Nature's contraceptive. Wet-nursing and prolonged lactation: the case of Chesham, Buckinghamshire, 1578–1601

Abstract

The evidence for a modal class of birth intervals during the Stuart period in south Oxfordshire presented itself through the family reconstitution of the parishes of Caversham and Mapledurham.This pattern is becoming quite clear from a family reconstitution of the busy port of Minehead, Somerset, during the same period.The work is being funded by the Social Sciences Research Council.Searches for qualitative evidence to support the quantitative evidence from the parish registers indicated that the prolonged lactation which caused the modal two to three years intergenesic interval was not confined to one mother and one baby.Real evidence for a substantial amount of wet-nursing was not found in Caversham, Mapledurham, or in Minehead.It was found in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, at the end of the Tudor period.The article that follows is an extension to 'Fertility, infant mortality and breast feeding in the seventeenth century', published in Medical History, 1978, 22: 378-396.There is nothing conclusive in the new article, it is merely a start to the understanding of wet-nursing in England.THmER IS NO doubt that in the past upper-class women thought themselves degraded if they suckled their babies, and it was very exceptional for women of rank to breast feed.Lady Falkland and Elizabeth Willoughby2 certainly did.The Duchess of Lincoln3

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