Sarah asked Karen Maitland:

I have just finished The Plague Charmer, and I have to ask this question. I know a lot of strange practices were around in the Middle Ages, but did some sadistic people actually "make" dwarfs from babies? Horrific I know, but curiosity has overcome me. Did you come across this practice in your research? Many thanks (and thanks for all the great books).

Karen Maitland Thanks for your question Sarah and for reading the novel. We know that in the Middle Ages they did try to create fake dwarfs. Herbals and grimoires of the period describe herbs and parts of certain animals that could be used to restrict growth and Shakespeare seems to allude to this in Midsummer Night’s Dream, referring to knot grass as one such ‘dwarfing’ herb. Today it’s known that certain substances can stunt a baby’s growth or cause malformations, so it is possible that some herbs would have this effect if fed to the child in large enough quantities especially if the child had a poor diet causing rickets. If the right pressure was consistently applied to young bones lacking in calcium, it would be easy to cause malformations.

It was accepted practise in the Middle Ages that some masters who were training very young children to be acrobats and jesters would dislocate certain joints in the hope of making them more bendy and others used metal frames to mould the skull of a baby to create the facial features they wanted in a jester or entertainer. Unscrupulous beggar-kings or even parents would deliberately maim a child by cutting off a limb or crippling the child in some way to turn them into professional beggars who could bring in money. But then this was the age in which the Church had hundreds of boys castrated before puberty to preserve their ‘angelic’ voices for the choirs.

But of course, we will never know how ‘successful’ the practise of making dwarfs was or how many children died in the process, because the traders were trying to produce ‘fakes’ to sell to wealthy families who would who would have taken violent action if they had discovered they been cheated, so the dwarf-makers wouldn’t ever have kept records of such activities. The babies would have been the orphaned or abandoned children or children of poor families who might be forced through debt to sell them, so no one would have bothered to find out what became of them.

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