A miracle story from medieval France, set vaguely in third-century Rome, offers the following account of a horrific act of infanticide. A noble widow, renowned for her charity and piety, was tempted by the devil into committing incest with her son. As a result of this forbidden union, she conceived. Overwhelmed with shame, she concealed her pregnancy and performed penance in secret. When the infant was born, however, the devil led her into even more terrible sin: She killed the newborn, drowning it in a latrine. Too ashamed to confess her transgressions, she devoted herself to ever greater acts of penance and charitable works, and acquired an enhanced reputation for holiness.
But the devil, eager to ensure the damnation of this unconfessed soul, sought her downfall. He disguised himself as an astrologer-scholar and demonstrated his talents to the emperor. Having obtained the emperor's confidence, the devil then denounced the widow as the worst of sinners, an incestuous and infanticidal mother. The emperor was reluctant to believe that a woman so seemingly good could be so evil, but agreed that if she confessed, or if the accusation could be proven against her, she would be executed. Summoned before the emperor, the woman obtained a delay, prayed to the Virgin Mary for help, and sought an audience with the pope. Kneeling before him, she finally confessed, sobbing. The pope, moved by her total contrition, absolved her. He urged that she continue to seek the Virgin's aid and offered as consolation his promise that the Virgin would save her. When she made her appearance before the emperor's court the Virgin stood beside her. The devil, unable to compete with the mother of God, vanished. With no one present to accuse her, the penitent sinner was saved.Footnote 1
However popular this story may have been—and it was quite popular—one might easily assume that it offers no useful evidence for the actual ideology and practice of the medieval French judicial system. After all, it is commonplace that medieval Western Europe was a strict and often brutal patriarchy. It is therefore easy to imagine that its laws must have been both forged and deployed as a weapon to further oppress already oppressed women. It is known that Christian doctrine condemned extramarital sex, incest in particular. The murder of an innocent, and especially an unbaptized infant, moreover, was a deplorable tragedy, the work of the devil. Indeed, it could even pollute the community as a whole. Such pollution, if left uncorrected, risked bringing down divine punishment, plague, or famine.Footnote 2 One might suppose, therefore, that an infanticidal mother, especially one who had killed her newborn infant to conceal evidence of her having engaged in illicit sex, must suffer and die for her sins. Such an act would have been “a crime punishable by death in fifteenth-century Europe, and one that was rarely pardoned… Women found guilty of infanticide were regularly executed by drowning or burning, a crueler method of death than the hanging or beheading employed for regular capital offences.”Footnote 3
But this was not so. The aim of this article is to challenge that assumption. Infanticidal mothers, perhaps even especially those pregnant from illicit sex, regularly escaped execution and had a significant place among the pardoned. This was true first of all because that was how justice essentially worked in late medieval France: There was a general reluctance to carry out executions.Footnote 4 Unwed and infanticidal mothers were not exceptions to this rule. This was also true because of the interplay of justice with a number of social and cultural norms: mercy, female agency (or rather the perceived lack thereof), the overwhelming power of both divine and demonic agency by contrast, and finally, gender and honor, because honor could serve as a justification for killing perpetrated by women much as it could for killing perpetrated by men.
My claims in this article should in some ways come as no surprise. Historians are well aware that royal pardons played a considerably important role in the medieval judicial system.Footnote 5 It is not news that religious and secular officials alike could be merciful in their expression of judicial authority, mitigating punishment or granting absolution or pardon, even to the worst of criminals. Failure to show mercy, after all, might result in divine retribution for the cruel or unjust judge.Footnote 6 Nor is it news that infanticidal mothers counted among those pardoned in medieval France.
Nevertheless, scholars have not fully grasped the significance of this culture of pardoning. They generally assume that pardons for infanticidal mothers were exceptional, that most women found guilty of this crime would have received the death penalty. This article challenges that idea. There are only a relatively small number of known pardons for infanticidal mothers as compared with the vast swath of pardons for other kinds of killing and crimes perpetuated, by and large, by men. But that relatively small number of pardons does not in fact mean that women who confessed to killing infants were less likely to obtain pardon.Footnote 7 Nor does it mean that these women were necessarily more likely to be executed. It does not even mean, as Wolfgang Müller claims, that the women at greatest risk of execution for infanticide were the marginal, “foreign maidservants or adulterous or older single women.”Footnote 8
Instead, as this article demonstrates, there are good reasons to suspect that pardoning, rather than punishing, was the de facto method of dealing with maternal infanticide in medieval France. And more than that: this held true even, or perhaps especially, when the infanticide was perpetrated by a woman pregnant outside marriage. To understand how this could be requires a careful review of the historiography on the subject, reconsideration of the relevant laws and legal practices, and a critical reassessment of our sources and their meaning.
