5. The community of birth

As a woman began to labour, the community around her moved into action. Women with experience of childbirth were summoned to act as birth attendants, while others provided childcare for older children or offered to lend the necessary linens. Still more waited, watched and listened for indications that the infant had been delivered. While waiting, they prepared gifts of food and drink or medicines and salves in anticipation of visiting the new mother and her infant. Once the delivery was complete, friends and neighbours visited the household to take gifts and fuss over the infant. While there, visitors would hear details of the birth that had just taken place and share their own birth experiences. They would offer advice or share medicinal or dietary suggestions that had helped them during their own experiences of birthing. Such neighbourly interactions were an indispensable element of birthing. They sought not only to ensure that the mother and infant were properly cared for but also to preserve customary methods of managing childbirth. This chapter develops our understanding of the relationship between birth and the community by exploring the impact of birthing on the neighbourhood in which it took place. Birth in the eighteenth century created a social and cultural space in which the business of being neighbours could be conducted. It bound the infant tightly into the networks of duty and obligation that defined the immediate neighbourhood, and created a space in which the ever-shifting boundaries of that community could be drawn and maintained.

The community of childbirth was a community of neighbours. It consisted of people who lived in close proximity to each other, regardless of religion, occupation or, to a lesser extent, social status and gender. It therefore represented the neighbourhood as it was at that moment. Rather than being defined by a strong common interest, the community of childbirth was defined by the limits of what its members could see and hear. It was therefore the kind of community experienced on a daily basis by those of lower and middling status. Elite families were removed from these aural understandings of community. Since the seventeenth century, elite families had begun to remove themselves from local networks. Their community, as Keith Wrightson suggests, ‘was that of the county, their neighbours the members of their own class with whom they hunted, exchanged visits, and served in country administration’.1 For elite women, neighbourly interactions took place through letters. These letters mirrored the interactions of the community of neighbours through the provision of support and advice, observation and scrutiny of the body, and speculation or surveillance where scandal was suspected. The eighteenth-century birthing chamber was therefore no longer the vector of cross-class unity it had been in preceding centuries. By the end of the period under consideration here, the birthing chamber reflected the social milieu to which the family belonged. Wealth was a defining factor, as those with money removed themselves to townhouses and family estates. At a time when old social boundaries were challenged by the rising wealth of the parish gentry and industrialists, the birthing chamber retained its importance as a method of delineating social boundaries. While the function of the birth community remained reasonably static over the eighteenth century, the status of the individuals present in the birthing chamber was increasingly restricted to those of a similar social status to the woman giving birth.

Karen Harvey’s careful and detailed reconstruction of the social construction of early eighteenth-century Godalming offers a rare and powerful account of the reach and importance of neighbourhood for poor families.2 Neighbours, she notes, were not only the social backdrop against which one lived one’s life but also the face of regulation and authority through the various mechanisms of local governance and poor relief.3 Watching, listening and sharing information created ‘community knowledge’ which, in turn, enabled the community to maintain an element of harmony in everyday life. This knowledge allowed neighbours to practise what Katie Barclay has identified as caritas, an affective bond rooted in love, duty and obligation to one’s neighbours which, she argues, produced community.4 Caritas required neighbours to assist members of the community who had fallen sick, for example, or who were starving and was therefore particularly important for the lower sections of society. It promoted communally orientated behaviours, from peaceable marriage to hospitality for strangers, to the policing of others’ moral actions.5 The knowledge acquired through the performance of caritas also allowed neighbours to avoid individuals with a poor reputation or to depose troublesome neighbours in court.6 Through the sharing of community knowledge, the boundaries of the community were created and reinforced. What was said, and to whom, defined those who participated in or were excluded from the day-to-day experience of community in the eighteenth century.

This community of neighbours is difficult to access in historical sources, but as a community of daily interaction it was crucial to the way in which eighteenth-century individuals understood themselves in relation to others. It was essential to their perception of place and, powerfully, to their sense of belonging.7 Despite its importance, however, the term ‘community’ has evaded successful definition for many years. Both the attraction of, and the problem with, the term is its slippery nature. Its meaning changes according to time and context. For most, the term means many things at once. It is not mutually exclusive and therefore a single person can consider themselves part of many different communities. It is a term that is rarely defined explicitly, and therefore even the same single facet of a community can be understood and interpreted in different ways by each of its individual members.8 Community boundaries can be internal, defined by religion for example, or they can be physical, defined by geographical terrain.9 They can be imposed by state and church authority, as in the parish, or they can be voluntary, as in shared interest groups.10 The community of neighbours discussed in this chapter was defined by proximity and by interaction. Good neighbours paid their debts, mediated in neighbourly disputes and could be called on to provide care and support where required.11 These neighbourly traits were reciprocal, and embedded neighbours in a network of belonging that often crystallized around life-cycle events.12

In examining the interaction between birthing and the neighbourhood in which it took place, this chapter uses two key types of source: folklore collections from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the records of the Northern Circuit assize court. Compendia of folklore record some of the celebratory customs that followed a legitimate, live birth, though they also present numerous methodological problems. As retrospective accounts of informal practices, they were subject to the vagaries of memory and exaggeration. Regional variation also affected the way in which customs might be remembered or recorded.13 The author’s motivation for creating the compilation, their personal interests and contemporary notions of respectability shaped the content of these compendia. Ruth Richardson’s work on popular death rituals has, however, demonstrated that folk memory of this nature can be extremely enduring and accurate while also accommodating local variation, particularly where the custom in question has significant social and cultural importance.14 This chapter looks to offset these unavoidable methodological difficulties by focusing on practices that were widely reported by folklorists in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Despite some regional variation in the way that birthing customs were reported, each retains a recognizable basic framework, which suggests a degree of consistency.

