Well I finally tracked down a source for this.
(The image I found had dated it to just ’16 Century’.)
I was going to say ‘the original source’, but it must have been gleaned from somewhere else before it was used in this book.
We would never have guessed the actual meaning behind it!
It comes from a German book;
“
Illustrierte Sittengeschichte: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart”by Eduard Fuchs.
Illustrated moral history; from the middle ages to the present
Found on Internet Archive, free to view, so I guess no copywright.
https://archive.org/details/illustriertesitt0002fuch/page/226/mode/2up‘Histoire d’un jeune Boulanger et d'une Meusniere lequel a mieux aime donner cent escus et prendre son enfant que de l'espouse; et s'estant marie d'une fille qui estoit grosse a ete trois enfants le lendermain de ses noches’.
The story of a young baker and a miller? who preferred to give a hundred escus and take his child rather than marry her; and having married a daughter who was pregnant, he had three children the day after his wedding”.
The image I had is the second one out of four telling this sorry tale.
He’s giving the lady a hundred ecus to buy her baby - no wonder she seems a little distraught!
Although this is written in French - the author of the book must have found it from somewhere else, the book is written in German, and I don’t know German to see if he mentions it in the text to say any more about it.
At the bottom of the images is written a title of sorts, a precis saying the same thing in German, and in very tiny writing ‘Um 1700’, which I take to mean ‘around 1700’, so not 16th Century at all if I’m correct.
