Digital Commons Network^™

Maternity's Wards: Investigations Of Sixteenth Century Patterns Of Maternal Gaurdianship, Liz Woolcott

History

Grants of wardship, by the time of the Tudor period in England, had evolved into an institution divorced from its feudal foundation but committed to maintaining a goal of economic profit. Mixed with a pronounced responsibility of the monarch to care for the unprotected children of deceased feudatories, this goal compromised the practice of wardship grants and created a bureaucracy whose sole policy was patronage. After the death of a man who held land as a tenant in chief, his heir was taken as a ward of the monarch, to be placed in the guardianship of anyone the monarch saw …