The documents produced by the northern assize courts provide details about the ways in which illegitimate births were handled in the eighteenth century. The northern assize circuit was the largest in the country, covering Yorkshire, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland. The assize court heard both civil and criminal cases that had been referred to it by the quarter sessions courts. The court archives contain extensive records covering a wide range of crimes from the theft of small items, clothing or animals to more serious accusations of rape or murder. This chapter focuses exclusively on witness depositions, constables’ notes and coroners’ reports that were produced during investigations into accusations of infanticide. These documents are particularly rich in material, as deponents recounted in detail not only what they had seen themselves, but also what they had heard and what they had been told by their friends and neighbours. As Elizabeth Horodowich has argued, depositions of this nature were essentially a type of officially sanctioned gossip.15

The act of recording this gossip, however, creates several methodological problems. Foremost among these concerns is the capacity, and indeed desire, of the writer to note the words of witnesses verbatim. While many of these accounts are written in the style of a transcript, it is highly unlikely that they represent a verbatim account of a conversation. It is more probable that the writer noted down key statements pertaining to the case and omitted those that were not considered relevant. Tim Stretton has suggested a number of ways in which lawyers and the legal process shaped not only witness depositions but future engagements with the legal process. ‘Legal hands’, he argued, ‘greatly influenced pleadings, interrogatories and depositions, litigants and deponants left the legal process wiser and more experienced in the ways of the law, rhetoric, and legal strategy, potentially influencing their subsequent actions and participation in the legal process.’16 Stretton’s research focuses on early modern England, a period in which legal action was widespread. While legal action of this nature was less popular by the end of the eighteenth century, Stretton’s ‘legal hands’ remained influential both in shaping testimony and in the informal education of litigants and deponents. The nature of the court and the infrequency with which it heard cases acted as a filter for lesser cases, or cases in which the burden of proof could not be met. Legal obfuscation of the distinction between stillbirth and infanticide may also have limited the number of accusations that were investigated and caused parish officers some confusion, as most women accused of infanticide had delivered their infant in secret. While women could protect themselves from false accusation by ensuring that the birth was witnessed, many argued that they had been surprised by a sudden labour or that they had not known about the pregnancy. It is therefore likely that many more cases remained undiscovered or did not come to the attention of the parish authorities. Finally, Steve Hindle’s work on court documents has shown that many deponents were familiar with the intricacies of the legal system that governed such cases. They were therefore entirely capable of manipulating their evidence to try to influence the outcome.17 Despite these issues, however, assize records regarding infanticide remain a valuable source of evidence, particularly concerning cultural attitudes towards pregnant women and illegitimate births.

Both the collections of folklore and the assize court records describe moments at which communities gathered together during birthing. Each was ostensibly ad hoc, with guests assembled from those who lived in close proximity to the household in which the birth was taking place, and who had at least some awareness of when the birth might happen. Both folklore accounts and criminal proceedings describe the community that attended the birth as ‘neighbours’, reinforcing the importance of neighbourliness and the related physical concept of neighbourhood in the creation and maintenance of strong community networks. Crucially, both types of sources described gatherings that relied on the sharing of gossip and what will be referred to throughout this chapter as ‘community knowledge’. By participating in both the gossip and the gatherings themselves, neighbours reaffirmed their personal involvement in, and identification with, their community. In being present in the social spaces of childbirth, members of the community created and cemented a position for themselves within the neighbourhood. They anchored the infant, its family and their household within local society. This chapter argues that birth exposed the mutually legitimating relationships between individual, household and neighbourhood that shaped everyday experiences of neighbourhood and community in the eighteenth century. It begins by exploring the concept of neighbourliness and its importance in eighteenth-century society, then examines the way in which the sociability of birthing shaped and maintained the way in which individuals understood concepts of community and neighbourhood. Finally, the chapter discusses situations in which birthing women sought to exclude their neighbours from birthing chambers, and the ways in which communities processed and handled this exclusion.

‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’

Neighbourliness was a rudimentary Christian tenet. The ninth and tenth commandments warn against neighbourly slander and covetousness, and the New Testament requires Christians to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.18 The theme was taken up in numerous religious tracts and devotional treatises throughout the eighteenth century, all of which emphasized the social and economic implications of ‘slandering, backbiting, tale-bearing, rash censuring and judging, receiving false reports … and all undue silence when truth and innocence suffers’.19 In these works, the word ‘neighbour’ referred to the whole Christian community and functioned as shorthand for conviviality and friendly relations.20 These ideals of neighbourly charity and love were accompanied by instructions and prayers for instances where such conduct had not been followed. Richard Allestree’s frequently republished treatise on godly living, The Whole Duty of Man, devoted an entire chapter to neighbourliness. He suggested that, ‘if you have done any unkindness or injury to any person, then you are to seek forgiveness from him’.21 The private devotional manual The Protestant’s Prayer-Book by the Gloucestershire clergyman John Marks Moffat, published in 1783, provided a formula for the confession of unneighbourly behaviour.22 Clearly, fulfilling one’s Christian duty to be a good neighbour could be difficult when presented with the realities of daily life.

The practicalities of neighbourly duty were a popular focus of instructional literature throughout the period. Good neighbours were expected to supplement their kind words with compassionate actions. The 1729 edition of The Compleat Servant-Maid, which was published under the name of the prolific writer on household management Hannah Woolley, suggested that every woman ‘ought also to have a competent knowledge in Physick and Surgery, that she may be able to help her Maimed, Sick and Indigent Neighbours’.23 Twenty years later, Eliza Smith’s popular work The Compleat Housewife; or, Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion noted on the flysheet that it contained recipes and remedies ‘fit either for private Families or such publick-spirited Gentlewomen as would be beneficent to their poor Neighbours’.24 In these instructional texts the love and charity required of good neighbours was largely described in practical terms. There was a tension, however, between the ideals of neighbourly behaviour and duty and one’s obligation to a community. As we shall see, it was often impossible to fulfil both responsibilities. Good neighbourliness frequently involved watching and sharing both goods and information. These actions could be both supportive and hostile and they had the potential to create conflict and misunderstanding. Competing duties – to friends, to neighbours and to the wider community – could not always be reconciled with the Christian requirement to ‘love thy neighbour’.

Talk between neighbours was crucial in defining the limits of the neighbourly community. The sharing of community knowledge gleaned from watching one’s neighbours has, historically and historiographically, been referred to as ‘gossip’. As we have already seen, the word, with its associations with subversive female sociability and triviality during the nineteenth century, has become loaded with negative connotations,25 whereas it originally emphasized the importance of childbirth to the daily experience of the community. ‘Gossip’ was first used in the seventeenth century as a name for the attendants who assisted the midwife during a birth. As it evolved over the eighteenth century, the word was used to describe an economy of shared information that encompassed men as well as women. This shared information could cover a range of topics, including creditworthiness and personal situation, as well as sexual misbehaviour and illegitimate births. Gossip was crucial to defining community boundaries as it created insiders and outsiders – those who talked and those who were talked about. For it to be effective, it had to rely on a shared set of principles and ideas of acceptable behaviour.26 The type of knowledge created by gossip recalls Rosenwein’s emotional communities.27 While gossip could be used to regulate those who did not follow the group’s principles, it could also be used to protect vulnerable members of the community, as we shall see later in this chapter. The community of neighbours that was so important in the management of childbirth, therefore, featured people who lived and worked closely enough to share gossip. They had opportunities to watch and hear and also to share their knowledge with other neighbours.