There is no question that medieval laws menaced those found guilty of infant murder with execution. But it is not correct to assume that these laws were necessarily enforced. And when we turn to the sources of legal practice from late medieval France, we find accounts that echo the tale of the pious widow of third-century Rome to a remarkable degree. Miracles, as Robert Bartlett has so evocatively demonstrated, had an important place in medieval justice.Footnote 9 This held true for mothers pregnant from illicit sex who killed their own infants. Indeed, it may have been especially true for them.
In 1390, for example, Colette Wardavoir, approximately 15 years old, became pregnant after having sex with an unnamed man.Footnote 10 She concealed her pregnancy from her parents, fearing their anger, gave birth in a privy, and, like the incestuous widow of the miracle tale this article began with, threw the newborn into the latrine. The infant cried out and Colette fled, frightened that the sound had woken the others in her household. Luckily, someone did hear the sound of crying, and the infant was rescued, baptized, and lived. The salvation of this baby was deemed a miracle.Footnote 11 But what of Colette, who had so cruelly attempted to murder her newborn infant? She had taken sanctuary, and showed great contrition. In light of her repentance, as well as her youth and the miraculous survival of the infant, she was pardoned by the king.Footnote 12
A miracle similarly features in the resolution of another infanticide prosecution 4 years later, in 1394.Footnote 13 According to the confession of Perrenelle Horrie, she lived in the town of Châteauneuf in the county of Angoulême, in western France, and had been married at approximately 16 years of age to a young man who stayed with her for 2 years but then disappeared, leaving her impoverished. When she was 22 years of age or thereabouts, another man pursued her, seducing her with promises that he would support her and even marry her.Footnote 14 This was a promise that he did not honor when she told him that she was pregnant. Ashamed, desperate, and tempted by the devil, she gave birth in secret, killed the newborn, and buried it in a garden. Somehow, it is now known how, her crime was discovered, and she was arrested and imprisoned. She confessed on interrogation, and was condemned to execution by drowning in the Charente River.Footnote 15 Perrenelle and her brothers, who belatedly had come to her aid, all prayed to the Virgin Mary for deliverance. These prayers were heard. When she was bound and thrown into the river, her hands came untied and she floated to safety. “Many said” this was a miracle of the Virgin.Footnote 16 The attempt to execute her was abandoned and she was returned to prison. Nor did it end there. Upon petition, King Charles VI granted her a full pardon, restoring all confiscated property and shielding her from any further legal proceedings linked to her crime, requiring only that she perform a penitential pilgrimage to Notre-Dame-du-Puy, and that she provide proof that she had done so to the seneschal of Angoulême.Footnote 17 Additional royal pardons of this kind will be discussed subsequently, but first the world in which they were granted and the reasons scholars have misunderstood them will be re-examined.
1. Infanticide Medieval Style?
There was an era in which infanticidal mothers pregnant from illicit sex were cast as emblematic villains, the worst kinds of perpetrators of infant murder, but this era was not the Middle Ages. In France it began in the sixteenth century. Alfred Soman, the great master of the early modern records of the Parlement of Paris, describes the law of that brutal post-medieval time: “The crime designated ‘infanticide’ (homicide de son enfant) was uniformly of one type (which either excluded or absorbed all other forms of child murder): a woman conceived a child illegitimately, concealed her pregnancy, gave birth in secret, and then killed her baby or deliberately let it die in a desperate attempt to suppress the evidence of her shame and dishonor.”Footnote 18 Other scholars speak in similar terms. Maternal infanticide was, as W. David Myers writes, “a particular kind of crime that haunted the imagination and morals of Europeans from 1500 to 1800.” Or to quote Stephanie Chamberlain, “no other early modern crime better exemplifies cultural fears about maternal agency than does infanticide.”Footnote 19
But the Middle Ages had other demons. The very idea of studying “infanticide” in medieval France is an exercise in anachronism, or rather anachronisms. They had no name for such a crime, or such a criminal.Footnote 20 There was no Latin or French word for infant-killer or the killing of an infant.Footnote 21 Third-century Church Father Tertullian used the term “infanticide” (“infanticidium”) in response to allegations that Christians practiced child sacrifice. Thereafter the term vanishes until the time of François Rabelais in his Pantagruel, published in French in 1532,Footnote 22 and in the seventeenth century the term first appears in English.Footnote 23 Neither medieval Roman Law nor canon law used this word.Footnote 24 The vocabulary of infant murder instead employed a range of vague and overlapping terms that often had unclear meaning.Footnote 25
