Hi r/AskHistorians!
I am working on a group of skeletons who were buried inside a church in France. They’re dated to around 1390CE and this site was a monastery at that time. I posted before about why I would see women included in these burials.
Now I have to ask, why would children be here? Did monasteries frequently bury children?
I’ve heard of elite burials inside monasteries but every individual I have examined shows signs of extremely hard labour, which discounts the likelihood that these burials are family graves for the elite. It’s more likely the adults were pilgrims or monks themselves, but this does not explain the presence of children. Did monasteries take care of orphaned or abandoned children during this time?
Really interesting! I'm more familiar with the early middle ages, and the monastery at Portmahomack might be one point for comparison. It appears that the monks on that site did literally back-breaking work to build the monastery. In the early middle ages, children as young as 7 could be donated to a monastery according to a practice known as oblation, although this largely dried up by the central middle ages. In your case, there might have been lay communities associated with supporting the monastery, or even itinerant workers who helped maintain or expand the site. This might be more likely if, as you suggest, your monastery functioned as a pilgrimage site. I'm unsure if French monasteries at this time were functioning as orphanages. As you suggest, donors might sometimes secure burial at religious sites. Finally, in some places where there was an enduring ban on burying suicides, unbaptized babies, etc., these individuals might be secretly buried on the sites of abandoned churchyards, and this could very feasibly include monasteries shuttered during the French Revolution. So there's lots of potential factors at stake, without knowing more about dating, the situation of the human remains, etc.