Communal watching and waiting was not just a feature of birthing. It could, for example, encompass early pregnancy (with speculation about changing menstrual cycles or body shape), newly married couples or illicit sexual liaisons. Regardless of subject, this economy of talk and information sharing between neighbours reinforced and policed the moral values of the community and shaped rules for everyday living.28 It also influenced the way in which the community behaved. The gatherings of women that took place at a birth were, to a point, spontaneous, but the whole community would have been watching and waiting for an impending delivery. Neighbours with experience of childbirth may have stayed at home when they knew a birth was imminent. Where an illegitimate pregnancy was suspected and the community’s suspicions were denied by the mother, her neighbours watched and waited for a sign that the birth had taken place. This can be seen in accusations of infanticide in terms of the speed with which most secret deliveries were discovered, the majority of accused women being searched and formally accused within twenty-four hours of the delivery. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that any hostility associated with watching and waiting was always directed against the mother and her illegitimate child. Communal knowledge of a husband’s bad character or of a servant’s unnecessarily violent mistress could equally affect the way in which the community responded to an illegitimate birth. The intimate relationship between the sharing of knowledge and birthing demonstrates the importance of birth in the creation and maintenance of neighbourly relations throughout the eighteenth century.

Sociability in birthing

Sociability shaped and maintained concepts of neighbourhood and community and was embedded in the way communities functioned throughout the eighteenth century, including in relation to birthing. Chapter 1 showed the importance of having neighbours and friends with experience of birthing to care for the new mother and her infant, watching them for signs of infection or making sure they were recovering satisfactorily from their travails. Chapter 4 explored the family networks that surrounded a birth. The presence of the neighbourhood within the framework of birthing reinforced and extended these networks and also increased the availability of advice or assistance in the precarious weeks that followed the delivery of the infant. Yet, as we have already seen, reciprocity was a key element in the management of childbirth during this period. Childbirth was as important to the community in which it took place as the community was to birthing. As well as providing neighbours with a topic of conversation or an opportunity to ‘gossip’, childbirth created a social space in which neighbours could conduct the business of being a community. By generating this space, birthing defined the extent of neighbourly obligations and duties at that particular point in time. Finally, sociability in birthing had an educational purpose. It gave young men and women the opportunity to learn about sexual and reproductive processes and informed them of which social, cultural and emotional behaviours were acceptable within the community. It gave those who already had this knowledge the opportunity to acquire other types of knowledge: for example, who was suspected of being pregnant, who owed money to whom, and who had moved away or arrived in the area? All these factors combined to make childbirth central to the way in which communities operated in the eighteenth century.

The early stages of birthing were populated by the midwife and her attendants. Once the delivery element of the process was concluded, however, the sociability of the birthing chamber was extended to the wider neighbourhood. William Howitt’s nostalgic collection of rural customs published in 1838, The Rural Life of England, recorded the ‘Dentdale Shout’ in which the first cry of the infant was a sign for those who had been present at the birth to run through the neighbourhood summoning women to a meal of bread, rum butter and wine.29 Almost 200 years later, the founder of the Folklore Society, Eliza Gutch, recorded a similar ‘First Cry’ gathering in North Yorkshire, which involved the banging of warming pans to summon the neighbours.30 The immediacy of these celebrations is implied by other accounts recording that those who delivered the child were required to cut and to distribute food among the neighbours who visited the house where the birth had taken place.31 Such customs suggest a childbirth community of close proximity, consisting of those who could hear the shouts of the birth attendants. They were potentially the same people who had also heard the groans of the mother as the delivery progressed and the subsequent cries of the infant. Their proximity allowed them to ready themselves to attend the celebration in a display of manufactured spontaneity after weeks of watching for signs of an imminent delivery.

As with other customary gatherings, the communal celebrations of birthing centred on the sharing of food and drink. William Henderson’s 1866 collection of northern folklore repeatedly cites an untraced manuscript referred to as the ‘Wilkie M.S.’, compiled by a medical student around 1816, which noted that

Tea, duly qualified with brandy, or whisky, and a profusion of shortbread and buns, are provided for all the visitors, and it is very unlucky to allow anyone to leave the house without his share of these good things.32

Harland and Wilkinson’s collection of Lancashire Legends published in 1879 recorded:

All the neighbours and friends are invited – sometimes many more than can be comfortably accommodated – and both tea and rum are plentifully distributed. After tea, each visitor pays a shilling towards the expense of the birth feast; and the evening is spent in the usual gossip.33

The key elements of these tea gatherings were their immediacy, the open nature of the invitation and the implied reciprocity of neighbourly duty through the provision of refreshments. These customary gatherings were distinct from both the sociability of the birthing chamber and the more formalized rituals of churching or baptism, though the same individuals may have attended each gathering. Tea gatherings drew together the neighbourhood so that it could acquire knowledge about the infant that had become its newest member, and to bind the child both visually and in the communal memory to its mother. Attendance at these gatherings was an open statement of involvement in and identification with the community into which the infant had been born, and created and reaffirmed the boundaries of the community as it was constituted at a particular moment in time in a single place. The sharing of food, drink and information further strengthened these boundaries through the expectation of reciprocal hospitality at a later date.34

The coroner’s report into the death of Mary Thorpe’s child in 1800 offers a rare glimpse of these post-birth visiting practices. The discovery of the infant’s body weighted down with stones in the River Dean had led to an investigation that captured something of the sociability of birth in the days immediately following a delivery. Mary Thorpe appears to have travelled around five miles from the house she shared with her parents to a township called Brightside near Sheffield. She gave a false name – Nanny – and took lodgings with Sarah Hartley, who did not realize that she was pregnant until around five or six weeks later. It seems from the case notes that Mary Thorpe was honest with her landlady about her pregnancy when challenged, adding to the community’s knowledge about her. By participating in the communal exchange of information, she thus located herself within the boundaries of the local community.

The extent of the community’s involvement in this birth is evident in the statements identifying the infant’s body. Sarah Hartley recognized the child ‘by the particular marks of the formation of its nose – sore eyes and a mark on its Navel’.