Most importantly for my argument, medieval French laws, sacred and secular, make few explicit references to infanticidal unwed mothers.Footnote 26 Instead, they consider any killing of an infant, by any person. Single mothers were rarely singled out. Where discussed, infant or child murder fell normally under the umbrella of homicide. Condemnations included a wide range of imagined perpetrators and actions, accidental and intentional. These included violence committed against pregnant women that led to a stillbirth, smothering of infants by parents or by wet nurses, and the death of infants by drowning or fire. It also was a subcategory of the crime of parricide (killing one's own kin).Footnote 27
As Claude Gauvard has argued, the clearest lesson to draw from the existing sources on infanticide in late medieval France is that the death of a child was viewed with a special horror.Footnote 28 Indeed, the role of illicit sex in shaping responses to infanticide should not be overemphasized. It was not only single mothers who were suspected of being - or denounced as - child killers. There were older women, and men, suspected of witchcraft and malicious use of magic. There were Jews, the most notorious supposed baby-killers of the later Middle Ages, and also animals, but especially enemy forces, soldiers, and mercenaries. The popular depiction of the Massacre of the Innocents in late medieval France, as Gauvard and Pichot emphasize, reflected the value placed on infant life. It was used to critique not just the Biblical Herod, but also evil kings of their own era, and the marauding soldiers who inflicted suffering on the “innocent.”Footnote 29
As all this indicates, there is no doubt that in medieval France the killing of infants was regarded as “heinous.”Footnote 30 But we must be careful not to allow anachronistic assumptions to color our reconstructions of how people understood and responded to infant murder. We know that infant death was deplored. But we do not in fact know if killing infants was—or even if it was perceived as—a crime most often committed by women pregnant out of wedlock, expectant mothers who killed their infants out of fear of being excluded from their social group as consequence for the pregnancy.Footnote 31 Nor do we know for certain that the majority of those who were executed were “marginalized persons such as foreign maidservants or adulterous or older single women.”Footnote 32 Such acts of infanticide may—or may not—have occurred frequently. At present, we as scholars can only speculate.Footnote 33 We can only speculate, too, as to the rate of prosecution, execution, and even pardon.Footnote 34
We must not, of course, assume that what was true of the sixteenth century was also true earlier. The early modern period is a perilous guide to the Middle Ages, although prosecutions of the kind Soman describes as happening in the sixteenth century did take place in the Middle Ages. In the early 1970s French legal historian Yves Brissaud went looking for records of women accused of killing their infants, and he found them. But he found them in a surprising source base: not in records of prosecution and punishment, but the letters of royal pardon.Footnote 35
These pardons spared women from what could have been a terrible fate. Although scholars still struggle to interpret the meaning of different kinds of execution, gender clearly had a role. Women were typically executed by drowning, burning, or burial alive, although some women were hanged, as Gessler and Gauvard discovered.Footnote 36 Burning was the punishment most often associated with infanticide in the examples that I have seen. This was also the impression that Brissaud had, based on the survey that he conducted.Footnote 37 Moreover, even if spared execution, women might spend years incarcerated in deadly prisons, or struggle to survive in exile, with any property they had left behind being confiscated. This was harsh, indeed, but the reality is that little is known about how this scenario occurred, or how often it occurred, especially as concerned infanticide.
At present there are only scattered documentary traces of investigations and prosecutions of infant murder from medieval France. Scholars have generally located at most one or two investigations while engaged in a larger study of justice in a given region.Footnote 38 There are good indications, however, that more work in local archives will provide a clearer sense of the possibilities. Certainly Rudi Beaulant has made discoveries of tremendous importance in this regard, having found several investigations of suspicious infant death or stillbirths, cases in which both men and women alike were the suspected perpetrators, as recorded in the exceptionally rich records of late medieval Burgundy.Footnote 39
But for now, scholars struggle to qualify and quantify the handling of infant killings in medieval France. Nevertheless, that has not prevented them from maintaining the supposition that the unwed infanticidal mother would have been punished especially harshly, and only rarely pardoned. But rather than assuming that there are scores of executions as yet undiscovered by scholars, or assuming that unwed mothers were already, as was so clearly the case in subsequent centuries, the targets of special and more punitive attention, we should explore what happens when we take stock of what evidence we do have.
