Age At Marriage!!

[linmey]

Hi Vasquez,
It looks like bride and groom could have been about 12. Looking at your link sandie, not a total impossibility!!

Linda.

[stanmapstone]

Hi Vasquez,
It looks like bride and groom could have been about 12. Looking at your link sandie, not a total impossibility!!

Linda.

The legal age for marriage was 12 for girls and 14 for boys.

Stan

Stan

[wileman 121]

certainly on my family tree dating back many hundreds of years i have about 12 or 13 different couples married before the age of 16.

from around 1100 and even some time before that up to th eearly 1800's it was quite common practice to marry when you were young even from the age of 12!
these marriages were not normaly chosen by the bride or groom but would most likely have been chosen by there parents sometimes even before they were born.
it was also common practice to marry cousins infact some families in the 1600's would not have it any other way!

[stanmapstone]

From time immemorial the age for matrimonial consent was fixed at 7 years, but puberty was accepted as the age for consummation of the marriage, which was 12 for girls and 14 for boys.

Stan

[kerryb]

Surely that was only for the rich, famous and royal?  Surely the common people didn't do it that way and marry each other off at the age of 7!!!

Kerry

[wileman 121]

Im afraid sometimes that was true as the poor people might not have had much chance at marriage any other way they would probrably have thought who would want to marry into a poor family so they marry cousins ect...

well the obvious choice would be another poor family and on extremely rare ocasions a poor woman would marry a noble gentleman but this was also a way to secure there child a marriage.

7 would probrably be a little young not to say it never happend but you some of the earlier cases would probrably be around 10-11 ish

   Jason

[kerryb]

I see that if they lived right out in the sticks in a small village they would have little choice, certainly that is true with a lot of my ancestors.  I didn't find many marrying cousins but certainly the neighbours children whos siblings might have married their own siblings.

But never that young 

Kerry

[stanmapstone]

From "The Oxford Guide to Family History" by David Hey.
Another myth that has been firmly laid to rest by social historians is that English people used to marry when they were very young......The evidence is inconclusive for the medieval period, but the study of parish registers has left no doubt that since the sixteenth century at least England has shared the north-western European pattern of a later age at marriage.... So well established was this pattern by the beginnings of parish registration, that it is unlikely that medieval experience was much different.... Only a very small proportion of the population of Elizabethan England married before the age of 20. 

Stan

[carrielovesfanta]

Slightly off topic but I was reading about Lucrezia Borgia, and she was married off at 13, but there were offers by the time she was 10!