of childcare in medieval Ireland. It has been observed that many ‘early Irish tales … have pervasive legal implications, for they depict a society in which law is a very active element’.Footnote 18 Furthermore:
[g]iven the literary convention that tales set in the distant past were primarily of relevance to the time and milieu in which they were redacted, it is clear that a knowledge of social idiom and particularly of the legal system is crucial to a deeper understanding of early Irish saga.Footnote 19
The law tracts, on which the legal aspect of the discussion is based, originate mostly in the seventh and eighth centuries, yet are usually preserved in later manuscripts.Footnote 20 It is difficult to know exactly how long they applied in the form in which they survive.
I
I was first drawn to questions relating to the age at which fosterage began by the character Sinech Cró, who appears in the king tale Cath Cairn Chonaill (‘The battle of Carn Conaill)’.Footnote 21 She is said to have fostered Díarmait mac Áedo Sláine, a mid-seventh-century joint-king of Tara. Her name is an unusual one.Footnote 22 If its first element was based on the word sine (‘teat, pap’), it may mean ‘teated one’. Such a derivation raises questions about the role of the foster mother and whether it involved wet-nursing. Even if the name were to have the meaning which I ascribe to it, this would not provide evidence of a societal norm. However, it may be significant that such a name should be given to a literary figure whom we are told engaged in fosterage, as the naming of a foster mother for a role associated with fosterage may well have resonated with a contemporary audience.
It is often said that fosterage in medieval Ireland began at seven,Footnote 23 an age at which a wet nurse is unnecessary. Kim McCone may, perhaps, be the most recent scholar to have advanced this thesis.Footnote 24 He writes, for example, that Cú Chulainn’s fosterage was unusual in requiring a wet nurse and states explicitly that seven was the age at which fosterage normally began.Footnote 25 Similarly, Ute Kühlmann states that fosterage usually began at seven, while acknowledging that exceptional cases existed,Footnote 26 and Edel Bhreathnach is largely in agreement.Footnote 27 Rudolf Thurneysen, however, wrote that children were given into fosterage im zartesten Alter (‘at the tenderest age’),Footnote 28 while Séamus Ó h-Innse recognised that ‘[c]hildren were sent to be fostered at the very earliest age’.Footnote 29 In one paper, Bronagh Ní Chonaill argues that not only did fosterage begin at a young age but that wet nurses were involved. The basis for this claim is unclear, however.Footnote 30 Elsewhere, she asserts that:
the legal material points to the possibility of a child entering into fosterage at any age, however young. The practice of wet-nursing as an optional first step in the overall fostering process is evident from a special, lifelong entitlement (to a particular payment) which was formed between foster- and biological children who shared the same cradle and mantle in the early stages of life within a household. This was a bond which was legally recognised and protected.Footnote 31
She cites ‘CIH 439.15‒8’ in support of this,Footnote 32 a passage from the so-called Díre-tract (c.700), which deals with compensation.Footnote 33 This passage on its own, however, appears to fall short of a proof that wet-nursing was ‘an optional first step in the overall fostering process’.Footnote 34 Caitlin Ellis wrote recently that fosterage ‘occurred early in life’ and that provisions ‘for swaddling clothes suggest that [it] could occur from infancy’.Footnote 35 As will be seen below, however, it is debatable whether there really was any such provision. While there is no consensus on the matter, there is evidence to corroborate the claims of those who have argued that fosterage could start at a very early age.
In eDIL, the verb ailid is translated as ‘nourishes, rears, fosters’.Footnote 36 It is impossible to know if these were once distinguished lexically. Parkes writes that while suckling and fosterage had become lexically conflated, ‘medieval Irish legends seem to have retained a moral partitioning of differential degrees of adoptive kinship through altram fosterage, where nurturant duties of adoptive parenthood and cliental allegiances of milk kinship remained fundamental’.Footnote 37 It is implied that the concepts of breastfeeding and fosterage, having become confused by the medieval period, were distinguished in prehistory. Edward John Gwynn, however, suggests they were never distinguished and that ‘fosterage may be considered as a natural development of nursing, arising when considerations of health or other special circumstances render it desirable to separate the child for a time from its parents’.Footnote 38
The Irish verb ailid is cognate with Latin alere (‘to suckle, nourish’).Footnote 39 Meanings embraced by the semantic range of alere include ‘to suckle, nurse, feed (offspring); to supply (a person, etc.) with food; (also pass[ive]) to be nurtured, grow; to rear’.Footnote 40 The Irish verb can have the meanings ‘to suckle, nourish’ also. It is clear, for example, that this is what is meant in an Old Irish poem deemed by its editor to be of pagan origin and ‘remodelled by a Christian poet’ in the first half of the eighth century: Admuiniur Senach sechtamserach | conaltar mnā sīde for bruinnib būais.Footnote 41