It is possible that there may have been many more executions for infanticide that we have yet to find. It is also possible that there are not that many more. We must remember that executions were probably rather rare. Medieval law and legal practice were marked by a certain reluctance to carry out the death penalty. Elizabeth Papp Kamali has demonstrated this in her recent Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England, showing a high acquittal rate and relatively few convictions.Footnote 40 We know of still fewer executions, and a far greater tendency to banish or otherwise punish the convicted felon.Footnote 41 Claude Gauvard, in her book on the death penalty in late medieval France, affirms that executions were rare and that banishment or other penalties were the preferred modes of punishment.Footnote 42 William Chester Jordan complicated that picture by mining judicial account books for references to expenses related to what looks like a considerable amount of public punishment and execution, but on the whole it does seem that execution was rare.Footnote 43 And quite often investigations did not result in any punishment. Suspects frequently took flight and sought sanctuary or self-imposed banishment. Pardons and other sources refer to escapes from prisons so often as to suggest complicity of the jailers at very least.Footnote 44 Sentences might also be overturned on appeal. There was, moreover, always the possibility of pardons and amnesties. Judicial officers who sentenced people to death therefore knew that this sentence might not be necessarily carried out. However often medieval law condemned extrajudicial killing, it also found ways to overlook, condone, or pardon it.
I suggest that women accused of killing their children were not exceptions to this general rule, not least because women constituted a tiny fraction of those prosecuted and punished in medieval judicial practice.Footnote 45 Working from Brissaud's list of executions and incorporating every other reference I could find in chronicles and court records, I have only been able to locate twenty executions, from the twelfth through the late fifteenth centuries, and from across France. But even some of these relatively few executions were not necessarily carried out. Sometimes the account of an execution is quite tangential, as in some thirteenth-century records of depositions claiming to have witnessed the execution of a woman condemned for killing her infant. These depositions were collected in an effort to prove that local authorities had long held the power to execute those found guilty of serious crimes, as part of a jurisdictional dispute.Footnote 46 It is probably safer to assume on the basis of these depositions that such an execution could have happened, but not that it did happen. In other examples, we read that a woman was sentenced to execution but we do not know if the execution was actually carried out. There must be more, but we should not necessarily assume that there were that many.
On the other hand, it does seem plausible that women pregnant outside marriage were quickly suspected, or blamed, upon the discovery of an infant corpse.Footnote 47 Sara Butler has suggested as much in her analysis of infanticide prosecution in Medieval England: “there is good reason to believe that single mothers were significantly more likely to stand accused of infanticide than was anyone else.”Footnote 48 Indeed, when someone in a medieval community discovered the corpse of an infant, it is quite possible that suspicion, or accusation, would fall soonest on the priest's mistress, the abandoned wife, or the poor foreign serving maid. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to assume, as Müller, Arnade and Prevenier, and others do, that because such women were more likely to be suspected, they were also more likely to be executed, and less likely to be pardoned.Footnote 49
As it currently stands, therefore, the previous scholarship's portrayal of infanticide in medieval France depends on three precarious assumptions: first, that medieval infanticide pardons reflect the same obsession with the restraining of illicit female sexuality thought to have predominated in sixteenth-century justice; second, that illicit pregnancy had much the same significance and consequences in the Middle Ages as in the far darker period that followed; and third and finally, that unwed infanticidal mothers would have been unlikely recipients of royal pardon, and that the relatively few pardons for infanticide compared with for other kinds of killing is somehow indicative of this. But these assumptions misrepresent the sources, and they misrepresent, too, the values at the core of late medieval French justice, because medieval prosecution of crime always went hand in hand with the possibility of penance and pardon, no matter how serious a crime.Footnote 50 And a woman's sexual transgressions did not necessarily make her less worthy of royal pardon, even if she killed her infant to conceal the sin.
All told, there is little evidence that maternal infanticide perpetuated by unwed mothers regularly met with brutal punishment. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It could be, as Brissaud and others have assumed, that the medieval reality was every bit as harsh as the sixteenth-century reality, even if the available sources do not reflect this. Nevertheless, it is best to build out interpretations on the foundation of what is known, not on what is not known. And the evidence that is available points to a medieval orientation toward mercy for these mothers. The vast bulk of that evidence comes from royal pardons, which (despite their use by Brissaud and others to indicate intolerance and harsh treatment) are by their nature evidence of mercy. Moreover, mercy features heavily in other sources, both legal and more broadly, as well. Certainly it dominates in medieval theology and in the miracle tales that were so important in medieval culture and society.
