_Kaunt le emfès sera nées,_ _Lors deyt estre maylolez,_ _En soun berz l’enfaunt chochet,_ _De une bercere vus purvoyet,_ _Où par sa norice seyt bercé._
This was the manner in which the new-born infant was treated in all grades of society. If we turn to one of the more serious romances, we find it practised among princes and feudal chiefs equally as among the poor. Thus, when the princess Parise, wandering in the wild woods, is delivered in the open air, she first wraps her child in a piece of _sendal_, torn apparently from her rich robe, and then binds, or swathels, it with a white cloth:--
_La dame le conroie à un pan de cendex,_ _Puis a pris un blanc drap, si a ses fians bendez._ --Parise la Duchesse, p. 76.
When the robbers carry away the child by night, thinking they had gained some rich booty, they find that they have stolen a newly-born infant, “all swatheled.”
_Lai troverent l’anffant, trestot anmaloté._--Ibid. p. 80.
This custom of swatheling children in their infancy, though evidently injurious as well as ridiculous, has prevailed from a very early period, and is still practised in some parts of Europe. We can hardly doubt that our Anglo-Saxon forefathers swatheled their children, although the practice is not very clearly described by any of their writers. We derive the word itself from the Anglo-Saxon language, in which _beswethan_ means to swathe or bind, _suethe_ signifies a band or swathe, and _swethel_ or _swæthil_, a swaddling-band. These words appear, however, to have been used in a more extensive sense among the Anglo-Saxons than their representatives in more recent times, and as I have not met with them applied in this restricted sense in Anglo-Saxon writers, I should not hastily assume from them that our early Teutonic forefathers did swathe their new-born children. In an Anglo-Saxon poem on the birth of Christ, contained in the Exeter Book (p. 45), the poet speaks of--
_Bearnes gebyrda,_ _The child’s birth,_ _þa he in binne wæs_ _when he in the bin was_ _in cildes hiw_ _in a child’s form_ _claþum biwunden._ _with cloths wound round._
These words refer clearly to the practice of swaddling; and, though the Anglo-Saxon artist has not here portrayed his object very distinctly, we can hardly doubt that, in our cut (No. 34), taken from the Anglo-Saxon manuscript of Cædmon, the child, which its mother is represented as holding, is intended to be swathed.