In considering the usage of ailid, it is well to begin with Mary and Jesus. There is no relationship between mother and infant more frequently referred to in medieval Irish literature than theirs, and instances of her suckling the Christ-child are not scarce. Here is one in a fifteenth-century poem by Tadhg Óg Ó hUiginn:Footnote 42
Síthlad, síthlód means ‘act of flowing, pouring forth’.Footnote 44 It may be better, therefore, to render dia do shíothlódh as ‘a sufficient pouring forth’ or ‘a sufficient flowing’ rather than the editor’s ‘wondrous peace-making’. The motif of Mary appeasing the infant Christ by breastfeeding, thereby calming Him, is common in Irish bardic poetry.Footnote 45 In the later medieval period, this may be replaced by more aggressive posturing (originating on the continent) whereby the Virgin bears her breast to a more mature Christ, in order to remind Him of erstwhile suckling for which He is in her debt.Footnote 46
It is also significant that ailid is used in Trom an suan-so ar síol Ádhaimh, regardless of whether a biological or foster mother nourishes the child. Blathmac (mid eighth century) provides an early example of a mother nourishing a child who is undoubtedly her biological rather than foster son. It is another reference to Mary and Jesus: [s]irsan dot mac – dígrais dál! | ron-ailt-siu a oenurán.Footnote 47 It is apparent that breastfeeding is what is meant here, as Joseph’s role in raising Jesus is acknowledged in the same poem. It may be noted that Jesus is referred to as Joseph’s son in quatrain 19, where the angel advises him to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt. In Félire Óengusso (ninth century), however, Joseph is referred to as aite Issu (‘Jesus’s foster father’).Footnote 48 James Carney uses a different verb in translating a similar line to the one cited above recalling the Holy Family’s return to Israel after Herod’s death: du-breth mac ríg nime nél | du altrum i tír Israel.Footnote 49 Elsewhere, Blathmac refers to [i]n mac ronn-ucais, ron-ailt.Footnote 50
The birth of Christ is obviously an exceptional case. It is not difficult to imagine a tradition developing in which God placed His Son Jesus in fosterage with Mary. Mary is referred to as both máthair (‘mother’) and muime (‘foster mother’) in a single quatrain of ‘The Irish gospel of Thomas’ (c.700).Footnote 51 It was also possible for the devout poet to see in God both a father and a foster father: [m]’athair mór muinterach … [m]’oite ocus m’anmchara.Footnote 52 It is clear that the image of Mary as muime in ‘The Irish gospel of Thomas’ is linked to her suckling the Christ-child:
There is nothing exceptional about this reference to Mary as foster mother.Footnote 54 Christ is called Mac Maire, not dalta, more often than anything else in poetry of the period 700‒1200.Footnote 55 On the other hand, St Brigit is sometimes referred to as Jesus’s mother (e.g. [b]id alamaire mar-Choimded mathair).Footnote 56 In the poems in which she is described as muime, Mary is usually also referred to as Jesus’s mother, often in the same quatrain, sometimes even in the same line, as in the quatrain quoted above from ‘The Irish gospel of Thomas’, or in this thirteenth-century example: is í a mháthair ’s a mhuime.Footnote 57 Was the mother specifically associated with the birth of the child and the muime with its sustenance, regardless of whether the latter was the biological or foster mother? Or did a tradition exist in which Mary, God’s client, fosters the son of her patron? It is a question worthy of further analysis, though difficult, at this remove, to answer definitively.
Altram, the verbal noun of ailid, has been defined as the ‘act of nurturing, fostering; nurture, fosterage’.Footnote 58 In the text Immathcor nAilella ocus Airt (‘Mutual restitution between Ailill and Art’) (c.700), which describes a lawsuit on the maintenance of children after marital breakdown, the verb ailid is also used with regard to an abandoned mother who is rearing her biological children. When twins are born to Sadb, daughter of Conn Cétchathach, Ailill Aulomm leaves her. Sadb is left to raise their family alone: rus-n-alt Sadb hi Comailt hUethne.Footnote 59 As they are biologically hers, and not foster children, it seems to me that Corthals’s translation of the line is not entirely satisfactory: ‘Sadb fostered them in Comalt Uaithne’.Footnote 60 A verb such as ‘reared’ would be better, which he actually employs in the translation of the introduction accompanying the rhetoric: rocomalt-sí a mac 7 a hingean.Footnote 61 In the Old Irish king tale Togail Bruidne Da Derga (‘The destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’), three distinct groups have custody of Conaire’s altram, the king who is the central figure in the text: those are the two men that fostered his mother, the two named Maine Milscothach, and the infant’s own biological mother, Mess Búachalla.Footnote 62
The following example of a biological parent engaging in altram where the other parent is incompetent is from BL, MS Egerton 88, f. 6a, a sixteenth-century manuscript containing, among other things, legal material from the Old and Middle Irish periods: [b]ean chodnach beres mac do druth dleagar di a altrum cu diailtre.Footnote 63 When both parents are incompetent, the responsibility falls on both their respective families: [b]ean mear bereas mac do druth con alur itir fine maithre 7 aithre.Footnote 64 It may be inferred from the foregoing that the verb ailid not only refers to the institution of fosterage but to the rearing and nourishing of children also. One must exercise caution in choosing a verb to translate it.
