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Things You Didn’t Know About Family, Marriage, Work, and Death Since the Middle Ages

The Young Squire's Wedding. Thomas Falcon Marshall (1818–1878) (Photo Credit: Lytham St Annes Art Collection of Fylde Borough Council)

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By Alice Reid

December 6, 2024
4:49 pm
Los Angeles, CA

What age did people marry in the British past? Famous examples suggest that people married at very young ages in the European past. Shakespeare’s Juliet was ‘not [yet] fourteen’ and Romeo probably not much older. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was either 12 or 14 when she married Edmund Tudor, and gave birth to Henry not much more than a year later. The marriage age for British nobles increased over time, but members of the royal family were still marrying fairly young in the 19th century. Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were 20 when they married in 1840, and Victoria’s eldest son, the future King Edward VII, and his bride Princess Alexandra of Denmark, were 21 and 18 respectively when they married in 1863. Such

What age did people marry in the British past?

Famous examples suggest that people married at very young ages in the European past. Shakespeare’s Juliet was ‘not [yet] fourteen’ and Romeo probably not much older. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was either 12 or 14 when she married Edmund Tudor, and gave birth to Henry not much more than a year later. The marriage age for British nobles increased over time, but members of the royal family were still marrying fairly young in the 19th century. Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were 20 when they married in 1840, and Victoria’s eldest son, the future King Edward VII, and his bride Princess Alexandra of Denmark, were 21 and 18 respectively when they married in 1863. Such examples encourage people to think that young ages at marriage must have been the norm.

In fact, the majority of women and men married considerably older than this in the past. The graph below shows the average age at marriage over the long sweep of English and Welsh history. Apart from a few decades in the early 1800s, the only time since 1550 that the average age of first marriage for women fell below age 24 was during the baby boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Why didn’t people marry younger?

Relatively late marriage in Britain and across a swath of North-West Europe is linked to something called the ‘European Marriage Pattern’. The key characteristic of this is that young couples usually set up a new household on marriage.

Albert de Belleroche, “The Servant“; Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries.

Establishing a new household involved the considerable expense of purchasing the cooking pots, blankets and tools they would need to equip their new home, and consequently both men and women would spend their late teens and early twenties earning money and saving some of it in preparation for marriage. Sometimes they would continue to live with their parents while doing this, but it was quite common to take a position as a domestic or farm servant which involved lodging with their employer.

This process of working and saving pushed marriage ages into the mid-twenties for both men and women. It also had the effect of making marriage responsive to the economy, as when wages were low it took longer to save for marriage, but when wages were high people were able to marry a bit earlier. In this way the long fluctuations in marriage age until about 1750 have been attributed to extended economic cycles.

The period referred to as the industrial revolution was characterised by a large increase in factory labour, and the comparatively high wages of factory work, together with the security it offered, meant that people could afford to marry at younger ages.

After not much more than 100 years of relatively low marriage ages, the fertility and marriage phase of the demographic transition started in Britain. The demographic transition is a concept used to describe the change from relatively high to relatively low birth rates (fertility) and death rates (mortality).

Fertility in Britain declined consistently between about 1870 and 1930, and increasing ages of marriage contributed to this by delaying the effective start of a woman’s childbearing career and reducing the number of children she had time to fit in.

The Baby Boom and beyond

The big spike in births which began during, and continued after, the second world war across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand is generally referred to as ‘the baby boom’. A large part of the baby boom was driven by an increase in the percentage of people marrying and having at least one or two children, and it was accompanied by a fall in the age at which people married, to levels which for Britain were unprecedently low.

The causes of the baby boom and this drop in marriage age are not well understood, but they have been attributed to a catching-up of births delayed due to the depression and war, a period of economic prosperity, and the coming of the sexual revolution which, in the absence of reliable contraception, meant that more young couples were rushed into marriage by an unplanned pregnancy.

Since the 1970s, ages at first marriage have increased rapidly, attributed to an increase in education which delays the start of partnership formation, a rise in cohabitation before or instead of marriage, and the declining cultural relevance of the institution of marriage. The average age of first cohabiting partnership, however, has risen much more slowly than the average age at marriage.

