Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death (BBC Four) was not particularly successful in its attempt to chart everyday life. In the first instalment of a three-parter, the historian Helen Castor looked at how medieval society dealt with the first of those three great human levellers, birth. “For a Queen, as much as a peasant,” she told the camera, “the experience of childbirth remained eternally unpredictable.”
Here, however, the documentary hit its major flaw: the complete lack of evidence about how peasants, or indeed even most aristocratic women, found medieval childbirth. So Castor spent much of the film discussing royal births, from the birth of Henry VII in 1457 to the arrival of his grandson 80 years later.
This story of teenage pregnancies and stillbirths was compelling enough but hardly informed us about life for the average 15th-century woman: it was the medieval equivalent of filming a documentary on contemporary childbirth solely in the Lindo Wing.
Interviews with historians about the relationship between women and the Church were more revealing. Castor did a good job explaining why painful births were viewed as a punishment for original sin, and why midwives were allowed to baptise babies if it was obvious they would die before being removed from the birthing chamber, where men were banned.
There were also glimpses inside the birthing chamber itself, as Castor told how medieval women took to bed weeks before the birth in a room with blackened windows so sunlight could not damage their child.
A “birthing bowl” made of jet, which was believed to possess special properties, and a birth girdle with Bible inscriptions both seemed archaic but a diagram for a “women’s stoole” was surprisingly similar to the birthing stool used by today’s midwives.
Castor’s deep knowledge of the subject was clear throughout, and she revealed at one stage that she had studied some of the documents the film relied upon for 25 years. If only she had spent less time on well-worn stories of princes and palaces, the documentary might have done this graft more justice.