ABSTRACT
Parental deprivation, a phrase borrowed from Peter Laslett, refers to children in pre-industrial England who were without parents, either through orphanhood or illegitimacy. But what place does parental deprivation have in a study on nurture and neglect? The answer lies in the fact that there were substantial numbers of children in late fifteenth-and sixteenth-century England who were left without one or both of their parents due to illegitimacy, death or enforced separation through practices such as abandonment or fostering. This in turn influenced the quality and type of nurture they received. It is these children who are discussed in this chapter. Who was to provide the nurture for such children and how were they to do it? Furthermore, to what extent were they neglected? Many of the themes in this chapter build upon those mentioned in preceding
chapters. The common acceptance of placing a child into an authoritative household where nurture was given by adults other than the parents, routinely done in cases of child marriage and apprenticeship, continued to constitute the care of a significant number of children who had lost a parent. Implicit too is the importance of the family, evidenced in all chapters, as the best environment through which to dispense moral counsel; to give practical advice including how to teach a child to know its place within the family; and to instruct them to place the wishes of the family above the child’s own. This is brought to the fore in this chapter by the homes into which parentally deprived children were placed by the municipal authorities and private individuals, as well as the expectation that poorer children were required to work so as to contribute to the family economy and thereby, their own nurture. There is also the juxtaposition of nurture and neglect as female traits articulated through the writings of ecclesiastical authors discussed in Chapter 2, which can be detected in the treatment by ecclesiastical and secular authorities of women who had illegitimate babies or had abandoned their children.