If we shake off the reflexive assumption that infanticidal single mothers must have been especially reviled and punished, we begin to see the medieval world in a different light. Various theological and cultural traditions argued against executing women.Footnote 51 Medieval chronicles depict the killing of a woman by a violent mob, or even formal judicial execution for treason, as excessively cruel and terrible.Footnote 52 Many a medieval romance has a beautiful adulterous queen bound to the stake and about to be burned, only to be rescued or spared.Footnote 53 Indeed, royal or no, young and beautiful women bound to the stake would have reminded medieval audiences of the many images of tortured female martyrs and falsely accused saints so frequently reproduced on the walls of churches and in so much of their visual culture.Footnote 54
Moreover, the widely proclaimed notion of female irresponsibility in this respect actually counted in women's favor. The incapacity of women to reason as fully as men, however insulting in principle, and however debilitating in general as women sought to make their way in medieval society, nevertheless had some advantages when it came to determinations of criminal responsibility. As I have argued elsewhere, for offenses such as bigamy and adultery, and as Hannah Skoda suggested for infanticide in the fourteenth-century Parisian secular court records, notions of female weakness as applied in church and secular court practice contributed to these women being punished with relative leniency, as being thought to be less responsible for their behavior than men.Footnote 55
2. Problems with Pardons
For all those reasons, it is prudent not to assimilate ideas and practices surrounding infanticide in the Middle Ages into the centuries that followed. The largest obstacle in our way to understanding the meaning of infanticide in medieval France lies in a fact about the sources: Our largest body of evidence for this topic is the royal pardons. Natalie Davis famously described such pardons as “fiction in the archives,” narratives crafted with forgiveness in mind, discourses in which an account of wrongdoing casts events in the best possible light to therefore seem to merit mercy. Davis remains essential reading and rereading.Footnote 56 Pardons cannot be treated as faithful accounts of events, but rather as plausible accounts of what might make a crime seem more forgivable. But even here great caution is necessary, because for medieval France, while we have thousands of pardons that were granted, I know of no surviving traces of pardons that were refused by the ruler, and scholars have so far found only scattered evidence of local challenges to pardons that, after being granted, were rejected as false, or as unacceptable on the grounds that the crimes in question were somehow unpardonable.Footnote 57 And despite the proclamation of lists of technically unpardonable crimes, all crimes could be pardoned, and were.Footnote 58 This raises serious difficulties for interpretation. Perhaps most importantly, it is not actually known to what extent the telling of a good tale of justified killing, or the claim to have otherwise led a blameless life, actually mattered in whatever decision-making process authorities engaged in when granting pardon or not. Additionally, these pardons must also be interpreted with particular care in efforts to assess crime rates or the severity of crime.Footnote 59
Once again, records of pardons are almost all of what scholars of medieval France have to work with at present. What is known about abortions, stillbirths, and the killing or death of infants in France, is known overwhelmingly from the accounts offered by those who confessed to their involvement as part of an effort to obtain royal pardon. That was a complex endeavor that involved finding advocates to present and to prepare the request, written up in the appropriate combination of narrative and legalese, and quite likely, this all cost money. The fact that pardons were considered necessary does indicate that the killing of an infant was regarded as a serious crime, as was theft and killing more generally. But the same fact also unmistakably indicates that the killing of an infant, like theft, and like other kinds of killing, was pardonable.Footnote 60
In fact, paradoxical though it may seem, even if illicit pregnancy might well have made a woman more likely to be accused or investigated for infant murder, her status as a sexual sinner who killed to conceal that sin would not necessarily have made her offense seem worse than other kinds of murder. If anything, her plight might have made her actions in a way more understandable than a senseless or gratuitous act of violence against a child. Killing an infant to conceal an illegitimate birth may have been regarded as an understandable, if deplorable, justification, because killing in an effort to keep secret an illicit relationship could be presented as motivated by a wish to protect honor, both a woman's own honor, and the honor of her family.
As Gauvard and Arnade and Prevenier have argued, killing to protect or defend honor was a pardonable crime in theory.Footnote 61 This and other previous scholarship has associated the mitigating factor of honor in homicide trials with male behavior: public violent disputes, or the killing of an adulterous wife or her lover. Yet pardons for infanticide perpetrated by—or for—women pregnant from illicit sex also share in the use of the language of honor: “to conceal her shame and protect her honor” (“a covrir sa honte et garder son honneur”).Footnote 62 Scholars working with pardons have noticed the inclusion of fear of dishonor in these examples, but they have most often interpreted these phrases as evidence of the real gravity of illicit pregnancy, not as a strategic use of the language of honor to obtain pardon.Footnote 63 But perhaps claiming to kill an infant in an attempt to defend honor had a similar mitigating function as claiming to kill a man because he called your sister a whore. The women, or their advocates, chose to use this language of honor and shame over and over, and that could mean that they thought it would, in fact, mitigate the gravity of the offense that had been committed.
There are, moreover, additional reasons to think that pardoning was considered an appropriate response. If we return to the prescriptive sources, we can find a heavy dose of mercy in the laws of both ecclesiastical and secular officials, norms that we can also see reflected in their applications of their laws.
