TL;DR: Women tended to marry between 20 and 32. Read why below!
aufanficfanatic said: Isn’t it like, 14 or something? I dunno man, educate me.
I’m so glad you asked @aufanficfanatic because I have so much to say!
In upper classes the children were considered the property of the family, so they married whenever the parents wanted them too. There were children of the nobility who where married as infants and then never saw their spouse until said spouse’s funeral due to the ague or whatever. Even the daughter of a simple gentleman might start feeling a bit alarmed if she hit 24 without any offers of marriage, but then her duty was to secure a suitable match.
The merchant, crafts, and agricultural classes were a bit different. And by a bit different I mean they were entirely different. A lot of this marry at first blink of puberty thing is part of the mythology that because the average age of death pre-1700 was about 35-40 that meant everyone died at forty. What really happened was that most people lived to 70 and half of all children died. Application of math tells us that if you add 70+0 and then divide by two the average death date is a bit misleading as a statistic.
The two most important things to people in a primarily agricultural culture is population numbers and food. You need more population to grow more food and you need more food for your population. There are other, more complicated factors such as the local nobility using the peasantry as cannon fodder, taxation, self-defense of the village, trying to avoid depopulation, but we’re going to skip that discussion.
Population is the big issue when it comes to marriage age, and let’s be honest. When we pick a teenage marriage age the picture people have in their minds is a forty year old man and a sixteen year old girl. This large age gap marriage mythology is a largely colonist era idea that means to depict sexual exploitation of children is natural and traditional for the purpose of corrupting men’s natural healthy instincts and discrediting cries of alarm from women.
But we’re not here to talk about politics, we’re here to talk about population. For Western Europe marriage was for the purpose of creating a home, a social, emotional, and physical support system - children were an expected part of that. However! Even among women who chose not to get married, and there was at least one bastard born every year, they chose to have their children at an older age.
There are several issues about a woman’s body that could get in the way of a young marriage age. First being that historically the first child a woman had usually died within a month, if the child was born alive at all due to a variety of issues like nutrition and stress on the woman’s body. You know how everybody tells women not to carry things? Well, European women didn’t always have that luxury. The older a woman was, the more like she would be to be strong enough to lose less babies.
Second, poor nutrition can push back puberty, or at the very least menstruation. This meant that many young ladies would only have superficial signs of puberty until they hit about sixteen, meaning that even if someone was going by some patriarchal conception of when a woman was marriageable, she’d only appear ‘on the market’ at sixteen, not be married by it.
Third, the woman’s body was insufficiently developed as a teenager, IE if she was sixteen or younger, her vagina would be smaller and her vaginal lining would be too thin as the thickness therein is determined by the amount of estrogen in the system. Usually the vaginal lining is not childbirth safe until the end of puberty, which depending on the female, is between 18-20. People are good at picking up patterns. They figured out pretty quick that women under eighteen tended to die during childbirth. I won’t be graphic, suffice to say they bled to death.
Fourth, due to apprenticeships and occupations, many women were too busy to get married as teenagers. Women had occupations other than some variation of mother or healer?!? Yes, rhetorical question, they did! If your last name was Baxter or Webster, not only do you descend from a woman who was a Master of her craft (baking or weaving respectively) but that one of your male ancestors took on her surname instead of the opposite. Other female heavy professions were black smithing, silver smithing, accounting, leather working, agricultural labor (except wagonering and plowing - no innuendo intended - that was more of a man’s job since they would often have to travel), administratrix (more legal than a steward, more useful than a lawyer), ale wifing and brewing, knitting and lace working, and notary-ing. Since having one or both of a couple having a craft occupation meant that their children would have a shoe in to a network of guilds it was of great benefit. Additionally since many men traditionally worked the land or went to war, it meant that their family would be taken care of if something happened to his health.
So there you go! Women generally started getting married after they finished their apprenticeships or when they reached about 20 and started having their own property and kept getting married until they were tired of it.
I will keep reblogging this until the last person who says any variation of “They married really early back then because everyone died at forty!” has been Informed of the Truth of the Matter. (That is to say, probably forever.)
Okay also I would like more explanation of the occupation of administratrix because I kind of want that on a business card now.
To quote from http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com:
Administrator
A person appointed by the court to manage and take charge of the assets and liabilities of a decedent who has died without making a valid will.
When such a person is a male, he is called an administrator, while a woman is called an administratrix. An administrator c.t.a. (cum testamento annexo, Latin for “with the will annexed”) is appointed by the court where the testator had made an incomplete will without naming any executors or had named incapable persons, or where the executors named refuse to act. A public administrator is a public official designated by state law to perform the duties of administration for persons who have died intestate.
An executor differs from an administrator in that he or she is named in the decedent’s will to manage the estate. If an executor dies while performing these duties, a court will appoint an administrator de bonis non cum testamento annexo (Latin for "of the goods not (already) administered upon with the will annexed") to complete the distribution of the decedent’s estate. This term is often abbreviated: administrator d.b.n.c.t.a.
(West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc.)
What this means is an administratrix would see to the burial, settle debts and disputes, help sell or divide goods, occasionally help to assign guardians to minors, and sort through who had a right to what which meant finding distant heirs on super rare occasion. It was an awesome job and great for women like maiden aunts who knew everyone and everything in a town.
