Could Medieval Lords Really Sleep With Brides on Their Wedding Night?
Fact Quickie | 12 Febr. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fubpe_-ip-4
5:19 The Church didn't need to track it.*
If you didn't get the right and didn't wait, you simply had one more sin to confess next confession.
7:15 "Did not commonly get married before the age of 18."**
Did you see Mr. Baker do a video on a certain female lineage (Garsenda of Sabran)?
I checked it out and found*** 22 women in the Middle Ages whose marriages were:
11 at the youngest.
14 as lower quartile.
15.5 or 16 as median.
17 as higher quartile.
26 as the oldest.
I did a few other lineages°, on the female side. 105 women in total, including above.°°
7 or 8 at the youngest (obviously the cohabitation started later)
13 or 14 as lower quartile.
16 or 17 as median.
18 or 20 as higher quartile.
53 as the oldest.
When an "or" is indicated, it's because I've taken into account for each person the highest and lowest ages possible from the sources, like disputed year or date of birth or of wedding can mean the same person can be seen as wed at 15 or 16 or even greater variation, and each list of position values takes into account the high and low values of each.
So, a woman married before 18 was at least in the nobility pretty common. Commoners are so much less documented, I wonder how you do stats on them. Obviously the diocese of Cambridge or whatever during the English Civil War and Cromwell's era cannot be seen as a guaranteed faithful sample for the Middle Ages.
- Susmitha Varma
- @susmithavarma53
- I think this video is talking about the usual age at marriage of commoners. Noblewomen certainly did marry very young.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @susmithavarma53 Now, the thing is, whether noble or commoner there was no such thing as the usual age.
If you take the span of ages between the one 1/4 and 3/4 up in the list of ages, you can get a typical age span, but even so, there are c. 1/4 who married younger than that.
The problem is, either Kim Phillips didn't present or Simon Whistler (or whoever wrote the script) didn't pass on the numbers for the early teens marriages. They were not a majority, but neither were they so among noblewomen.
8:14 I'm noting, Kim Phillips book is in the full title:
Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270-1540.
8:16 I'm noting that he uses the word "the norm" here.
It was obviously allowed to wait a bit longer, and I think a monastic school among nuns would have been better suited to make this endurable while staying chaste than lots of modern high school settings.
The quote on the screen doesn't specify how common or uncommon a marriage around the age of puberty was.
8:36 Ah, OK,
"a large portion of the sample married between the ages of 18 and 22"
I could say the same for my 105 woman sample.
The position values 66 to 88 are between 18 and 22
20 20 20 21 21 22 22 22
81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88
Or even between 72 and 94
18 18 19 19 19 19 20 21 21 21 21 21 22 22 22
81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95
Sorry, 95.°°° That's a large portion.
But I suppose his "large portion" could be sth like between the two quartiles, i e the middle 50 % or so. That would be less misleading.
It can be mentioned, Yorkshire is in the North, with delays of puberty in pre-industrial times, and also somewhat poorish, so delays of economic nature can have intervened. In other words, a similar sample from the Paris region might give a different result.
9:10 Massachusetts 1652 to 1800.
Like Cambridge, that's Calvinist country.+
For ancestors of the Count of Chambord, back to Henry IV and his wife Marie Thérèse of Modena, I got more younger marriages, with nearly no Calvinist ancestry, than for Francis Joseph and Sissi, with herself descending from a 16th C. Calvinist of Palatinate Zwei Brücken.
9:17 Oh, you give 19.5 to 22.5 as
mean age.
But that doesn't specify the spread or anywhere near it.
How old was the Lower Quartile of age samples?
Case in point, in the ancestries of Marie Thérèse of Modena and the Count of Chambord, the furthest back generation I went to++ had these ages of women at their first marriage (not always coinciding with the one for the genealogy), here:
13 13 13 14 14 14 14 14 14 15 15 15 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
16 16 16 16 17 17 17 17 18 18 18 18 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
21 21 21 21 21 22 22 22 22 21 22 22 23 23 23 24
41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56
24 24 24 25 25 25 25 25 26 26 27 28 29 35 37 39
57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
So, the overall spread is 13 to 39, but the
median is 19. The
mean would not be too far off.
However, 12 of 72 or 1/6 were married before age 16.
9:35 The
average is not a good substitute for the minimum.
If you make "the average" a decent hint at where to put the legal minimum, you cut out all the previous lower half of ages.
Did Kim Phillips
really just give the average? That's dishonest.
Now, the lowest 1/6 are certainly not "the norm" but they are a far bigger portion than the lowest 1/100, so can absolutely not be stamped as "abnormal" either.
10:15 No, I don't think early marriages are a recipy for high divorce rates.
Bad preparation is, and Baby Boomers had part of the worst messages in some popular Anti-Fascism or Anti-Nazi propaganda, Feminism, to poison some of their marriages.
Sure, we shouldn't put people into very degrading camps because of their origin, but that doesn't mean that Bund Deutscher Mädel was wrong about the role of women.
* The curate could sell the couple the right to not wait to the third night. ** Female marriages. ***
The post Mariages dans la lignée de Garsende de Sabran °
Seven Generations Women, Age at First Marriage,
Age at first marriage and at death - a few more °° The total is given in
Encore de lignées féminines : l'âge au premier mariage. °°° The font on that blog has shorter space for numbers like 1, so the numbers don't line up properly. They do in the comment section of the youtube video, so I took last portion to verify. 66 was the beginning of a line, and 72 is just 6 items in from that. + I should have mentioned, a study from 1960 or so did use Cambridge or some other clearly Calvinist dominated diocese, in a period involving the Civil War and Cromwell. ++
Encore une génération ou deux ?