II
It is fitting at this point to attempt to demonstrate that wet nurses were a familiar feature of medieval Irish society, as the examples we have seen heretofore involve the biological mother engaging in altram and wet nurses, obviously, are required to establish a milk-kinship bond. It is accepted that fosterage was an institution of great importance. Deep, long-lasting relationships and ensuing loyalty were undoubtedly often characteristic of the foster-kin connections created.Footnote 65 These emotional ties are treated of at length in O’Donnell’s rich study, mentioned above.Footnote 66 The use of affectionate terms like buime/muime and aite to refer to foster parents where the formal máthair and athair refer to biological ones is often adduced as evidence of the strength of the bond between foster kin. Thomas Charles-Edwards, for example, refers to terms in ‘father-mother’ and ‘daddy-mummy’ sets.Footnote 67 Such terms also attest to the ubiquitousness of the institution of fosterage in medieval Irish society:
In most Indo-European languages the words for ‘father’ and ‘mother’ have intimate forms, used particularly in childhood … In Old Irish the intimate forms have been transferred to the fosterparents … If fosterage were not common … this shift in meaning could not have occurred.Footnote 68
It seems reasonable to suggest that the terms of affection are the earliest ones a child learns as speech first develops. The sound mā (reduplicated mamā/māmā) is a feature of the earliest speech of the child. Forms like muime are a development of this. Latin mamma (‘breast’) is from the same root.Footnote 69 The muime is the one who breastfeeds the infant. This aspect of language development suggests fosterage began very early indeed in the life of the infant. In one Early Modern medical tract, the muime is instructed to rub butter to a child’s teeth (which should probably read gums) when they begin to break through: in uair is aimser dona fiaclaib fás dlighid na banaltranna im do coimilt do cir in leinim.Footnote 70 The Latin original does not specify any agent.Footnote 71 A child’s teeth usually come up between five and nine months.Footnote 72 In the later tradition, Aodhagán Ó Rathaille (d. 1728) certainly associated the banaltra with wet-nursing:
It is difficult, however, to be sure that foster kinship is to be equated with milk kinship. Of course, the latter cannot develop without breastfeeding. Lisa Bitel suggests that wet nurses must have been scarce in medieval Ireland because they are seldom alluded to: ‘[n]one of the laws or any other sources explicitly mentioned wet nurses; they may have existed, but were not common enough to merit comment’. However, it equally may be the case that the reason wet nurses are not mentioned is that they were so common. Bitel also says that foster mothers may usually have been too old to breastfeed.Footnote 74 Elizabeth Lerner goes further in stating there was no role in society for women who were unable to suckle an infant: ‘women who could not mother (i.e. nurse) a child had no viable options for a life and place in society’.Footnote 75 No evidence is adduced in support of this, however, apart from citing Cáin Adomnáin (‘The law of Adomnán’) (697). But there are, in fact, plenty of examples in the literature of women fulfilling other roles.Footnote 76 Emer, for example, the wife of Cú Chulainn, bears no children and yet ‘[h]er words play prominent and powerful roles both in generating the plots of the tales [she appears in] and in their construction of meaning’. Significantly, she receives a ‘uniformly positive portrayal … in these texts’.Footnote 77 In the Middle Irish introduction to Cáin Adomnáin, the tract Lerner cites as proof of her thesis, the cleric’s mother wishes, were she able, to suckle an orphan they see on the battlefield:
Is bōedh 7 is trógh lim-sa suut,’ ar Ron[n]at māthair Adamnāin, ‘aní atchīu fot cosu-su, a chlērc[h]ocān! Ced nachamlēci for lār, co tartur mo chiigh dō? Acht is cīan mór hūadh ō dac[h]ōdar mo chíghi-si i ndīsca. Nī foigfide nī indtib.Footnote 78
Despite the fact she is no longer capable of suckling the infant, she is not without a definite role: she urges the saint to resurrect the corpse and requires him afterwards to promulgate his celebrated cáin ‘law’.
