Dead Babies and Creature and Vitalis September 20, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern , trackback
You are reading through a medieval or early modern English record and you come across the name Vitalis or alternatively Creature, as you will from time to time. Two random examples.
Vitalis, son of Richard Engaine, and Sara his wife, released his manor of Dagworth in 1217 to Margery de Cressi.
1550, Nov 5. Buried Creature, daughter of Agnes Mathews, syngle woman, the seconde childe.
So what are these? Just name flotsam? The occasional eccentric name that most cultures spit up, from time to time, on the beach of documentary evidence. In fact, the names were linked, even interchangeable and they were given in equivalent situations. The key point with Vitalis and Creature is that they were neutral names, that could be given either to a baby boy or a baby girl. This was the English reflex of a wider Christian tradition that surrounded parents’ anxiety over baptism. An unbaptised baby could not be buried in consecrated ground: at least legally. It could not go to heaven: hence the creation of limbo and other undefined spaces. This was taken seriously enough that a mother that died in childbirth was cut open so that the unbaptised baby could be removed and so the mother, without encumbrance, could be buried in the churchyard. Horrific! Babies that looked as if they were going to die were often baptised while they were still in their mother’s womb – there is a very striking eighth-century example of this from Ireland – or while they were exiting by the midwife. If contractions began, for example, in the seventh month and the midwife could be fairly certain that the child would not make it through this kind of strategy could be used to assure salvation of the child: it must also have been a way of calming the mother in her birth pangs concerned not just with her baby’s body but also her baby’s soul. The result is that usually the names appear in melancholy records such as that from 1550 above. However, at the same time if the baby survived it would be lumbered with this curious name. It is important to stress that some of these babies did make it through to adulthood. Note Vitalis Engaine above or Creature Cheseman who married John Haffynden in 1579.
There must be other examples of this from around the Christian world: can anyone help, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Beach remembered the Roman name Posthumous, which is not quite the same thing but close: a name given to a baby born after his or her mother’s death.
20 Sep 2015: Nancy from Nancy’s Baby Names kindly writes in
