This is the first part of the third part of our series (I, II) discussing the patterns of life of the pre-modern peasants who made up the great majority of all humans who lived in our agrarian past and indeed a majority of all humans who have ever lived. Last week, we looked at death, examining the brutal mortality regime of pre-modern societies, typified by extremely high (c. 50%) infant and child mortality, very high maternal mortality and often high male military mortality, which kept life expectancy at birth as low as the mid twenties, while life expectancy at adulthood was better – around 50 – but still very low by modern standards.
This week and next, we’ll start working out some of the consequences of this mortality regime, looking at family formation which in these pre-modern agrarian societies means marriage. While the intense variability of mortality meant that peasant households came in a variety of single- and multi-family forms, pre-modern agrarian societies generally had strict and rigid expectations for marriage: in nearly all of these societies everyone got married and was expected to get around to having children because the community required them rather than necessarily because they wanted to.
So this week we’re going to look at marriage patterns, particularly the question of age at first marriage. Then next week, we’re going to turn to the implications those patterns have for child-bearing and child-rearing. The family and the household were the fundamental institutions of everyday life for pre-modern people, so understanding their structures and assumptions is crucial for understanding the rest of life in these past societies.
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Marriage, Marriage is What Brings Us Together, Today
Mawwiage, mawwiage is what brings us together, today.
No, I will not apologize for this joke.
We begin with marriage as the first step in family formation (though not necessarily household formation, as we’ll see). Whereas the pre-modern mortality regime is broadly consistent over different cultures, marriage patterns (nuptiality) vary significantly. Very nearly all human cultures practice something we can identify as marriage, the mostly-permanent pair-bonding of individuals to create a new family (but not necessarily household) unit into which new children are born. Different cultures, even in the pre-modern world, differ notably on the rate of marriage (though it is, in all cases, by modern standards very high, for reasons which will become clear), its timing, and the presence or absence of polygamy.
Before we get into those variables though, we need to make a very important point: we are talking about peasants. Remember peasants? This is a post about peasants.
The marriage patterns of high elites in a society are often quite different from the marriage patterns of most of the society. The classic example of this is to note that students are often mislead by European aristocrats in the medieval and early modern periods marrying very young and so they assume that everyone in medieval Europe married very young, but in fact, as we’ll see in a moment, medieval western Europe is notable for very late (mid-twenties for women, late twenties for men) typical age at first marriage among the general population. The very wealthy do not marry under the same economic constraints and incentives as the enormous majority (upwards of 90%) of the population living as peasant farmers or even the smaller subset working in cities or having specialized trades or so on. Indeed it is very common for elites in pre-industrial societies to marry much younger than non-elites, because of the different pressures (family alliances, the need for heirs, the lack of direct economic pressure) placed on those marriage decisions.
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