In his monumental A guide to early Irish law, Fergus Kelly refers twice to wet nurses from Old Irish sources. In one case an infant is taken from its mother because the law deems her unsuitable to rear a family: dingbáil maic di chích.Footnote 79 This prohibition occurs when a woman is physically or mentally incapacitated, as well as when she is deemed immoral (as in the case of bancháinti (‘female satirists’) and sex workers, for example). The other case concerns a mother who has died: athgabáil dingbála meic di marbchích a mathar.Footnote 80 Both of these instances are obviously of a type that may be deemed ‘crisis fosterage’, an arrangement of necessity rather than an institution for the strengthening of ties of allegiance or dependence. Esther Goody, who conducted fieldwork in west Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, distinguishes ‘crisis fosterage’ from ‘kinship fosterage’.Footnote 81
Within kinship fosterage, also, there are different types. In his investigation of the institutions of adoptive kinship across broad swathes of Eurasia in the premodern period, Parkes distinguishes ‘cliental’ and ‘patronal’ fosterage. The latter kind, where a patron fosters his client’s child, customarily occurs in domains he refers to as ‘developed patrimonial states’, and it was usual for children past their infancy to be involved. In cliental fosterage, on the other hand, the client fostered his patron’s child. This happened very early in life, sometimes directly after birth. It was a feature of ‘segmentary-tributary polities’, among which Parkes counts medieval Ireland. He describes such polities as ‘segmentary states, peripheral to patrimonial or bureaucratic states, whose administration was articulated through internally ranked kin groups or conical clans’.Footnote 82 Bitel agrees that it was usual for the child of a noble to be placed in fosterage with a family from a lower social stratum: ‘all free ranks supposedly participated in the system whereby a couple usually of lower status than the parents raised, either for love or money, their social superiors’ sons and daughters’.Footnote 83 She cites ‘CIH 1760’ in support of this,Footnote 84 though I cannot find any reliable corroborating evidence there. She later accepts one cannot be certain that foster children (or, rather, their parents) were ordinarily of higher status than their fosterers.Footnote 85 Despite these opinions, Bart Jaski states that a ‘foster-father was normally of the same status as his fosterling’,Footnote 86 though he goes on to qualify this statement.Footnote 87 Bray shares the view that the fosterer and the fostered were normally of the same standing.Footnote 88 However, two types of fosterage are distinguished in the Old Irish Ántéchtae (Breth), a general, early-eighth-century text dealing with a wide range of subjects.Footnote 89 In one of the types, in dalta is e is flaith ann seo 7 int aite is e ceile,Footnote 90 in the other int aithe is e is flaith and-so 7 in dalta is e is ceile.Footnote 91 It may be more appropriate to speak of the status of the father than that of the child: ar id comdire mac righ 7 mac aithigh co cenn .uii. mbliadnae.Footnote 92 After that, the child’s honour price depends on that of his/her father/foster father.Footnote 93 According to Ní Chonaill, the child’s honour price at birth is elsewhere reckoned at half that of the father,Footnote 94 and an increase in the honour price of children may have been influenced by the church as part of a more general attempt to give greater protection and security to the vulnerable.Footnote 95
III
The questions of whether or not wet nurses were commonly employed in medieval Ireland and of the age at which fosterage ordinarily began are, of course, closely connected. As stated above, seven is often mentioned in the latter regard. In Cáin Íarraith, it is stated EACHUIB I NAIMSIR IMRIME … .i. o aite o. uii. mbliadnuibh amach.Footnote 96 Bitel cites ‘CIH 1761’ when she claims ‘[n]o laws set an age at which mothers bade farewell to their babes, but jurists hinted that the age of seven, when sexless infants became educable little boys and girls, was the appropriate time to begin a child’s training’.Footnote 97 This line and CIH 1761.32 (another reference to riding) are the only two on that page (where there are many references to things that should be taught to boys) which refer to a foster child’s age. This does not mean fosterage began at seven, however, but that seven is a suitable age to learn to ride. It seems that Jenny Bledsoe’s positionFootnote 98 is based on the twelfth-century Life of St Moling, where Moling requests Jesus’s company when He is aged seven. However, fosterage does not appear to be the desired outcome here but simply a short period of blessed companionship.Footnote 99 In the same Life, the saint says beir lat in náidhin 7 a māthair leis da lessughadh corob am léigind dó.Footnote 100 As is clear from Whitley Stokes’s translation, the boy was beginning his education at seven, the same age at which a boy learned to ride. Again, this is not to say fosterage itself began at this age.
Some clarificatory evidence may be found in the literary tradition. In the text its editor called ‘The adventures of Ricinn daughter of Crimthann mac Lugdach’, for example, Crimthann places his daughter in fosterage with a priest for seven years from the time of her baptism. After that, the priest sent her to the saint Cáirech Dergain to begin her education.Footnote 101 We see in the Táin that Sétanta’s parents raised him until he was five, at which point he went to Emain Macha where he became Conchobar’s fosterling: Alta-som … la máthair 7 la athair.Footnote 102 Sétanta, of course, was an exceptional child in every way. He went from stage to stage of early development at a faster rate than the norm. Before departing from the realm of the mythological, it is worth noting the folk tale recorded in Carna by Heinrich Wagner in the twentieth century. In it, Pádhraic Mac an Iomaire relates how Fionn mac Cumhaill was apparently given to a nurse by his mother directly after his birth:
maraíodh [Clanna Baoisne] ach aon bhean amháin a bhí a dh’iompar linbh faoina broinn. D’imigh sí ar a teicheadh faitíos go marófaí í ar nós an chuid eile do Chlanna Baoisne. Agus ba iníon le Bóirne í, an dream a mharaigh Clanna Baoisne. Ach bhí sí gaibhte láithreach nó gur rugadh an páiste agus fuair sí banaltra leis an bpáiste a thógáil.Footnote 103
The death of a five-year-old girl in fosterage is mourned in a thirteenth-century lament by Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe: nír shlán acht cúig ceirtbhliadhna.Footnote 104 This is usually taken to mean that the child died at age five.Footnote 105 This is also how I interpret it, though it could, theoretically, mean five years of fosterage had been completed, the age that fosterage began remaining unexpressed. Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh informs us that Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill (c.1572–1602) was given into fosterage immediately after birth:
Dála … Aodha Ruaid do radadhsidhe iarna gheinemain fochettoir dia oileamhain 7 dia leasughadh do shaorchlandaibh soichenelchaibh Chenéil Chonaill Gulban … 7 nirbho hiadsomh namá ro ett eisidhe for altrom 7 oilemhain acht ro ghabhsat araill do Chenel Eóghain.Footnote 106
In summary, we may say that a foster child’s status could change at seven or that fosterage could begin around that age, but that fosterage need not necessarily have started then.