The local midwife, Ann Seddon, confirmed the presence of the identifying marks on the infant and added ‘that she dressed the Child for Mary Thorpe … and remembers putting round its body a ragged piece of Linen cloth’. Ann Seddon had delivered the infant and noted that she ‘saw the Child frequently during the succeeding week’.35

The most detailed description of Mary Thorpe’s lying-in was given by Sarah Pinder, who confirmed that

she was present when Mary Thorpe was delivered of a male child … that in the Course of the succeeding week this witness saw the Child not less than four or five times every day and recollects it perfectly well – that on the Evening of Monday the eighteenth instant, this witness having the Child on her Lap, Mary Thorpe took it from her saying she would take it to Derby to her sister to nurse – a man then present asked her, what was she going to do with it? – she replied she would get it baptised.

Three other women also testified that they had been present at the birth of the child, and that they had been involved in caring for it during the week that followed. Mary Thorpe’s birthing chamber was clearly a busy space. All of the women knew her as Nanny and they all seem to have been aware that the infant was illegitimate. Despite this, the witness statements all suggest that the birthing chamber had been a friendly environment. One witness noted that she ‘saith on the day immediately after the Child was born she observed … what a pretty child hers would be to show her Father and Mother’.36 By the time she was delivered, Mary Thorpe had been living with Sarah Hartley for almost three months. The attendance of so many local women during her lying-in indicates that she had integrated well into the community. Despite the illegitimacy of the child, these witness statements suggest that Mary Thorpe’s birthing chamber was a social and convivial space where the people present fussed over the infant, passed it to one another, talked and shared information.

These informal gatherings were an opportunity to see the mother and the infant together in the weeks that followed the delivery. The official communal rituals of childbirth – churching and baptism – focused on the mother and the infant respectively and took place several weeks after the birth.37 It was rare for both to be present at either of these ceremonies until the end of the eighteenth century. Baptism was expected to take place on the first Sunday following the birth, when the mother was still confined to her bed. Churching took place four weeks following the delivery, and marked the point at which the mother could move outside the confines of her house. As the age of the infant at baptism increased towards the end of the eighteenth century, it became more common to combine these two ceremonies at the conclusion of birthing.38 By visiting the mother and child during the intervening weeks, the community gained knowledge of the birth and visually associated the mother and her infant in a way that was formalized by the attendance of other neighbours and family members. It also provided the community with the opportunity to ensure that the procedures and processes of birth were being correctly observed, and created a space in which more community information could be shared. The sociable nature of the birthing chamber, the presence of neighbours and friends, and the provision of food and drink after the child was delivered created the ideal atmosphere in which to share information. By participating in these informal acts of hospitality, the community created, reinforced and defined itself as it was at that moment.

The custom of ‘presenting’, or ‘gifting’, in which the infant was given gifts of food and money on its first outing, also tied the infant to the physical landscape of its community. The earliest published record of this custom can be found in John Brand’s Popular Antiquities, dated 1777, in which he noted that ‘Hutchinson, in his history of Northumberland, tells us that Children in that County, when first sent abroad in the arms of the nurse to visit a neighbour, are presented with an egg, salt and fine bread’.39 Harland and Wilkinson described the practice in more detail almost 100 years later:

It is a custom in some parts of Lancashire, as well as in Yorkshire, Northumberland, and other counties, that when an infant goes out of the house, in the arms of the mother or the nurse, in some cases the first family visited, in others every neighbour receiving the call, presents to or for the infant an egg, some salt, some bread, and in some cases a small piece of money. These gifts are to ensure, as the gossips avow, that the child shall never want bread, meat, or salt to it, or money, throughout life.40

There were many regional variations. In East Yorkshire, matches may also have been given to light the infant’s journey through life to heaven.41 Henderson noted a Durham custom of keeping slices of the cake cut following the infant’s safe delivery to distribute on the infant’s first outing.42 This ritual exchange of gifts shares many similarities with the informal tea gatherings that took place throughout the lying-in period. Both traditions cemented the place of the giver and the recipient within the community through their participation in neighbourly duties. Neither is described in letters or diaries of the period, yet both were sufficiently tenacious customs to survive until the mid-nineteenth century.

The gifting located the infant in the physical landscape of the community in a way that the tea gathering did not. This was important for the creation of communal memory but was also a way of visually articulating the neighbourhood as it was at that moment in time. The gifting ceremony resembled the perambulations of parish boundaries that took place regularly throughout the liturgical calendar, though on a much smaller scale. The parish perambulations were rituals of boundary marking and knowledge transmission in which (mostly male) members of the community walked the boundaries of the parish, occasionally fighting over boundary markers with neighbouring parishes.43 Crucially, the gifting encompassed not the administrative boundaries of the community but those of the neighbourhood into which the infant had been born. Both rituals were thus means of locating the body within the landscape, while the gifting operated on the smaller scale of community that was experienced by people on a day-to-day basis.44

The reciprocity inherent in the gifting ritual was important. While folklorists recorded it as an informal ritual, it was performative and pre-organized. To participate, it was necessary to know the day on which the ritual was to be performed and the route that was to be taken. Some organization was required to ensure that the child received the correct gifts. Furthermore, fears of the child getting cold and concerns about the impact of prolonged light on young eyes suggest that the infant’s first outing would have been short.45 It would, therefore, have taken place in the immediate neighbourhood and involved the same individuals who had heard the groans of travail and attended the tea gathering. Thus, the gifting was an articulation of personal landscapes. It defined the everyday experience of community as it was at that particular moment, which was necessary as neighbourhoods accommodated regional migrants in search of work or who were bound by family ties.46 It placed the infant within the networks of watching and exchanging information that would surround it, and tied those networks firmly to their geographical location.

