Reconsidering obstetric death and female fertility in Anglo-Saxon England
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- The authors understanding of Anglo-Saxon burial practices has been revolutionized in the last decades, developing from an examination of artefact typologies and ethnicities into an established exploration of the social experience.
- Non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way, is permitted.
- She was buried supine in full dress with a cruciform brooch and two small long brooches.
- The foetus lay low and transverse across her pelvis, which was probably the cause of this double fatality (Fig. 1).
Archaeology and maternal mortality
- Post-mortemextrusion, it is speculated, takes place forty-eight to seventy-twohours after death because the formation of decomposition gases creates an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, causing the uterus to prolapse, resulting in post-mortem delivery (Smith 1955: 25).
- Relying on the decomposition process to create forward momentum also presents a problem.
- As a result, coffin birth would be extremely unlikely to occur within an archaeological burial even inside a coffin-like cavity.
- At St Nicholas Shambles, a medieval site in London, he identified a woman with cephalo-pelvic disproportion; she died with the foetus lodged within the birth canal where it remained for burial (Wells 1978).
- At a superficial glance grave 57 at Oakington fits a recognized pattern of infant and woman double burial seen at other large early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries (Crawford 2007; Lee 2008).
In utero double burials
- At Abingdon I, a pregnant woman aged 15–20 was interred on the edge of the cemetery, her grave including beads, a bucket and three brooches (Leeds and Harden 1936).
- She had Schmorl’s Nodes affecting the eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebrae and the second and third lumbar vertebrae.
- Worthy Park grave 26 contained an 18–30-year-old female buried supine with a foetus between her thighs (Chadwick Hawkes and Granger 2003: 33).
- Grave 188 contained a woman aged 25–30 located between three plots on the same orientation as the majority of graves, with no grave goods and no pathology.
- Bhatia also investigated the mortality rate by age (Fig. 3), showing an increase in the mortality of younger women due to pregnancy with a high of 31.6 per cent of deaths among those aged 20–24 years.
Discussion
- Everyone would have known someone who had, or would, die in childbirth.
- Given that reality, it is conspicuous that there are not more examples of double obstetric death in the archaeological record.
- The laws of Ethelbert (king of Kent AD 602–3) regulated sex with women and levied fines against men Obstetric death and female fertility in Anglo-Saxon England 293 for engaging in sex with a king’s maiden, a grinding slave, a noble woman’s serving-woman, a free man’s serving-woman or a slave woman.
- According to law 85, even a servant or slave was protected though compensation if a man lay with his wife.
- The legal authority regulated a woman’s sexual partnerships and placed emphasis on female fertility within identifiable biological lineages; adherence to these early laws was probably not enforceable but may have been cultural practice (Reynolds 2009).
Conclusion
- Death in childbirth was commonplace in Anglo-Saxon England but this does not mean that the double death of a mother and infant was not socially or emotionally difficult.
- This was not a universal response and women with foetuses in-utero were interred in subsidiary and central locations, with wealthy, modest and sparse sets of grave goods.
- Maternal mortality was far more common than Wells (1978) assumed.
- Post-mortem extrusion, however, is an extraordinary and implausible taphonomic process.
- Past societies probably employed social mechanisms or cultural responses that reduced the risk of mortality.
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"Reconsidering obstetric death and f..." refers background in this paper
...They are also the result of cultural circumstance, with complications in pregnancy as the highest cause of death among adolescent girls because of a preference for early fertility (Conde-Agudelo, Belizán and Lammers 2004; Patton et al. 2009)....
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Related Papers (5)
Frequently Asked Questions (13)
Q2. How long does it take to extrude a foetus?
putrefaction takes longer than forty-eight to seventy-two hours and extrusion would have to overcome an un-dilated, un-plastic, cervical canal, while the foetus was itself decomposing.
Q3. What are the common types of double burials?
The most common types of double burials are: child and woman (22 per cent), man and woman (19 per cent) and infant and woman (12 per cent) (Stoodley 2002).
Q4. How many times did the risk of infant mortality decrease after maternal death?
infant survival was diminished after maternal death (5.1 times) and the risk of infant mortality (in the first year of life) was twenty-eight times that of an infant with a living mother (Ganatra, Coyaji and Rao 1998: 565).
Q5. What is the predominant interpretation of coffin birth?
in archaeology the dominant interpretation for extruded and partially extruded foetuses is currently a phenomenon known as coffin birth: the post-mortem extrusion of a foetus into the grave (Lewis 2007: 35).
Q6. What was the role of the local agency in the death of a child?
Death in childbirth was a democratic tragedy affecting the whole social spectrum but the treatment of the individual was determined through local agency, the result of negotiations that took place within a particular funeral party during a specific set of chronological and social circumstances.
Q7. What was the position of the female in grave 146?
At Castle Dyke, Barton-on-Humber, a female aged 35–40 carried in-utero a thirty-seven-week foetus, she was positioned in grave 146 with her right hand over her extended abdomen.
Q8. What is the reason for the uterine contractions?
Plausibly uterine contractions could be ‘caused by the onset of rigor mortis’ (Schulz, Püschel and Tsokos 2005: 275); however, this is in fact an inhibiting factor because of the restriction of tissue.
Q9. What is the significance of the Anglo-Saxon laws on female fertility?
This system created a network of social rules, marriage restrictions and taboos which acted to control female fertility, placing emphasis on the mature body.
Q10. Why are complications in pregnancy the highest cause of death among adolescent girls?
They are also the result of cultural circumstance, with complications in pregnancy as the highest cause of death among adolescent girls because of a preference for early fertility (Conde-Agudelo, Belizán and Lammers 2004; Patton et al. 2009).
Q11. What was the cause of the fetus’s movement?
The laminae on her fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae were fused, a congenital anomaly, but her movement was probably unaffected (Waldron 1994: 58, 64).
Q12. What is the probability of death among women who were under the age of 20?
The highest probability of mortality was identified among women who were aged less than 20 with an increased risk after 35 years; the first and fifth (or further) pregnancies were the most dangerous.
Q13. What is Calvin Wells’ approach to maternal mortality?
Calvin Wells’ conservative approach to maternal mortality derives from the certainty of identification (Chadwick Hawkes and Wells 1975; Wells 1978).