Assistance to children in North-West Portugal: the case of pre-industrial Braga

Abstract

In pre.industrial Braga, children seem to have been the most numerous recipients of charity. Assistance to childhood was not confined to abandoned children, but included also destitute children whose parents were know, either legitimate or illegitimate. The level of child abandonment was never very hogh when compared to bigger cities like Porto, sex ratios are inconclusive and tend to favour the abandonment of males rather than girls, curves of seasonality sem to matcth in broad terms other data existing for the same area applying to all births. D. Frei Caetano Brandão, archbishop of Braga towards the end of the eighteenth century, founded in 1791 a college for needy children, both foundlings and orphans. Initially intended to privilege foundlings, it soon became almost monopolized by orphans and children whose parents were still alive. Orphans, deprived of one or both parents, although coming from well-to-do families, were in need of support in order to ensure careers the would enable them to reproduce or improve the social status of their families of birth. Strictly dominated by ecclesiastical authorities until 1834-5, the college depended largely on patronage in the admittance of its pensioners, especially in the case of foundlings and illegitimate children. But, once a child entered the college, regardless its origin, no career seem to have been forbidden to him. How can we explain this if norms forbade illegitimate children to became priests? The fact that many children had protectors to stand for them might have influenced the career they followed. Besides, in a system that produced a high level of losses - childred who died, who escaped the college or gave up their studies - the policy of the college administrators seems to have been to profit from intelligence and talent whenever they could be found