It is in fact clear from the laws that fosterage could begin very early indeed. Kelly remarks that the law relating to díre refers to foster brothers who were so young they were kept in the one cradle (comalta óenchléib).Footnote 107 In Cáin Lánamna, recognition is given to the relationship between foster mother and foster son, the only relationship based on fosterage mentioned there. In the accompanying commentary, recognition is also given to how early the muime takes a central role in the child’s life:
.i. fria mo-uime, mo do-ní uime ina int aite .i. a tegha[d] 7 a chluda[d] 7 [a] altrama; ł mucha do-ni uime ‘nas gac duine; ł is mo na mí no(s)-ailenn.Footnote 108
As for Mellbretha ‘Sport-Judgements’, the Old Irish law dealing with injuries sustained by children at play,Footnote 109 youth is divided into three stages: tri haoise eim-coimsithar dona macaib beca .i. 7. mbliadna 7 da bliadain .x. 7 .7. mbliadna .x.. Footnote 110 In short, the first period of youth ends at seven, the second at twelve and the final at seventeen. Ó h-Innse has already recognised the existence of three periods of fosterage, one of which ends at six or seven.Footnote 111 Ní Chonaill has also recognised these distinct stages, and provides a lengthier and more detailed treatment than will be attempted here.Footnote 112 The last age mentioned in Mellbretha agrees with some sources that state a boy’s fosterage ended at seventeen. Kelly points out that in Críth Gablach (‘Branched Purchase’) (c.700), a tract on the law of persons, it is stated that a boy’s fosterage could end at fourteen; this is the same age mentioned for girls in Cáin Íarraith, where seventeen is mentioned for boys; the eighth-century Bretha Crólige ‘Judgements on Sick Maintenance’ gives seventeen as the age for both sexes. ‘Probably there was variation in practice’, according to Kelly.Footnote 113 Jaski suggests the age at which fosterage ended may have been revised upwards from fourteen to seventeen,Footnote 114 and that this may have been done to control youths who could cause havoc as members of fían groups ‘warrior-bands’.Footnote 115 In Cáin Íarraith, the same three periods are enforced with regard to the authority of foster parents over their foster children, and how to prosecute offences the children under their care might commit is outlined:
CIA AIRET BIS IMCOMUS FOR MACUIB NALTRUMU .i. cia fat bis eimcuimsiugud curtha forna macaib donither d’altram? a tri: tomaithimh [curtha] (?) in mic cin a denumh ina cetcinadh, a curadh isin .c.ais, 7 beth gan biadh la cureth isin ais tanuisi, 7 aithgin isin ais deidenuigh o da bliadain decc amach.Footnote 116
During the fosterage, therefore, the defendant’s youth diminishes his responsibility. It appears that the first offence by a child of 12‒17, the second by a child of 7‒12 and the third by a child under seven were of equal gravity.Footnote 117 The period below seven is known as the ‘first period’. Further evidence of the potential youth of a fostered infant is provided in Cáin Íarraith, which refers to the responsibility of the biological parents to provide the foster parents with a díllat cléib and a saluchdíllat. Ó h-Innse also recognises the significance of these terms in arguing that fosterage began early.Footnote 118 Regarding díllat cléib, the editors of eDIL follow the translation in the Ancient laws of Ireland in rendering it a ‘cradle coverlet’.Footnote 119 Clíab also means ‘breast’,Footnote 120 and one wonders if it is possible that a díllat cléib was used to cover a woman while breastfeeding. Saluchdíllat is a compound of salach (‘dirty’) and díllat (‘garment’). It is translated as ‘nursing clothes’ in the Ancient laws of Ireland Footnote 121 and ‘a child’s swaddling clothes’ in eDIL.Footnote 122 That it was used to swaddle an infant seems unlikely, and it may have been a type of cloth or clothing to keep a young child clean, perhaps a nappy. That, at least, was how one later glossator interpreted it: int etach doberar imin salcar.Footnote 123 It stands to reason that a wet nurse would be required for children placed in fosterage so early, though it should be noted that Bitel highlights references to the rearing of infants on cow’s milk.Footnote 124 Exactly how an infant was to be given the milk of an animal is unclear, but a range of devices was available during the Middle Ages, the most common of which was a perforated cow’s horn.Footnote 125 Porridge is the basic foodstuff prescribed in the commentary to Cáin Íarraith, enriched (with, for example, butter or honey) in accordance with the status of the fosterling.Footnote 126 In any case, it is clear that one period of fosterage, lasting several years, ended at seven, rather than that having been the age at which a child’s placement ordinarily began.Footnote 127
IV
References to milk kinship are also found outside the laws. Beginning with late citations, it is clear that foreign observers saw the wet nurse as an integral participant in fosterage in Ireland. The term ‘nurse’ is often mentioned in English-language sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote 128 Edmund Spenser (d. 1599) identified intermarriage and the development of fosterage ties between the Irish and the Old English as the greatest impediments to the advancement of English hegemony in Ireland. The only outcome of these practices, he opined, would be the Gaelicisation of those who were culturally and genetically English:
the chief cause of bringing in the Irish language amongst them … for first the child that sucketh the milk of the nurse must … learn his first speech of her, the which being the first that is enured to his tongue is ever after most pleasing unto him … For besides the young children be like apes, which will affect and imitate what they see done before them, specially by their nurses whom they love so well. They moreover draw into themselves together with their suck, even the nature and disposition of their nurses, for the mind followeth much the temperature of the body.Footnote 129
Many contemporary medical practitioners shared the belief that a child could be imbued with the personal and physical characteristics of the wet nurse through imbibing her breast milk, just as one might derive such characteristics genetically from biological parents.Footnote 130 Based on her reading of English-language texts by Elizabethan colonisers in Ireland, Patricia Palmer finds that the view that the acquisition of Irish by the descendants of English colonisers was a ‘mamillarily transmitted infection’ was pervasive. One author explained the degeneration of the Old English thus: they ‘suckte theire conditions from the teats of their Irishe Nurses’, turning them ‘from men to monsters’.Footnote 131 And Clodagh Tait has shown that it was not just the Old English that became involved in Irish fosterage practices, as Protestant New English settlers also engaged with the indigenous population in aspects of the custom.Footnote 132
Another late-sixteenth-century source, similar in form and agenda to Spenser’s A view of the present state of Ireland, is ‘H. C.’s tract’.Footnote 133 It goes further than the Irish sources in distinguishing five forms of fosterage, its editor, Fiona Fitzsimons, finding that the text shows the binary opposition in forms of fosterage proposed by Kelly to have been an oversimplification.Footnote 134 In his Guide to early Irish law, Kelly refers to fosterage for pay and fosterage for affection.Footnote 135 One of the five types of fosterage discerned in ‘H. C.’s tract’ obviously involves breastfeeding:
miltch nurses that fostereth upp our children with their children with theire breast … and this Irish mylke worketh such effect in our children … that moste of them never careth for englishmen or english civilitie ever afterwards … by bearinge such affection to that sorte of people who naturally are evill.Footnote 136
In interpreting ‘H. C.’s tract’, Fitzsimons finds that ‘the lord-client relationship was central to all methods of fostering’ in Ireland, envisaging the ‘miltch nurses’ as aristocratic mothers of infants who foster children of a similar age to their own rather than the hired wet nurses of lower status common in other western European societiesFootnote 137 (the ‘developed patrimonial states’ mentioned earlier). She considers the term ‘miltch nurse’ to be one of disparagement, purposely employed to undermine the status of the fosterer. This is not to say that foster mothers were necessarily of the same social status as the parents whose children they fostered, but rather the distance between them was not so great and the relationships created were more permanent and more significant than those created in other societies between wet nurse and infant. While the evidence of ‘H. C.’s tract’ is certainly very significant, it may be noted that the existence of up to five forms of fosterage had been recognised by Kathleen Mulchrone well before the document came to light.Footnote 138
With regard to the subject of this paper, the references just cited might be criticised as being anachronistic. However, it is worth referring to ‘Lawes of Ireland’, a seventeenth-century English manuscriptFootnote 139 which shows, according to Kelly, ‘how little the institutions of Irish society changed between the Old Irish period [c.700‒900] and the Flight of the Earls [1607]’.Footnote 140 While this may be true in certain respects, there is a danger of overstating this conservatism. Scholars once held the view that the society in which the laws were written down was so inherently ultra-conservative that diligent transcription and annotation continued to take place long after the laws retained any practical relevance. This view is still popularly held, with the journalist Fintan O’Toole, for example, feeling justified in writing of a conservatism in Gaelic society that at ‘times … seems demented’.Footnote 141 Scholarship in recent decades, however, has brought a great deal more dynamism to light than was previously thought to have existed.Footnote 142 And while it is undoubtedly true that the institution of fosterage was unlikely to have remained static over a period of centuries,Footnote 143 it is also the case that it survived in some form for a very long time indeed. Daniel O’Connell (b. 1775), for example, was given ‘in fosterage to a small herdsman’s family’ until the age of four.Footnote 144 He, in turn, had his eldest son Maurice (b. 1803) wet-nursed in Kerry, unlike most of the boy’s siblings. Maurice was to spend his early childhood with his paternal grandparents.Footnote 145 And O’Connell’s next son, Morgan (b. 1804), ‘was put out to wet-nurse with a family on Valentia Island’.Footnote 146
There is, in any case, little in the accounts of fosterage offered by the English observers — their racism and colonial bias aside — that contradicts the Irish sources. It is also worth noting an instance of a more benign reference to fosterage and wet-nursing in a sixteenth-century English source. Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and lord lieutenant of Ireland for a time, dedicated a sonnet to a daughter of Gerald, ninth earl of Kildare, and Lady Elizabeth Grey, an English woman and cousin of Henry VIII. The girl, often referred to as ‘Fair Geraldine’, was born in Ireland in 1527 and moved to England with her mother in 1533.Footnote 147 The period of her fosterage, therefore, had ended by the time she was six. The poem includes the lines ‘foster’d she was with milk of Irish breast: Her sire an Earl; her dame of Prince’s blood’.Footnote 148