I begin with the most important piece of canon law to address the intentional killing of an infant, a letter from Pope Alexander III dated 1168–69.Footnote 64 As this text explains, in the second half of the twelfth century, in the county of Flanders, a single mother took her newborn son to the man she claimed was the father. The man denied paternity, and the mother, in despair, killed her newborn. The count of Flanders banished this woman for 7 years as punishment. The mother, horrified by her own action and inspired by crusading zeal, decided to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to atone for her sin. First, she went to Benevento to present her case to Alexander III, to confess her sins to him and to ask that he assign penance. The pope rejected her idea of pilgrimage to Jerusalem as futile and potentially harmful. Moved by her tears, he decided that her banishment could be lifted. Instead, she should be placed in a convent in Flanders, and dedicate herself to a life of penitential enclosure. However, the pope did not oblige the unhappy woman to do so. He stipulated that if she was not able or willing to maintain a life of celibacy, she should be given permission to marry instead.
To the modern reader, this is a rather remarkable response by a pope to a woman who confessed to illicit sex and intentional killing of her own child. It might be assumed that the decision was intended and taken as an exception, but in fact, it is never treated as such, not in the decision rendered by the pope, or in the subsequent handling of the case in canon law. Alexander's letter is the only text in the most important and influential canon law collection of the Middle Ages to explicitly address the intentional killing of an (illegitimate) infant by its mother. It was not the exception, it was the rule, or at least the only guidance that religious law offered.Footnote 65
Other canon law sources display the same attitude. Take for example the standard gloss, or commentary, provided by thirteenth-century jurist and cardinal Bernard of Parma. For him, the case of infanticide is not just the case of a woman overcome by rage, “iracundiae calore ducta”; it is the case of a woman possessed by the devil: “diabolico furore accensa.”Footnote 66 And in the additional commentary, there is the explanation why she, and others like her, should be given the chance to atone: “nolo mortem peccatoris sed convertatur,” God sought not the death of the sinner but his—or her—conversion, a change from wrongdoer to someone repentant and good.Footnote 67
For French ecclesiastical authorities, infanticide seems to have remained in the realm of penance, or left to secular authorities to prosecute.Footnote 68 Local legislation issued by bishops in France, and across medieval Europe, regularly decreed that all involved in the death of an infant or harm to a child, accidental or intentional, through suffocation, or by negligent exposure of an infant to the dangers of water or fire, should appeal directly to the bishop for penance. A local priest could not absolve so grave an offense.Footnote 69 Mothers are certainly sometimes the subject of these texts, but so are women in general, or parents, as well as all manner of other persons.Footnote 70 Whereas a few collections made distinctions between accidental and intentional killing, many others did not. Both the provider of an abortifacient and the negligent wet nurse were enjoined to seek episcopal remedy. The welfare of all infants was of great concern, and all Christians were potential culprits. As Richard Helmholz explains: “negligent infanticide was to be punished as well as intentional killing. Lack of desire to kill was cause for mitigation in the degree of punishment, not reason for absolution.”Footnote 71 This broad condemnation of involvement in infant death complied, as Helmholz points out, with the general principles found in canon law.Footnote 72
Turning next to secular law, in principle, anyone found guilty of killing a child could be executed. Several French collections of customary law set limitations on this punishment when addressing cases in which parents, women, or mothers are suspected of killing their infants by suffocation or overlaying.Footnote 73 But at the same time, in principle, parents who harmed their children, like all parricides, were considered to have committed graver offense than the killers of a stranger. And anyone who harmed children, intentionally or not, might also fall foul of laws that placed great value on infants and children, even before birth. Those who caused a pregnant woman to abort or miscarry, through potions or violence, also risked criminal prosecution and execution, and sought pardon to escape these penalties.Footnote 74 In short, the letter of secular law harshly condemned all manner of infant death.
Nevertheless, all child killing, however harshly condemned in principle, might be resolved via penance, by compensation paid to the bereaved family, or by fines levied by the court that prosecuted the accused. We may never be able to arrive at a clear statistical account of how often offenders received mercy. We do not know the rates of prosecution, even, let alone anything like numbers of actual alleged killings, let alone actual rates of suspicious infant death. But the possibility that there might be pardon, or absolution, or that the investigation might be dropped altogether, was real. The kind of justice practiced in medieval Europe was one that encompassed both harsh punishment and mercy. Even the worst of criminals could be pardoned.Footnote 75 But infanticidal unwed mothers were not necessarily counted among that “worst.”
