Art historian Barbara Kellum’s 1973 article on child murder in medieval
England paints a picture of a world replete with ruthless and murderous
single mothers who escaped the legal consequences of their actions due to
an indifferent court system that chose to turn a blind eye to the deaths of
young children. Despite the overstated tone of her work, it remains the
most systematic study of child murder in the medieval English context.
Employing a sampling of 131 instances of child murder (including 144
victims), drawn from royal and ecclesiastical courts from the late thirteenth
to the early sixteenth centuries, the current investigation asks
us to rethink these early conclusions. Infanticide was a felony in the
Middle Ages and neither jurors nor royal officials treated child murder
with indifference. Nevertheless, it is clear that both gender and marital
status guided the courts in their decisions throughout the legal process
in terms of indicting, prosecuting, and sentencing defendants in cases
of child murder.