The ‘right’ to community knowledge

Visiting and gifting rituals were supportive communal events only if the new mother and her family wished to participate. As this chapter has shown, such neighbourly sociability was embedded not only in birthing but also in the way that communities functioned. This meant that opting out was difficult. Where the community had been excluded from the networks of trust and information that surrounded pregnancy and childbirth in this period, they looked to assert their right to this knowledge. Participating in the economy of knowledge and information sharing was, essentially, part of one’s duty as a good neighbour and an effective member of the community. The creation of communal knowledge goes some way to explaining the incongruities identified by Mark Jackson in the prosecution rates of women suspected of infanticide. Jackson’s work on the Northern assize records suggests that prosecutions for newborn child murder were linked to concerns about rising poor rates, yet, as he notes, if the child had died at birth it would not become a burden on the parish. His statistical analysis also highlights the particularly high attendance rates of witnesses at cases of suspected infanticide, despite the lack of reimbursement for the attendant costs.47 Jackson explains these inconsistencies by suggesting that prosecution acted as a deterrent to young women who might otherwise become pregnant. But the eagerness with which witnesses came forward could also be explained by the desire to maintain community knowledge. Once violent death had been ruled out and the mother had been identified, the tone of an investigation often switched from hostility to sympathy. In some instances, the community worked together to assert its knowledge to the authorities, to provide evidence of birth preparations that would ensure that the new mother was acquitted of murder. Community knowledge of the new mother was therefore crucial in determining her fate. This is not to say that long-standing residence in an area guaranteed support from the community. In line with what is already known about the importance of trust within communities in the eighteenth century, honesty was the hook on which community knowledge hung. Newcomers to the community could earn its support through participation in the daily interactions of the area and through openness about pregnancy, birth and death. Similarly, women who did not fulfil the necessary expectations of a member of the community might experience a lack of support if they were accused of newborn child murder.48

In 1774 the residents of Bulmer in North Yorkshire noticed that a young foundling apprentice called Elizabeth Rainbow had gone missing. It was widely reported in the township that she was six months pregnant, and it appears to have been widely understood that her master, John Hall, was the father of the child, though this was not directly stated in the witness statements. The constable was alerted to the missing girl by ‘severall of the Neighbours [who] apprehended she was with Child … and are fearfull that some Accident has happened unto her’. The same neighbours went on to report that a servant boy ‘has been seen wheeling Sand or Gravell into the House … in order to fill up the cellar and that there is a strong report in the Neighbours heads that … Elizabeth Rainbow has been murther’d’. Several men were recruited from nearby fields and, on clearing the cellar, they discovered the body of Elizabeth Rainbow ‘with her hands tied behind her back and a rope about her Neck’. Suspicion instantly fell on John Hall who had been seen nearby enquiring about a fast horse. The amount of detail contained in the subsequent witness statements suggests that the community had been watching developments within the household for some time. Mary Peterkin claimed that Elizabeth Rainbow had told her of the pregnancy and ‘weeped very much’. Jane Taylor reported that Rainbow, when charged with her pregnancy had said that ‘God would stick by the right’. Thomas Benfield, an apothecary, remembered being asked to make up a strong prescription that Hall had then given to Rainbow ‘but it had done her no Service’. William Masterman testified to the frenzied and erratic behaviour of Hall on the day of Rainbow’s disappearance, which he observed ‘as he was sitting at his house door … with a Child on his lap’.49

Hall’s eventual capture was also the result of community watching and information sharing. The parish constable pursued Hall to York using intelligence he gathered from people along the way. Hall might have evaded his pursuers but for the actions of Joseph Barnes who

heard some persons call from the opposite side of the River [Ouse] and asked if he had seen any person pass over … with a Reddish or Russet coloured coat … he called to know what they wanted and was answer’d that he had murther’d a woman.50

Barnes subsequently seized Hall and held him until the constable could cross the river. The community of Bulmer may have been watching for Elizabeth Rainbow’s impending delivery, but the focus of their information sharing changed when they perceived that a greater crime had taken place.

Similar patterns of surveillance and sharing of information are evident in the investigations of secret births and infant death. In each of the cases located, the community went to extreme lengths to find the bodies of secretly born infants and to reunite them with their mothers. This was driven by the need to investigate the death and to ensure that the child had not been murdered; it was also a way of writing the birth into the communal memory. This was important as it enabled the community to link the dead infant to its mother and to make the necessary adjustments to its knowledge of both her and her family’s reputations. A community that was sympathetic towards the infant’s mother enabled the proper care to be given for her recovery. Where it was not, it ensured that her behaviour was regulated. Communal sympathy was based mainly on the level of honesty that had been displayed by the mother, as well as the perceived nature of her crime.

The idea that knowledge, both personal and communal, was an important element in how communities behaved in the aftermath of a birth is linked to the language of the stranger. ‘Strangers’ could be designated through behaviour and reputation, as well as according to geographical origin or lack of personal recognition. Women could be designated strangers in suspected infanticide proceedings despite those who accused them recognizing them either by sight or through their personal networks.51 If they did not participate in oral exchanges of information, or if they concealed or denied their pregnancy when challenged, such women could exclude themselves from the community. It was also common practice to call unborn infants ‘little strangers’. ‘Stranger’ in the context of a birth also meant an individual who did not yet have a firm place in the community.52 For them to be assigned a place, they had to exchange information with other members of the community. The rituals of childbirth facilitated this exchange of information. With a live birth, the celebrations that took place throughout the lying-in period allocated the child a place in the community that was anchored by the geographical location of its birth and by the individuals who surrounded it. In the case of dead infants, fixing the child in the community was achieved by the location of their body; a search of the mother, her rooms and linen chest; and occasionally a postmortem of the child’s body. By participating in a birth as a community, its members ensured that the infant and its mother were integrated into the memory of that community, assigning them a place, ensuring that they were cared for and regulating their behaviour.

The case of Isabell Ward in rural North Yorkshire demonstrates not only the drive of the community to find the body of the infant, but also the extent to which knowledge could influence community behaviour. Ward was charged with having given birth to an illegitimate child on 16 May 1741. The case was a simple one to investigate as Ward confessed to having been ‘delivered of a Male Child at her masters house Wm Edlins in Brasseton’.53

Her confession was obtained by a local midwife, Mary Nelson, whose deposition was recorded as follows:

On Monday ye 18th May 1741 she was desired by Thomas Pearson Church Warden of the township of Brasseton to go & examine Isabell Ward who lived as maid Servt with Wm Edlin in sd Township & whom was suspected to have lately born a child, yt on her first questioning sd Isabell Ward hereabouts she denied she had lose [sic] a child but on insisting to see her breasts she found she had Milk in them & on charging her again yt she had been lately delivered of a Child she at last confessed she had been delivered of a Male Child on Saturday ye 16th instant & yt nobody was wth her at ye time which was about 2 a clock in ye afternoon & on asking her where the child was, she said it was a still born & she had thrown it under a gooseberry bush in ye garth but on going to look for it there, could not find it.54

These circumstances were not unusual in cases of suspected newborn infant murder. The lack of an infant’s body was not particularly remarkable in this case. It had been disposed of outside, and in many instances the initially successful concealment of an infant’s body was thwarted by itinerant dogs and pigs digging for food in communal spaces.55 Yet, despite a plausible explanation for the lack of a body, the community decided to investigate further. Mary Nelson had clearly discussed the situation with other members of the community, as her deposition continued:

at ye request of the Neighbours I went again ye next day to try if I could get her to confess wt she had done with ye Child & after some perswasions she did at last own she had ye Child in another room in ye house & would produce it upon wch I desired to have Ruth Whitehouse present with me when ye Child was produced & she was accordingly sent for.

