It was a matter of some chagrin to families angling for rich alliances that a young couple could upset carefully laid plans by betrothing themselves, without benefit of parents or clergy. So long as the youth was over fifteen and the girl over twelve, their mutual pledges were indissoluble, and the Church, though looking on such arrangements with disfavour, was obliged to support the betrothal. 'In Chaucer's time', says Dr G. G. Coulton, 'the whole world was a vaster and more commodious Gretna Green.' Small wonder that the wealthy zealously guarded their virgins from the attentions of susceptible young men. Yet, unsentimental as the age appears, there was occasional scope for boy-and-girl dalliance.
In the Paston Letters, which chronicle the fortunes of a family of rich Norfolk landowners in the turbulent fifteenth century, young love breaks occasionally through the records of squalid bargaining. Writing from Topcroft in 1476, Margery Brews informed her 'right worshipful and well-beloved Valentine', John Paston, who was negotiating for her hand, that 'my father will no more money part withal, save £100 and 50 marks, which is right far from the accomplishment of your desire.' Wistfully, Margery added: 'If that ye could be content with that good and my poor person I would be the merriest maiden on ground.' The gesture was probably lost on a suitor whose approach to marriage had hitherto been both commercial and flippant (he had even talked of joining up with some 'thrifty draff wife' in London).
A disappointment to the family was Margery Paston, who fell in love with Sir John Paston's bailiff, Richard Calle. Learning that the two had plighted their troth, the angry parents sent them up before the bishop, who tried to find fiaws in the formula of their betrothal, but without success. They were married, and Sir John refrained from dismissing his bailiff.
Margery fared better than Elizabeth Paston, who for years resisted the family's attempts to marry her off. One of the suitors she spurned was a rich widower with a disfiguring disease. At one time her God-fearing mother, tired of being thwarted, held her daughter incommunicado, beating her once or twice a week, sometimes twice a day, and succeeded in breaking her head 'in two or three places'.
One way to discourage calf-love intrigues was to marry off sons and daughters as children, even as infants in swaddling clothes. The Church decreed that the contracting parties to a marriage should give their voluntary consent, yet priests were found to play their part in the sad farce of child marriages, right into Elizabethan times. Often boy and girl were brought home after the ceremony to be bedded, a symbolic ceremony in which bride and groom, uncomprehendingly called upon to play 'fathers and mothers' at their elders' behest, often displayed a less than cordial attitude towards each other. Near-adolescents would lie in frightened sulks all night, taking care to avoid those contacts which instinct, or the lewd laughter of grown-ups, told them were dangerous. The night after the bedding, bride and groom would return to their separate homes, or perhaps the boy would go to live with the girl's parents. Unhappily for the scheming elders, when the couple reached years of discretion the marriage could be set aside, provided there had been no cohabitation, kissing or other familiarities.
From the dry records of the Diocese of Chester, covering the period 1561-66, the historian F. J. Furnivall unearthed details of child marriages which were no doubt typical of those in earlier centuries. At the age of three John Rigmarden was married to a bride of five. Borne in the arms of a clergyman, he had to be coaxed to repeat the marriage words. Before the end, the wilful John announced that he would learn no more that day. The priest replied: 'You must speak a little more and then go play you.'
Eleven-year-old John Bridge, bedded with a girl a year or two older, lay with his back to her all night, which offended her. On the wedding night of Ellen Damport, aged about seven, two of her sisters lay between her and ten-year-old John Andrewe; and 'since that time he never lay with her nor never had carnal dole with her'. When James Ballard sought the dissolution of his childhood marriage, he pleaded that 'the said Anne had enticed him with two apples to go with her to Colne, and to marry her'. The morning after, remembering his Genesis perhaps, he 'repented the said marriage' and had avoided his wife's company.
Clearly, many of these Chester child marriages were unsuccessful, though others no doubt prospered. There was a variant of this type of marriage, in which a child would be betrothed to an adult. A famous, and happy, example is to be found in the Stonor Letters. Thomas Betson, a wool merchant of the Staple, was engaged to Katherine, daughter of Elizabeth and Sir William Stonor. One day in 1478 he wrote to her from Calais (enclosing a ring for a token):
And if ye would be a good eater of your meat alway, that ye might wax and grow fast to be a woman, ye should make me the gladdest man of the world, by my troth..
I pray you greet well my horse and pray him to give you four of his years to help you withall-tell him that I prayed him so.
And Almighty Jesu make you a good woman, and send you many good years and long to live in health and virtue to His pleasure. At great Calais on this side of the sea, the first day of June, and the clock smote nine, and all our household cried after me and bade me come down, come down to dinner at once! and what answer I gave them ye know it of old. By your faithful Cousin and lover
Thomas Betson.
'If one must be engaged to a girl of 12,' says Dr G. M. Trevelyan, in his English Social History, 'this is certainly a good way to write to her.' Thomas and Katherine were married in 1478. She bore him five children, but he died when she was twenty-two. Like the sensible young woman she was, she remarried.
As a contrast, there was Sir William Roper's way of wooing. One morning (this is John Aubrey's story) the gallant knight of Eltham, Kent, called 'pretty early' on Sir Thomas More, with a proposal to marry one of his daughters. Both girls were still asleep in a truckle bed in their father's chamber. Sir Thomas ushered his caller into the room, took the bed-sheet by one corner and whipped it off. The two girls lay on their backs 'and their smocks up as high as their armpits'. Awakening, they at once rolled over on their bellies.
Sir William Roper said: 'I have seen both sides.' He then patted one of the girls on the buttock, and said, 'Thou art mine.' Says Aubrey: 'Here was all the trouble of the wooing.'
It may be that Sir William Roper had borrowed a notion from his fellow-knight's Utopia (1517). In More's enlightened land, 'the woman, whether maiden or widow, is shown naked to the suitor by a worthy and respectable matron and similarly the suitor is presented naked before the maiden by a discreet man'. The Utopians regarded as risible the custom of men in 'other nations' taking every scrap of harness from a donkey to ensure that it had no flaws, yet estimating the value of a wife 'from a single handsbreadth of her, the face only being visible'. Much foul deformity might well be hidden under clothing. There ought to be a law, More seems to say, to protect men from being entrapped by such guile.
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