Why is it so tempting to think people think married younger than they did?

The balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. (Photo: the British Library)

Given that people married late in the British past – so late that it’s only in the last few decades that the average age at first marriage has exceeded the historic norm – why is it so common to think that people married young in the British past?

One possible reason relates to the examples from literature, drama, and Europe’s real noble families mentioned at the start of this blog. The marriage patterns of the elite were far from typical of society in general, but there are very few literary examples or details of ordinary weddings to inform the popular imagination.

Another reason is the use of misleading starting points for comparisons over time. Demographic time series often start no further back than the mid-20th century, and even when longer term time series are available, many historic comparisons take a relatively short time span.

It is very common, here in the UK, to start historic time series in the 1960s or 1970s when age at marriage was unusually young (see, for example, this blog from the Office for National Statistics). This creates an impression of a constant increase, even before the time series began.

Reading history sideways

These factors contribute to a tendency to ‘read history sideways’, a phrase coined by the sociologist and demographer Arland Thornton.

This practice involves looking at contemporary societies across the world and assuming they are all at different stages on the same developmental trajectory, from ‘less-developed’ places with early marriage, to ‘more-developed’ places with late marriage. This leads to an assumption that marriage in the European past must have been as young as in parts of Africa and Asia in the mid-late 20th century.

Thornton argued that not only does this practice lead to a misconception of the history of demographic change, but contributes to a ‘developmental idealism’ which encourages ethnocentric ideas that the ‘western’ family is some sort of ideal. In this case, age at marriage for the majority of the population in the British past does not map onto that seen in late-20th or early-21st-century ‘less developed’ countries, so a better knowledge of history can be an important corrective to reading history sideways.

Note on sources: How do we know?

Working backwards from the present, today every marriage – whether it takes place in a registry office, church, or other venue in the UK – is recorded in the civil register of marriages. The age of both parties is recorded, as is their civil status – i.e. whether they are single, widowed or divorced.

A young couple are being married in church. Stipple engraving by R.M. Meadows, 1806, after R. Westall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

This system began in 1837 in England and Wales, and the data in the graph above are generated from calculations done at the time using the average (mean) ages of all the marriages of unmarried men and women in opposite sex marriages. We don’t include same-sex marriages here because these are so recent, and the ages of participants may be influenced by ‘catch-up’ marriages by people who would have married earlier if it had been legal.

Between 1538 and 1837, the data on marriages are derived from the parish registers kept by the Church of England. For most of the period the majority of the population were C of E, so these registers are considered quite representative of the general population.

However, parish registers are not easy to use – to be useful they must be consistently recorded, and the surviving series must cover a long time period with no or few gaps. Transcribing them can be challenging and time-consuming (today much transcription has been done and is available on platforms such as Ancestry, FindMyPast, and FreeReg).

Baptismal register for St Stephen’s Church, Norwich, 1796-1797.

Crucially, however, parish registers rarely recorded ages at marriage, so to find out ages of marriage, the researcher needs to link the bride and groom in a marriage register to their entries in a baptism register. This linking, part of a process called family reconstitution, is complicated and time-consuming, and careful attention has to be paid to the influence of out-migration on the averages. Therefore only a relatively small number of parishes contribute to this data, but careful comparisons suggest that they are a good representation of England as a whole.

None of the reconstitution parishes were located in Wales, so the early data only cover England. On the other hand, the older civil register data are only available for England and Wales combined. This is unlikely to make much difference to overall averages, however, as the population of Wales has always been very small compared to that of England.

Similarly the parish register set used here don’t include any Scottish parishes. However we do know that in the second half of the 19th century, Scottish men were about a year older at marriage than English and Welsh men, and Scottish women were about half a year older than the English and Welsh (see PopulationsPast.org).

Data on cohabitation come from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey, a sample survey which ask interviews the same people every few years and asks about dates of entry into cohabitation and marriage.

Source: University of Cambridge