The French pardon letters, like the medieval laws reviewed, do not just involve Alfred Soman's “one type” of “a woman [who] conceived a child illegitimately, concealed her pregnancy, gave birth in secret, and then killed her baby or deliberately let it die.” Women were not alone among the pardoned. Men also sought pardon for different kinds of involvement in the death of an infant.Footnote 76 Moreover, the infants in question were not just those conceived illegitimately. Children of legitimate unions figured as well.Footnote 77 Nor were all their deaths the kind of deliberate killing that Soman describes. The advocates for penitent culprits regularly claimed that they had acted out of fear, poverty, temporary madness, and every other emotion that the devil might instill in a human soul.
3. Pardoning the Infanticidal Mother
What, then, is the history of maternal infanticide in medieval France as we know it, taking stock of what sources there are: the laws, stories, the few records from local investigations and prosecutions, and the royal and ducal pardons? It is a history of pardons above all, pardons and penance, with only scattered references or examples of execution or other punishment.
The women who received pardon could be young or old, married or unmarried, adulteresses or widows.Footnote 78 They could be of high or low status, living with their parents or in service. For some it was their first pregnancy; others already had children, some legitimate, some not. The pardon requests most often claim the women had given birth alone, in the most dire and terrifying of circumstances, and therefore with fewest chances for the successful birth of an infant. In other cases, women gave birth with the help of their kin: mothers or other family members. Some confessed to giving birth to an infant who lived long enough to receive baptism, others claimed stillbirth, and still others confessed that although the infant had been born alive, they either had not tried to baptize the baby or had tried and failed before it died. Many of those who killed claimed to have done so in the first desperate moments after giving birth, some killed their infants days or even months later.Footnote 79 These all obtained pardon.
There are too many pardons to detail here, but it is instructive to consider at least a few more examples. According to one woman's confession, for example, she had surrendered her body to the demands of the man she hoped to marry, who lived with her in her father's home. Guillemette Lelasuier, a “poor girl” of 20 years of age or thereabouts, had wanted to marry a servant called Jehan Coquechart, had sex with him, and became pregnant. Well before 9 months had passed, she fell in a ditch and the next day gave birth, but kept the infant squeezed between her legs until her family and the other people staying with them had left the house, so she could keep the birth a secret. At that point, she claimed, she wanted to baptize the infant but it had already died, because it had been born too prematurely. The king pardoned her nevertheless, in 1482.Footnote 80 That same year he also pardoned a widow, Anne l'Abbesse, already the mother of “many little children.” Her pardon letter explained that she had, after baptizing her newborn infant, smothered the baby in her bedsheets to make sure that her family did not discover her with a newborn infant whose presence would have offered irrefutable evidence of her having had illicit sex with a young man whose name, like the place in which she lived, was left blank on the pardon.Footnote 81
Presented with the confessions of infanticidal, even incestuous, mothers, the Valois kings regularly granted pardons. Annette de Boussen, for example, confessed not just to illicit sex but also to incestuous illicit sex with her brother, and of having killed her newborn infant to conceal the crime, acting “out of great shame and fear of her mother and father,” and “tempted by the devil.”Footnote 82 When the corpse of a baby girl was found in a neighbor's garden a few days later, she fled to sanctuary, and obtained royal pardon in 1382. Spared any further criminal prosecution, she was sentenced to 2 months in prison on a penitential fast.
Some of the royal pardons for men and women who confessed to involvement in illicit pregnancy or infant murder do offer indications that other culprits had been executed. It is difficult to tell if their offenses were regarded as somehow worse, or what other factors contributed to the infliction of capital punishment. To give one such example, in 1481, Guillaume Langlois sought pardon for his involvement in an infanticide. A married man, he had been having a sexual relationship with a woman staying in his house, Raouline Pacquet. He claimed that she had concealed the pregnancy even from him, and that she had buried their newborn daughter in his garden, only telling him afterwards. According to Guillaume's request for pardon, although this is not known for certain, Raouline had been executed, and this had happened at least in part because this was not her first offense; she had aborted a previous pregnancy.Footnote 83 Guillaume denied any involvement in the death of the infant, but rather than risk prosecution, he had fled and sought pardon, as did a few other men in similar circumstances. Lest it be assumed, however, that the woman necessarily had more responsibility, in a reverse situation, there are the pardons sought by two young women who confessed to incestuous sex and abortion, it was their fathers who were condemned to execution. In 1453, the daughter who sought pardon claimed that her father had raped her and forced her to abort her fetus.Footnote 84 In 1474, another young woman sought pardon because she had been imprisoned and investigated after her father, she claimed, had forced her to drink an abortifacient, and he had been sentenced to execution and had appealed his case to Parlement.Footnote 85 Abortion or infanticide compounded by a prior offense, or especially by incest, may well have made execution a more likely outcome than in other cases. But even with these examples, the fate of those described in the royal grants of pardon as instigators and condemned to death is not known. Nor is the fate of the suppliants in these cases who had presented themselves as accomplices, often as quite unwilling or unknowing accomplices, known. All that is known for certain is that the king granted pardon in the records available.