Ward was treated quite gently by her community. Only two people were present at her examination, both of them classifying themselves in the proceedings as local midwives. Her neighbours, who were probably responsible for the initial accusation and were definitely interested in the outcome of the case, did not attend in person, nor did they appear to employ any intimidating tactics to extract the information they desired. The reason for this treatment is explicitly and deliberately mentioned in both of the witness statements. Once Ruth Whitehouse had arrived at the house, both midwives

went wth her in another room where she showd us ye child wrapt up in a linnen cloth laid in a bowl, & it seemed to be a full grown child, & this deponent further saith yt on going to her on Monday she askd sd Isabell Ward who ye father was of ye Child she had lately bore she answered it was her Master Wm Edlin ye was ye father of it.56

The case was taken no further. Although the infant was noted to have been full grown, no specific mention was made that its body was examined for signs of violence. No detail was recorded about the aftermath of the birth, nor the way in which the infant was wrapped to rule out potential suffocation or death by neglect. No comments were made, nor were questions asked, about Ward’s preparations for the birth – a detail that could stand between the accused and the gallows at this point in the century.57 The final sentence in each woman’s deposition confirmed that Ward had named her master as the father of the infant, giving this information a sense of significance regardless of whether the emphasis had been that of the witnesses or of the constable who had taken down their depositions. The inference in this case was that the community had knowledge of the individuals involved, of Ward’s potential vulnerability and of her pregnancy. It was necessary to find the infant’s body to create space for it in the communal memory, and no apparent challenge was made to Isabell’s claim that it had been stillborn.

Community knowledge of the pregnancy and the birth similarly influenced the outcome of Mary Ingleson’s case in York in 1742. Ingleson was recorded as a single woman who confessed to the accusation that

in the Dwelling House of Joseph Hodgson was delivered of a Male Bastard Child had made no provision of Child Cloths to wrap it in carried the Child out of the Dwelling House in her Petticoats and Laid it upon the Dunghill and covered some part of with Cow Dung and Grass.

Mary, Hodgson’s wife, deposed that Ingleson had complained of ‘heart colick’ for some time before suddenly affecting a recovery. It is not clear if Mary had suspected that Ingleson was in labour, but she did go to clean the bed following her recovery and found ‘a great deal of Corruption and Nastiness’ before discovering the body of the infant several days later:

She acquainted her Neighbouring Women and she and they agreed to let it lye where itt was and on Thursday Morning her husband dug itt up out of the dunghill and carried it and buried it in the Orchard where she believes it has laid until this day.58

Again, the community handled this case quite carefully. There does not appear to have been any confrontation or confession. The community had found the infant’s body, identified it as belonging to Ingleson and reburied it in a more acceptable location. Two neighbouring women testified that they had heard Ingleson’s labour in the days prior to the discovery of the body and that they saw her in bed. Their depositions were, however, non-committal and simply repeated Mary Hodgson’s statement that Ingleson had claimed to be suffering with heart pain. As in Isabell Ward’s case, the inference is that the members of the community who were close to the birth knew about the pregnancy and were potentially aware of, and sympathetic towards, Ingleson’s circumstances.

Alongside the need to create knowledge, there were several other reasons why a community might be driven to find the body of an infant that had been born in secret. It enabled the local midwife and surgeon to inspect the body to determine its period of gestation and to look for any signs of violence, thus allowing for some speculation as to the cause of death. Finding the body also ensured that the infant received a ‘proper’ burial. The burial of unbaptized infants was problematic for most communities. In theory, they could not be buried in consecrated ground, but in practice there were various ways of circumventing this rule.59 The majority of trial records in which the infant’s body had been concealed provide a great deal of detail about the location and manner of the burial. This would have been one of the key elements in the investigation, as wrappings and swaddlings, while demonstrating care for the infant in a legal sense, could also be the means of killing it. It was also, as noted, a crucial component in the creation of communal knowledge. Just as the community liked to see a live infant with its mother in the days following a delivery to situate both within the communal memory, they also liked to see the body of a secretly born infant.

This was evident in the case of Hannah Clayton of Skelmanthorpe in West Yorkshire. Hannah’s infant had been premature and stillborn. The birth had taken her mother and sister by surprise, both of whom testified that they ‘never knew that [Hannah] was with Child till she was upon her knees in Bed and that the Child dropt from her’.60 They kept the child in the house for two or three days, ‘then wrapped said Child in some linen and put it in a paper box and carried it to Cissett Wood and there buried it’. To all intents and purposes, the child had received a ‘proper’ burial, but Hannah Clayton’s mother ‘fetched it back on account of the inhabitants of the township of Skelmanthorpe insisting of the Child being brought forth’. The production of the body allowed the infant to be examined, confirming Hannah’s claim that the child had been stillborn. It also enabled changes to be made to what was known about Hannah and her family. In a culture where reputation and honesty were matters of currency, it was important to update the communal memory.

In direct contrast to the gentle treatment of Ward, Ingleson and Clayton by their communities, the accusation of Mary Jackson of Newcastle upon Tyne was confrontational and intimidating. Jackson was a widow who let rooms to John Liddell, ‘Soldier in his Majesties Regiment of Foot commanded by the Honourable Colonel Price’, and his wife, Jane. Like Isabell Ward, Jackson gave birth alone but was discovered immediately afterwards by Jane Liddell, who had gone into her chamber to fetch her cloak from Jackson’s bed before going out with her husband. Both Liddell and his wife claimed that Jackson had been ill for several hours, complaining of violent pains in her side. On spotting the head of the infant among the bedclothes, Jane Liddell informed her husband who, in turn, informed other members of the community. One deponent in the case was William Leadon, constable of Sandgate, who stated:

This afternoon this Deponant being Called upon to go and search the House of One Mary Jackson Widow situate in Sandgate aforesaid who was suspected to have murder’d her Bastard Child this Deponent in the Execution of his Said Office went into the said House and When he came to the Door thereof the said Mary Jackson refused to let him therein whereupon this Deponent produced his Constables Staff and went in And Katherine Martin Ann Halley and Margaret Robinson followed him into the said House.

