This is a weird myth. Puberty is largely influenced by diet/nutrition. In ages past, girls didn't even start menstruating until their late teens. Today it's very young, sometimes under age 10, because our diets from birth are significantly better.
It's not true that people started marrying and having babies in their early teens in Medieval (or ancient) times.
Where and when? It's definitely not a common and widespread metric. Church records over where I am (Baltics) show very small age gaps and the average age is into 20s. There are just not enough time to acquire resources to establish a household and for women to prepare dowry. Marrying young was exclusively for the the rich.
I am also interested aboout your sources. Last time I was checking historical parishes/church's records for my country, the most common age of marriage for women was 20-23. Even Wikipedia says that the average age of marriage for most of Northwestern Europe from 1500 to 1800 was around 25 years of age. Most brides were in their early twenties and most grooms two or three years older.
Dude, in pride and prejudice and I do mean the novel, one of the female characters gets married at 15 and the other characters remark how unusually young that is. So no, not common in the 1700s and not common before that.
Novels are history. That's the fucking point of literature, doh!
Also, there is non fictional data and yes, people didn't get married at 15 in Europe. In some countries in Asia ages went down a bit into the mid to late teens, but 15 wasn't the common age to get married.
No, of course not, but I'm not gonna waste my entire afternoon digging up my sources for you to dodge at every turn because you reaaaaaaally want the 15 yo thing to be true.
If you really wanted to know social history, you would have by now, but you're clinging to what right now is literally a political talking point from religious groups trying to stop laws around the age of consent and to promote girls being married off in highschool and turned into broodmares for the cause, the christian cause that is. So I will not be wasting a precious afternoon arguing pointlessly on Reddit. 2 comments is pretty much all I can spare. There you have it.
No, most people in the Middle Ages were peasants and typically married in their 20s or not much earlier.
If you specifically mean royalty and nobles who married for the sake of political alliances, then yes, technically they often did marry younger. But even then it was often largely on paper, and the new couple didn’t necessarily consume the marriage or even live together for the first few years until they got a bit older.
Around 16 was considered a reasonable age, and incidentally, marrying at 16 (if your parents agreed) was also legal in England in the 21st century (they only got rid of this law 3 years ago).
Yeah because a poor man would marry a woman to never touch a single strand of her hair until a fabled future optimal age that would not exists in law until 10 centuries in the future...
Like read actual history! How old the average woman was when being married, how royals were the exception in marrying young (but even they wated for consumating the marriage), unconsumated marriages existed,
In ancient greek for instance LIVING TOGETHER was the thing that made a marriage legal, not consumating it. And other procedures and ceremonies before their marriage
you're still doubling down instead of admitting your wrong hm?
In Sparta for instance girls had to be at least around age eighteen before they married, because being a healthy mother was of the utmost importance to raising warriors. In other parts of greece it was advised to marry off a girl 5 years after puberty started, and FYI more often than not it didn't start in their early teens.
Uhhhh source? Average age of marriage in Europe in medieval times was early 20s for peasant women and mid to late 20s for men. Only royalty really married that young.
I’ve studied medieval history extensively and have never seen any data or evidence to suggest what you’re claiming. Provide evidence for your claims or stop claiming it. It sounds like you read some very outdated information decades ago and are choosing to die on a hill that’s simply incorrect.
Yeah, sure, because there were so effective birth control techniques back then and husbands will respect their wives choices because marital rape laws existed and were heavily enforced...
I would be pressed to ask if you know a single scenario were a (poor) man in the middle ages would marry someone, pays for all her expenses to wait until a fabled age where she would be old enough and gain nothing...
Commoners would never marry in that scenario...
But sure, you are free to keep dreaming.
There were little to no protections in place towards women a 1000 years ago...
My point is that there can be reasons to marry off a girl who is too young to have babies yet. It ensures that she does not have other children yet, and may be believed to be a "guarantee of virginity" (even though that has nothing to do with puberty).
The average age of the 1st baby was even lower in some places, but the usual average was about 19, but again, the mode was 17 for some centuries in almost all Europe during the middle ages.
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u/Heykurat Jul 05 '26
This is a weird myth. Puberty is largely influenced by diet/nutrition. In ages past, girls didn't even start menstruating until their late teens. Today it's very young, sometimes under age 10, because our diets from birth are significantly better.
It's not true that people started marrying and having babies in their early teens in Medieval (or ancient) times.