Hey let’s destroy the pernicious myth that preteens were regularly marrying in medieval and early modern Europe and were having children as young teenagers. It’s just not true. Church records show the typical age people got married was around 18-23. Sure, around a third of brides were pregnant at the time of their marriage, but premarital sex was actually completely fine in medieval and early modern Europe if the couple intended to marry. (Oh look! Another historical fact the Victorian period completely mangled!)
Very young girls were not having babies in medieval times, people. The only people who ever bring this non-fact up are paedophiles looking to defend their dangerous paraphilia. So cut it out. Stop spreading this myth. It’s not historical, it’s not factual, it’s not true.
By the way the texts in support of these facts are here and here.
“Emerging evidence is eroding the stereotype of medieval child marriage. Goldberg and Smith’s work on low- and lower-middle-status women has refuted Hajnal’s argument for generally early marriage for medieval women. Even Razi’s ‘early’ age at marriage for girls in Halesowen hardly indicates child marriage, as a large portion of his sample married between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two… . Goldberg has offered evidence from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Yorkshire showing that urban girls tended to marry in their early to mid twenties and rural girls married in their late teens to early twenties, and both groups married men who were close to them in age.” (Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, c. 1270-1540, p. 37 (x).
Bolded for emphasis.
As far as i can recall, the only instances of child marriages in the Middle Ages i ever remember reading about were amongst the nobility, where marriages were arranged for political advantage over any other consideration. (And even in those cases, contracts frequently specifically stated that the marriage was not to be consummated for several years.)
I think a lot of the problem in conceptions comes from the way history has often been written. It’s only relatively recently that the “common people” have been considered worthy of consideration when writing history – for a lot of the span between the Middle Ages and now, history was basically a genealogy of rulers ( in the words of Barbara Tuchman). the concerns of the lower classes were basically ignored – and a side effect of this is that the habits of the documented group are assumed to be representative of all groups. So, yeah, child marriages existed – but they existed among a tiny minority of the population whose daily lives and concerns were wildly different from those of everyone else.
Kimchi and Justice 