The joint statements of Katherine Martin, Ann Halley and Margaret Robinson added more details to the scene:

These Deponents went into the House of the said Mary Jackson situate in Sandgate within the Liberties of this Town and found the said Mary Jackson standing in the Middle of her Room and these Deponents Some or One of them thereupon Chargeing the said Mary Jackson with having been lately delivered of a Child she the Said Mary Jackson positively denied that she had been delivered of any Child But these Deponents and Severall other Neighbours searching in the House of the said Mary Jackson found in a Chest therein a Dead Child wrapt up in An Apron which Child was warm and as these Deponents verily believe had been born alive and these deponents further severally say that they did not discover or find that any Cloaths or other preparation had been made for the Birth of the said Child.61

Words such as ‘murder’d’ and ‘Bastard’ reflect a tone of hostility in this investigation that was not present in those of Ward or Ingleson. Significantly more members of the community were involved in the search for clues, both of Jackson’s delivery and of the location of the infant’s body. The presence of four hostile individuals plus ‘severall other neighbours’ contributed towards an intimidating and unsupportive environment in which Jackson was being excluded from her community. No mention was made in any of the statements about potential fathers for the infant, nor was there any suggestion that there had been suspicions of the pregnancy until the body of the infant was found by Jane Liddell. Her community had no knowledge – not just of the birth itself but also of Jackson’s pregnancy – and acted accordingly to forcibly acquaint themselves with the information. Furthermore, they then looked to seal Jackson’s fate by their deposition: ‘These Deponents verily believe [the infant] had been born alive and these deponents further severally say that they did not discover or find that any Cloaths or other preparation had made for the Birth of the said Child.’ Theoretically, the failure of a woman to make the expected preparations for her delivery was crucial in the outcome of infanticide cases.

The penultimate clause of the 1624 statute on infanticide focused on the procurement of childbed linen to determine a mother’s intent towards the unborn child. As the seventeenth century progressed, the lack of preparation of clothes for the infant became cultural shorthand for the mother’s intention to murder the infant.62 However, as has been shown, childbirth relied heavily on notions of good neighbourliness and reciprocity. Many of the arrangements for childbirth were, therefore, informal. Finding women to attend the birth, for example, would not have been difficult despite no prior arrangements having been made. The creation of community knowledge through watching and exchanging information meant that, even where the birth had been concealed, neighbours were waiting for labour to commence and had no compunction about involving themselves as attendants where possible.

It was also possible for women to borrow childbed linen with very little notice. Baby clothing, in particular, was useful for only a short period of time and was therefore often shared between members of a community.63 The mistress of the Cumbrian dairymaid Ann Watson, for example, urged her to confess to her pregnancy so that some ‘Necessary Things might be procured’.64 In 1799 Mary Robinson of Sheffield accused Susanna Staniforth of being pregnant and ‘offered to lend her some Child Cloaths’.65 Furthermore, childbed linen could be temporarily fashioned from aprons, handkerchiefs or old clothing, as we saw in Mary Thorpe’s case. One of the witnesses against Thorpe identified a ‘piece of Linen cloth found round the Child’s Body’ and ‘remembers Sarah Hartley cutting it from one of Mary Thorpe’s old shifts and in particular recollects part of it which this witness tore a piece to make the Child a Stay Band’.66 When they explicitly deposed that they believed the child had been born alive, and emphasized the new mother’s lack of preparation for the birth, Mary Jackson’s neighbours were probably aware that their accusation would not result in a conviction.67 Rather, these accusations were part of a confirmation of community responsibilities and boundaries. Where a woman was considered part of the community, she may have experienced some leniency in the way she was treated during and immediately following her pregnancy. Having taken part in the networks of information and reciprocity that tied the community together, she might be able to borrow linens despite the illegitimacy of the birth. Where the new mother did not belong to the community and had made no effort to integrate, she could expect to be treated in a much more hostile manner. By explicitly stating that there was no childbed linen, Mary Jackson’s accusers placed her outside the networks of exchange and information that defined the communal boundaries.

In some cases, the communal mood could change following the discovery and examination of the infant’s body. The case against Susannah Stephenson in 1740 began similarly to that of Mary Jackson, with the local midwife deposing:

this Examinant with twelve more women of ye same Town went to ye said Informant’s [Stephenson] mothers house with intent to examine her and search her whether or not she had born a Child on Sunday ye 3rd Day of this instant March.68

One of the women who went to see Stephenson said that ‘it was talked in ye Town she had born a Child’. Stephenson was alone in bed at her mother’s house when she received this visit from her neighbours. Once she had confessed to the birth, ‘ye rest of ye company asked her where it [the body] was to wch she replyed she did not know and said it was dead whereupon this examinant asked her if it ever cry’d to wch she answered it never did’. At this point, Stephenson’s mother appeared in the house with the body of the infant, having asked ‘severall more Neighbours both men and women’ to go with her into the woods to find the place that Stephenson had buried the child before going to her mother’s. The infant was then examined by the midwife and was pronounced to have been born before its time. The hostile nature of the initial investigation appears to have dissipated thereafter. Margaret Addamson, one of the women who had originally accused Stephenson of murdering her child, added to her statement that

she had not provision of Child Close but this Examinant saiyth her Mother going to Mary Stephenson’s [Susannah’s mother] house ye day after ye Child was provided this examinant asked ye saide Mary if they had any Child close to wch she said they had but ye Examinant did not see them nor asked to see one and further saith that she thinks ye child was not at its full time nor did it appear to have any marks of abuse upon any part about it.

Whatever the veracity of Addamson’s additional statement, it had clearly been made with the provisions of the 1624 statute in mind. Once the community had been provided with the child, it worked to protect Stephenson from a charge of murder by testifying that preparations had been made and that the child had miscarried. The key point in each of these cases was the provision of the infant’s body. Once group suspicions about pregnancy and parenthood had been resolved, and the child had been physically examined in much the same way as it would have been had it been born alive, the community could assimilate the ‘little stranger’ into the networks through which it defined itself. As with live births, it was important for members of the community to collectively see the infant and to visually associate it with its mother.

