The Age of Marriage.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 4973, 14 May 1891, Page 4

The Age of Marriage.

(Speaker.)

The excitement which has been created among large classes of our Indian fellowsubjects by the proposal to raise the legal age of marriage, may make it interesting to recall the corresponding change which has taken place in this country. Few people, we think, realise that among our own ancestors women were commonly married when they were twelve years old, and that the age of marriage has been only slowly and gradually raised through the List ten centuries. Chaucer makes the " Wife of Bath " say :

"Lordings, sin I twelf yere was of age (Thankedbe God that is eterne on live) Husbondes at chirche dore have I had five."

We may, or we may not, agree with the Wife of Bath's views upon marriage. But it is at least evident that she thought that there was nothing either unusual or unseemly in the marriage of a girl only 12 years old. We have to descend rather more than two centuries in passing from the time of Chaucer to the time of Shakespeare. But the age of marriage does not seem to have been raised two years in the interval. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is within a few weeks of completing her 14th year. In this play Shakspeare is no doubt introducing us to Italian scenery. But, if his scenery is Italian, he is writing for an English audience; and he would have hardly ventured on statements which would have seemed unnatural and unusual to every spectator of the drama. But no spectator of Romeo and Juliet would have seen anything unnatural or unusual in these ages. The Lady Margaret was under fourteen years of age when her son who became Henry 11., was born. His daughter, Margaret, was married to James IV. of Scotland before she was 14; her granddaughter, Mary Queen of Scots, was married to the Dauphin a few months after completing her 15th year; and when Catherine de Medici was advocating her son's marriage with Elizabeth of England, according to Mr Froude, she told the English ambassador that "she was married when King Henry had but 15 years, and she fourteen. . . . and, said she,

look at my soil, lie is not small, nor little of growth." Eren a century later, so Mr M'Cartliy incidentally mentions in his History of the Four Georges, Mary of Modena was only 14 when she married James IT. Her first child was born within fourteen months of her marriage ; and, according to Keble, who makes the statement in his Life of Bishop Wilson, Lady Elizabeth Butler was under 14 years of age when she married —in the same year as Mary of Modena—the ninth Earl of Derby. Early marriages were not confined to the female sex. Edward 111. was only 16 when he married Philippa of Hainault; his son Lionel was 14 when he married Elizabeth de Burgh ; Henry IV. was only 13 when he married Lady Mary de Bohun. Catherine de Medici, in the conversation we hare already quoted, said that Mr Secretary Cecil—so her ambassador had informed her—had a child at 14. Sir Alfred Lyall says that Warren Hastings' father married at 15. According to Mr Hodder, the first Earl of Shaftesbury married at 18, and the second at 17 years of age. The third Earl, the author of the " Characteristics," married at a more mature age, but there was only an interval of 16 years between his marriage and that of his eldest son. These examples, taken almost at random from literature and the peerage, are sufficient to prove the remarkable change which has taken place in the feelings and the habits of the people of this country during the last few centuries. Marriages which seemed usual in Chaucer's and Shafespeare's time, and which were not unusual two centuries ago, would not be regarded as impossible.