Conclusion
That there was room for mercy and for the miraculous in medieval justice should not in the end be surprising. The miraculous escape of Christian apostles and saints from captivity or from attempted execution featured prominently in medieval Christian religious devotion and iconography. The fact that Jesus had been subjected to trial and execution mattered a good deal also. Divine intervention in temporal affairs was taken seriously. If an attempted execution failed, and if it were claimed that saints, or the Virgin Mary, had intervened to spare the guilty, this could mean an end to efforts to execute that person. This could happen even for seemingly rather unsympathetic persons. As Robert Bartlett wrote in his account of a “notorious Welsh brigand,” or rebel, executed in 1289 for homicide and other offenses, the executed man, thought dead, returned to life and this resuscitation was attributed to Thomas of Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford and future saint.Footnote 86
But it was not just a matter of miracles. However vicious and violent medieval society was in many respects, when it came to criminal punishment, there was a shared reluctance to execute, to condemn, and to carry out sentences, among judges and juries and extending to anyone involved in a criminal proseuction.Footnote 87 Dangers of hellfire menaced not only those who wrongfully condemned the innocent, but also those who failed to recognize the role of divine intervention and the essential place of mercy in exercising justice.
Showing mercy to sinners was, moreover, an important mechanism of rulership for popes and kings, and for religious and secular authorities more broadly. It was a mighty weapon in a ruler's arsenal to have the power to condemn to death, but to choose instead to show mercy to those who confessed and sought pardon. It could increase royal income, but could also demonstrate the extent of a ruler's power, and coule enforce and uphold the patriarchal social order. This grace was shown to both the worst sorts of criminals, and to those who confessed to less egregious, if still serious, crimes. The place of women on this spectrum of wrongdoing, and infanticidal mothers in particular, remains unclear. In general, justice as exercised against women in medieval France might more accurately be thought of as paternalistic rather than viciously patriarchal: women were a recognized category of vulnerable persons whom those in power had a special obligation to help.
Even women who killed their newborn infants could be shown mercy, and were. It should not be assumed that the sinning unwed mother who concealed her pregnancy and killed her infant was counted among those worst offenders in the medieval imagination. To make this assumption is to mistake the nature of medieval patriarchy and the function of religious ideas of good and evil. This assumption fails to recognize, too, the role of honor and shame as mitigating factors in acts of violence, even when committed by a mother against her own infant, conceived out of wedlock or otherwise. Mothers of illegitimate children who sought royal pardon regularly claimed that they had concealed pregnancies and killed because they wanted to protect their honor and that of their family, and that they feared violence or condemnation from their kin. They admitted that they had concealed pregnancies from their employers and neighbors, and in some cases from their cuckolded husbands, even though doing so endangered the lives of their infants, and their own lives. This scenario was morally wrong, but not unforgivable. It was morally wrong, but in a way understandable, that these women had killed their infants. They should suffer imprisonment or be sent on pilgrimages or they should spend some time atoning for their involvement in the death of an infant. But there was no absolute necessity to drown them or burn them so that the social order could be maintained. In the medieval handling of maternal infant murder, Christian notions of penance, mercy, and redemption predominate.
The sinning mother who killed her illegitimate child had to atone; but so did any man or woman who had any involvement in the death of an infant, a miscarriage, or a stillbirth. Both intentional and unintentional killing of an infant could lead to criminal prosecution. It remains unclear if unwed mothers were more likely to be prosecuted. Certainly, they appear to dominate among those pardoned for involvement in the suspicious death of an infant, but more research is needed to confirm this supposition. There could be many more pardons for men involved in infant death that have yet to be identified. What is clear is that the life of a child was sacred, and that both pregnant mothers and young children had special legal protections. Those who harmed them could face considerable legal as well as spiritual consequences. But at the same time, perpetrators could also, after penance and confession, reintegrate into society. This patriarchal system oppressed women mightily, but did not need to inflict harsh judicial punishment upon them to maintain social order. And just as the Virgin Mary saved the life of the incestuous noblewoman of Rome who killed her newborn infant to protect her honor, so, too, did French kings grant pardon to the women who confessed to killing their illegitimately conceived infants, and who sought royal grace.