While many women accused of being pregnant initially denied it, they usually capitulated following the birth of the child. There was generally no record of women objecting to being searched once the constables had been summoned and, where it is mentioned, any objection often appears to have been weak. This was a result of the confrontational nature of the search, which usually involved at least one medical professional and the woman’s accusers. Searches were typically conducted in the hours following the birth, as the watching and talking networks of the community identified signs that the accused had been delivered. The body of the infant was often still in the room, and many accused women appear to have been aware that they might be treated in a less hostile manner if they were honest. Occasionally, however, there are accounts of resistance to the community. These are often signified in the court records by an emphasis on secrecy. Locked doors or closed windows in a house where an illegitimate pregnancy was suspected created a suspicion not only of delivery but also of murder.69 Aggressive responses to community enquiries about a suspected a pregnancy were also recorded with apparent precision. By essentially opting out of the community talk and creation of knowledge, accused women were placing themselves outside the community boundaries.

Susanna Staniforth attempted to reject accusations that she was pregnant in 1799. The accusation of child murder arose from one particular neighbour – Sarah Harris – who appears to have driven the allegations against Staniforth. Harris deposed that she ‘hath observed for many weeks past an unusual largeness in the Body and appearance of the said Susanna Staniforth … and this witness has mentioned her suspicions many times of late’. Another witness, Mary Robinson, said that she ‘has been of the opinion she [Staniforth] was with Child and has a great many times told her so’. It is evident that the community had discussed Staniforth’s appearance. Nor was this discussion restricted to women. Joseph Ibberson, a labourer, testified that one evening Sarah Harris ‘came to him and mentioned that Susanna Staniforth had got shut of her great Belly’. The inference is that he had partaken in the communal exchange of information about Staniforth’s condition. Unusually, Staniforth sought to neutralize the community talk by aggressively denying the allegations. Sarah Harris complained that Staniforth ‘gave her very abusive language and called her a Liar’. Mary Robinson’s offer to lend Staniforth some childbed linen was rejected by ‘giving her ill words’ and saying ‘What must I have Child cloaths for? I am not with Child’.70 By doing this, Staniforth placed herself outside the community, explicitly rejecting the reciprocal networks of birth. Communal concerns about her intentions towards the unborn infant were implicit in these rejections.

Staniforth’s delivery was, unsurprisingly, discovered quickly as her neighbours watched for signs that it had taken place. Sarah Harris triggered the accusation by entering Staniforth’s house and exclaiming, ‘Look, thou hast got shut of thy Great Belly’. When Staniforth still refused to admit to having given birth to a child, Harris summoned the parish officers. Interestingly, at this point Staniforth tried to draw other community members into the secrecy of her delivery. When the Surgeon arrived to search her, ‘she said … on his entering the House “Well Sir, the neighbours say I’ve bore a Child which is a lie, I’ll go upstairs and convince you it’s a lie”’. Once she was away from the more public areas of the house, however, she ‘clapped her hand on his shoulder and said to him “to tell you the truth I’ve miscarried”’. This distinction between her public indifference and private confession suggests that she viewed community talk as partly performative. The surgeon was not persuaded, and the house was searched by the parish officers and Joseph Ibberson. Staniforth maintained her denial until some bloodstained linen was discovered. Again, she separated her public persona from the evidence. She ‘clapped her hands on [Ibberson’s] shoulder and said “I’ll give you two Guineas if you’ll go your Way and say nothing about it”’. When this offer was rejected, ‘she further said that he and Mr Hincliffe [one of the parish constables] should have the pleasure of making use of her any time they pleased if they would search no further’. Eventually, Staniforth capitulated to the community’s accusations and provided them with the body of her infant, which she had hidden in a locked box.71 Talk was transactional and created knowledge.72 Everyone was expected to contribute to this economy of talk, even if it was about themselves. It is possible that vehement denials could alter the course of community talk, particularly as successful denials would not be visible in the oral economy of information exchange. The sheer levels of surveillance in most eighteenth-century homes made evasion unlikely, however. Shared beds, thin walls and the ubiquity of social activities such as washing made it difficult to hide a swelling waistline.

Conclusion

Informal customary behaviours following the birth of an infant defined and created communities in a particularly immediate and personal way. Each of the gatherings discussed in this chapter made little or no mention of imposed communal boundaries such as parish, religion or common interest. These distinctions were reserved for the formalized rituals of baptism, churching and burial.73 Instead, these informal practices reinforced and made visible the community that was defined by the network of neighbours and associates who were geographically and socially near to the birth. The historiography of seventeenth-century lying-in practices, particularly among the poor and among single women, has highlighted the role of neighbourly networks in policing female sexuality. This chapter has broadened the scope of these arguments into the eighteenth century and included the experiences of lower and middling status women as well as poor women. While elite families were withdrawing from these systems of neighbourly support during this period, this chapter has shown that, for those of lower and middling social status, neighbourly networks continued to be an important part of everyday life.74

The neighbourly networks discussed in this chapter were bound together by an economy of duty and obligation, knowledge and conversation, that had its roots in surveillance. This surveillance and knowledge could be both supportive and hostile.75 It enabled the community to take action where someone was ill or had fallen into poverty. It also had the capacity to regulate behaviour by exposing inappropriate conduct. For the community, involvement in this economy of knowledge, and observation of the customary practices described in this chapter, fulfilled expectations of neighbourly duty through active participation in the everyday behaviours that defined the group. Such behaviour fostered a sense of common interest through the creation of friendships and information networks or through group condemnation of culturally unacceptable behaviour. Most importantly, however, it gave the members of a community knowledge about individuals who lived within its margins, which enabled the adjustment of communal memory to take account of birth and the subsequent realignment of community boundaries and membership.

By focusing on a community identified by an association with a particular event rather than one with more stable and clearly defined boundaries, this chapter reveals the untidy type of community experienced by people on a day-to-day basis. This community could be made up of people from different ages, social backgrounds, religions and occupations. Its members were linked by geographical proximity and social interactions. Seeing and talking defined the boundaries of this community and created group memory. The ways in which they talked, and about whom, created personal alliances and a sense of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, particularly in behavioural terms. Childbirth presents us with a rare opportunity to see this type of community in action as its members watched and waited for a delivery, gathering evidence for accusations or preparing for the delivery. The sharing of knowledge through talk characterized the social spaces of childbirth, presenting opportunities for other sights and sounds to be discussed and for the ongoing creation of communal knowledge.