I just wanna go back to the upper classes for a tiny minute because they were the ones marrying at ridiculous ages. BUT! these marriages were for political purposes more than anything. in medieval Europe, alliances between families were the foundation of the political system.
so yes, a girl might be married at six, and custom/law might say the marriage can be consummated at 12 or 14, but there are two important things about that:
her bridegroom was likely to be a child himself, rather than a grown man;
her parents had control over when she left her home for her husband’s.
Think about it. You’ve successfully cemented an alliance with this marriage. You may well have been on bad terms with this family beforehand, which made the marriage necessary to broker a peace. Do you really want to come over when the girl’s twelve like “Okay, you need to give me your daughter now”? No!! Her parents naturally want her to be healthy and happy, and they know that’s not going to happen if you take her away and start trying to make babies right off the bat. If you try that shit they’re gonna be pissed. Heck, if you’re at all interested in healthy heirs (which, as a medieval nobleman, you absolutely are) then you want to wait until she’s fit to have children before doing anything.
tl;dr in cases where children were being married off among the upper classes, it was not some creepy bullshit about a grown man wanting to fuck a teenage girl. it was pretty much about anything other than that.
Bolded for the people in the back because I’m just enjoying myself.
so yes, a girl might be married at six, and custom/law might say the marriage can be consummated at 12 or 14, but there are two important things about that:
her bridegroom was likely to be a child himself, rather than a grown man;
her parents had control over when she left her home for her husband’s.
Lord help us, I have Things To Add. Also, any marriages between teenagers tended to happen in the nobility/aristocracy. This was mostly because it was a political/economic union at stake, and powerful families wanted to get that shit nailed down as soon as possible (an betrothal might in itself provide that security, but a marriage definitely would), but for everyone else…not so much. Yes you do have instances of teenagers (girls especially) being married young, as in the case of the 15-year old bride for whom the The Good Wife’s Guide was written by (the much older) “Le Ménagier de Paris” in the 14th century, but for the most part daughters were valuable contributors to the household economy, particularly for agricultural families—you’re not going to give away an extra pair of laboring hands too early (this has even more true in Ireland, where well into and throughout even the 19th century all (common) people had the habit of waiting well into their late-20s to marry). So, yeah, marrying young was a Rich Person thing, not an Every Person thing. Although, I’m not certain it can be said with certainty that very many children were necessarily married in infancy/early childhood. Certainly, a non-negligible number were engaged that young—and medieval terminology for the states of betrothal vs. marriage was…well, often vague and muddled plus, depending on local traditions, a betrothal might very well be viewed by a community as a marriage in all but word. However, no child the age of six or younger could enter into a full, legal, Church-sanctioned marriage, because the “age of reason” was commonly held to come at seven years or so. That is not to say there was not some wiggle room (particularly when non-standardized calendar systems get involved), or some simple misremembering of the exact timing of life events (side note: for a truly fascinating and engaging example of this phenomena in the medieval world, I suggest taking the time to read The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages by Robert Bartlett). But if a person, of any age, could not reason, they could not consent to a marriage. Believe it or not consent was a huge concern of the medieval Church. No matter what the economic and social reality of the participants in a marriage, spiritually it was meant to be a union between two equal souls. To not wholeheartedly (well, more or less…) agree to a union was to, among other things, bear false witness before God—-which was kind of a Big Deal back then—and furthermore to do so in the practice of one of His most sacred institutions. Therefore, both parties necessarily had to consent of their own free will to the marriage, otherwise it wasn’t a true marriage and all kinds of spiritual shit would, apparently, hit the fan. So, while either the bride or the groom could be (and probably, often, were) coerced, cajoled, threatened, etc. into accepting the marriage before the ceremony, once the couple were before the priest—though, this had it’s own issues, and the necessity of a religious cleric of some sort to legitimize a marriage wasn’t really enforced in any meaningful manner until the 12th and 13th century, much to the continuous ire of the Church—if either person showed, or especially spoke, resistance to the ceremony any cleric worth his salt would call the whole thing off due to lack of unequivocal consent. (That means no weeping, wailing bride being dragged to the altar to be married against her will to a man she utterly loathes—fuck you, Hollywood, and your historically inaccurate melodramatic tropes.)
It’s also worth adding, on the subject of young marriages among medieval royalty/nobility, that cases where noblewomen did give birth at a very young age were noted as unusual – probably the best known example (for people who do English history, anyway) is Margaret Beaufort, who gave birth to the future Henry VII at the age of 13 and was unable to conceive any other children afterwards. Another example is Mary de Bohun, wife of the future Henry IV; she gave birth to a stillborn child in 1382 when she was about 13 or 14 (we don’t know her exact date of birth, but she and Henry were about the same age), but it was a number of years before she and Henry resumed sexual relations because their next child, the future Henry V, wasn’t born until 1387, and they presumably decided that perhaps underage childbearing is a Bad Idea. (They had five more children after Henry not-yet-V though, all of whom lived to adulthood.)
But these examples get remarked on precisely because they’re rare – while canon law as determined by the Fourth Lateran Council set the age of consent as 12 for girls and 14 for boys, in practice it was the done thing to wait until the girl was old enough to safely bear children. Hell, even in Romeo and Juliet (which is where the assumption of early marriage comes from for a lot of modern people) Shakespeare has Capulet tell Paris that “too soon marred are those so early made,” insisting that he’d prefer to wait before marrying Juliet off (although of course he changes his tune later).