On the matter at hand, the twelfth-century account of another foreign observer is certainly consistent with the more negative later reports. Giraldus Cambrensis, in deploring the Irish custom of fosterage, refers in Latin to the existence of a bond between foster kin that was deeper than that between biological kin, using terms that have clear associations with breastfeeding: alumnos et collactaneos diligunt; fratres et cognatos persequuntur.Footnote 149 The key words are alumnus (‘nursling, foster son’) and collactaneus (‘a brother or sister nourished at the same breast, a foster brother or sister’).Footnote 150 These accounts remind one of a passage in Smaointe Beatha Chríost, an early-fourteenth-century translation of a Latin text.Footnote 151 When visiting Elizabeth, Mary picks up her son John and suckles him. Afterwards, his love for her is greater than for his own mother: dob airde a ghradh innti sin na i n-a mhathair.Footnote 152 This part of the account is absent from the Latin manuscripts.Footnote 153 In a seventeenth-century versified version of this text, Mary is described as follows for her role in John’s infancy: [d]o bhīodh mar bhanaltruinn dā cheangal ’s dā sgaoileadh, | dā ghoradh is dā phōga is ag tabhairt a cīch dho.Footnote 154
There are also references to wet-nursing in the literary tales and hagiography. In Immram Curaig Maéle Dúin (‘The voyage of Máel Dúin’s boat’) (ninth/tenth century), the titular character was one of four foster children brought up together, being breastfed along with the others: [r]odn-alt íarom óen mumme éseom 7 tri maic ind ríg i n-óenchliab 7 for áenchích 7 for áenchúd.Footnote 155 There is another apt example in Compert Con Culainn (‘The Conception of Cú Chulainn’), to which its editor assigns an eighth/ninth-century date.Footnote 156 When the Ulaid argue over who should foster the newly born Sétanta, Conchobar chooses several fosterers, designating particular responsibilities to each. Finnchóem was to act as wet nurse: dí chích a máthar cích Finnchóeme.Footnote 157 In another account of his conception, we meet a character called Cet mac Mágach and his foster parents. Cet’s erstwhile foster mother stops nursing her own infant, Lóeg, so that she may suckle Sétanta in his place:
Beiridh dī Ceat ar altrum mac Deichtire 7 dos·ber i n-ucht a buime 7 a aide he 7 bentair Lægh da chich roime. Teit dī Ceat i Connachtaibh iar sin, 7 fairisidh a bhuime 7 a aide la hUltu ac altrum ConCulaind.Footnote 158
Afterwards, it is unclear whether a separate arrangement is made for Lóeg or if the muime continues to suckle both infants. This account contradicts Bitel’s opinion, highlighted above, that women past childbearing age may have been chosen as fosterers to allow young mothers to continue having children.
In the Virgin Mary’s Modern Irish Life, we see that Mary did not have a wet nurse: níor iarr a máthair buime dá hoileamhuin amhail iarraid mná eile ach a hoileamhuin ar a cíochaibh féin.Footnote 159 St Íte may provide an example of a wet nurse from Old Irish literature. According to the later prose introduction that was added to it, she had a huge stag beetle as fosterling, the suckling of which caused the saint physical injury: dael oc a diul méitigther oirce ro chlóid a lethtaeb uile.Footnote 160 It may be that Elva Johnston does not choose the most suitable verb when referring to ‘a beetle that gnawed on her flesh’.Footnote 161 One day, while Íte is away from home, her fellow nuns kill her fosterling. She demands the Infant Jesus to suckle in place of the beloved beetle, and we apparently see her demand acceded to in the well known Old Irish poem Ísucán,Footnote 162 though as O’Donnell points out it is not clear that the poem associated with her is actually written in the voice of a woman.Footnote 163 Bray stresses the extension of the maternal role from a physical to a spiritual one.Footnote 164 Íte was renowned as the foster mother of the saints of Ireland: [h]ec enim uirgo multos sanctorum Hibernie ab infantia nutriuit.Footnote 165 Despite having suckled the beetle and Jesus, however, Íte did not suckle Brénainn. It seems that that holy infant was weaned off his biological mother’s milk before being fostered:
Postquam uero in domo parentum compleuit annum sue ablactationis infans benedictus, episcopus Ercus eum secum adduxit, ac cure sancte uirginis, nomine Ita, commisit.Footnote 166
St Brigit, whose Life was translated into Irish in the ninth century,Footnote 167 was also weaned before going into fosterage.Footnote 168
V
In the literature, men also suckle infants. In his Early Modern Life, being male is no impediment to St Colmán Ela breastfeeding. He offers cioch lemnachta 7 cioch meala to two babies he was to foster.Footnote 169 Interestingly, references to male saints suckling Jesus, or any holy baby, are more frequent than to female saints fulfilling this role.Footnote 170 Two cases in point are FregiusFootnote 171 and Findchú. The latter had a foster son, taken from his mother after birth, who suffered no ill effects from his unorthodox placement: [d]obhí bisech ar an mac sin nách bíadh oca mháthair fesin dia mbeitis noenbur banaltrann fai.Footnote 172 It seems cows and/or women were present at monasteries, at least sometimes, to provide milk for infants fostered therein. This is apparent from the notability of their absence in the Latin Life of Kevin of Glendalough:
quia mulieres et vacce longe erant a suo monasterio … Deus ilico misit de monte propinquo ceruam ad sanctum Coemgenum, de cuius lacte infans Felanus nutritus est. Footnote 173
