This strange medieval ritual was designed to protect a mother from grief. How did it work?

An early medieval text describes rituals intended to protect pregnancies and address the loss of a child. Historian Elinor Cleghorn explains what it can tell us about maternal grief and attitudes towards children

Medieval manuscript illumination depicting a woman giving birth in bed, attended by several women who assist the mother and tend to the newborn child.

Published: September 23, 2026 at 3:08 PM

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There is one early medieval English childbirth charm that contains a rather unusual instruction. According to the text of the charm, a woman whose child has died should take soil from the grave, wrap it in black wool and sell it to a merchant, speaking a short formula as she does so.

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The passage forms part of a group of rituals commonly known as For a Delayed Birth. They concern the difficulties of bearing and rearing children, combining prescribed movements, spoken words and objects associated with pregnancy and loss.

For historian Elinor Cleghorn, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, these instructions offer evidence of how medieval society acknowledged maternal bereavement. They also challenge the assumption that parents became emotionally detached from their children, because so many children died so young.

“It was a common assumption for a while that parents in history, especially in the Middle Ages, didn't really love their children in the way that we do today because lives were so precarious and short,” she says. Clearly, she says, that wasn't true.

A medieval collection of remedies

Cleghorn places For a Delayed Birth among the “metrical charms”: writings that use the rhythms and patterns of poetry as part of a prescribed ritual. They were, she says, “medical prayers”, which “could be recited to aid all sorts of things”.

Their subjects included concerns familiar to medieval households.

“There was a metrical charm for protection on journeys,” she says. Other charms addressed bees, the protection of cattle and the recovery of stolen livestock. These texts belong to a world in which religious practice, certain words, and ritual actions offered ways of seeking protection alongside other responses to illness or misfortune.

“For a Delayed Birth [is] a beautiful set of birthing rituals, not just around birth, but also around the hope for a child,” Cleghorn explains.

The text survives in British Library Harley MS 585, a manuscript containing medical remedies, prayers and charms. The collection in which it appears is known as the Lacnunga, an Old English word meaning “remedies”. The childbirth passages were copied in approximately between the years 1000 and 1050, before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. They combine prose instructions with short passages of Old English verse intended for recitation.

Medieval manuscript illumination of the Nativity, showing the Virgin Mary resting in bed while attendants care for the newborn Jesus and prepare food nearby.

A new mother was expected to rest while other women cared for her and the baby. Recovery could take weeks, and childbirth remained hazardous even after a successful delivery, with complications posing a continuing threat to women | Credit: Getty Images

Pregnancy after an earlier loss

The title of the charm doesn’t fully describe the text’s concerns. A modern reader might understand “delayed birth” as prolonged labour, but the instructions extend to carrying a pregnancy successfully and keeping a child alive.

Cleghorn interprets them as intended for “a woman who has experienced trauma and tragedy in childbirth, so perhaps has lost a child, or by a woman who hopes to again become pregnant and give birth safely after experiencing such a loss”.

This connects the experience of bereavement with expectations surrounding another pregnancy. The rituals address both an earlier death and the possibility that it might be repeated.

One sequence instructs that a woman hoping for a smooth pregnancy should step over her husband as he lies in bed. It recommends an “elaborate stepping sequence, and the woman has to make sure that her husband doesn't wake up while reciting her intentions to become pregnant again and have a healthy child,” Cleghorn says.

The soil and the black wool

Another passage concerns what a woman should do if she has previously lost a child.

“One of the sequences involves a woman going to the grave of her dead child and taking some of the soil and wrapping the soil in some black wool,” Cleghorn explains.

The instruction specifies material from her own child’s grave, linking the ritual to a particular bereavement. The soil is then transferred to someone outside the household.

“The ritual was completed if she gave this black wool containing the soil from her child's grave to a travelling merchant, who would then take it away from the area where she lived to symbolise her grief and the threat of another loss being taken far away from her.”

“So there was also a little collaborative element as well in this,” she says, “that the merchant would then leave town, taking with him the grief and the danger.”

This reading suggests a practice that joined remembrance of a deceased child to concern for future pregnancies. It also provided a defined action through which a woman might respond to circumstances she had been unable to control: a way of reasserting some agency in a decidedly uncertain context.

Instructions rather than a personal account

The evidence has clear limitations. The charm survives as a written prescription, rather than a description of an observed ceremony or a mother’s account of her own experience.

“We know they exist and were written down, but we don't know how these rituals were performed, or by whom,” Cleghorn cautions.

Nor can the text establish how common these practices were or whether women found them reassuring. However, its survival demonstrates that certainly someone considered these responses to reproductive difficulty worth recording.

For Cleghorn, that’s significant in itself. It indicates “a real sense of a necessity to create practices around mothering and childbirth that could bring some safety, bring some degree of protection”.

So, the assumption that frequent childhood deaths produced parental indifference confuses two different questions: how often families experienced bereavement, and how they responded to it. These birth charms, however, show that the loss of a child was understood as an experience requiring emotional action and attention.

Grief may certainly have been more common, though no less profound.

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Elinor Cleghorn was speaking to Lauren Good on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

Authors

James OsborneSenior content producer

James Osborne is a senior content producer at HistoryExtra

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