Clerics are not the only men that suckled infants. In the Early Modern Uí Eachach Mumhan genealogies, there is a reference to Lughaidh Cíochach:
isé ro alt na meic sin Chriomhthainn mic Eachach ar a chíochaibh féin .i. Laoghaire agus Aodh Uargharg. Agus adeirid cuid dona senchadhaibh gur lemhnacht do thigeadh as an gcíoch do bheireadh do Laoghaire, agus gur fuil do bheireadh d’Aodh as an gcíoch eile. Do ghoir Lughaidh Cíochach ar na draoithibh dá láthair, agus do thesbeán dóibh a chíocha, agus mar do thighedh lemhnacht do Laoghaire agus fuil d’Aodh. Isé breithemhnas rugadar na draoithe air sin .i. nimh ghaisgidh agus fola do bheith ar chinél Aodha, agus sonus cethra agus lachta ar Chinél Laoghaire.Footnote 174
In Acallam na Senórach, Finn dreams two seals are sucking his breasts. He goes to Fergus Fínbél to seek his dream’s meaning. In the oldest extant version of the Acallam, Fergus explains the two seals are the two sons of the king of Connacht.Footnote 175 The story continues without further explanation, in this version dated by Nessa Ní Shéaghdha to the period 1142‒75.Footnote 176 In a later (fourteenth/fifteenth century) version,Footnote 177 however, Fergus is more expansive. He says Finn’s two breasts are to be identified with the two sons of the king of Connacht: the reason he makes this connection is that the king’s sons were fostered by Finn.Footnote 178
It is interesting that Stokes refers to ‘authenticated instances of males suckling infants’.Footnote 179 The ‘evidence’ for this is in Alexander von Humboldt’s travelogue, where the Prussian polymath gives examples of men who suckled infants.Footnote 180 Among these is ‘Robert, bishop of Cork’. Unfortunately, he gives no further information concerning this man and I have been unable otherwise to identify him. In biological terms, one of the preconditions for lactation is the production by the pituitary gland of high levels of prolactin. This occurs naturally in pregnant women. It can also occur, however, in women who are not pregnant and even in men. The condition galactorrhoea results in the ‘[a]bnormal production of milk. It may occur under psychological influences or be a sign of pituitary tumor’.Footnote 181 Modern cases of men lactating as a result of pituitary tumours have been discussed in medical journals.Footnote 182 Carney has described ‘a Christian society [in Ireland] that, at its height, was perhaps the most ascetic that Western Europe has known’,Footnote 183 and there is another, more remarkable, case of galactorrhoea which is brought on by conditions suffered in an environment not unlike the conditions endured by some of the more ascetic medieval Irish monks:
lactation in men was observed in World War II prisoner of war camps when malnourished detainees were later liberated and provided with adequate nutrition. During the period of limited food supply, the prisoners suffered liver, testicular and pituitary atrophy. After post-release increases in nourishment, the testes and pituitary gland rapidly regained their function and began producing estrogens and androgens. However, the liver was slower to recover from the stress of starvation and could not metabolise these products. The result was an imbalance of hormones that led to male lactation.Footnote 184
As Thomas Owen Clancy writes in another context, ‘a conceit demands a reality with which to play’.Footnote 185 Who knows whether the author of one of the Lives in which a lactating male saint is found had in mind an instance of a monk who, having desisted from engaging in extreme ascetic practices, began to lactate as his body struggled to recover from the trauma?
VI
The history of childcare and of the lives of children in medieval Ireland is still in its infancy. Fosterage arrangements are of central importance to this history. References to wet nurses abound in Old, Middle and Early Modern Irish sources. They also feature prominently in the writings of foreign observers. It seems that the suckling of the fosterling by the fosterer was seen to be a natural part of fosterage. The wide range of references to the suckling of infants by an individual who was not the biological mother speaks to the accepted role of the wet nurse. It is not difficult to imagine that the character Sinech Cró may have been so named because of her acknowledged role as a fosterer. So prevalent was the practice, indeed, that Old English and even New English settlers came to use it. The oft-cited claim that children were fostered at the age of seven can no longer be supported. Indeed, to take seven as the starting point is to fail fundamentally to appreciate how fosterage often operated in medieval Ireland and how and why such reputedly deep and lasting bonds were formed. The famous quote ‘give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man’, attributed both to Aristotle and Ignatius of Loyola, comes to mind. Of course, to accept the wet nurse as an integral part of society is not to suggest that every foster child had one. It is also evident that different, legally recognised kinds of fosterage existed. Their further study is greatly to be desired.
Acknowledgments
Much of this work builds on an article published several years ago in Irish: Aogán Ó hIarlaithe, ‘Sinech Cró, an mháthair chíche agus an t-altramas in Éirinn sa mheánaois’, Celtica, xxix (2017), 55‒75. I am grateful to the editors of Celtica for permission to return to print here material originally published there. I am also indebted to the two anonymous readers who peer-reviewed the current paper and to the journal editor, Clodagh Tait, and thank them for their sound advice and recommendations.
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