CHILD MARRIAGES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 May 1938, Page 4

CHILD MARRIAGES

INCREASE IN BRITAIN A considerable increase is reported in marriages of boys and girls under the age of 16, but happily the law forbids any return to the practice of medieval times when, especially among the wealthy classes, the marriage ceremony was frequently performed over children who had not reached their teens, says a writer in the “Manchester Guardian.” Royalty set a bad example as in the case of Prince Lionel of Clarence, who was married at three years ten months, and Richard, one of the little Princes in the Tower, who was wedded at four a-half. As late as the end of the sixteenth century Richard Brooke, aged 10, married Joan Chaderton, aged nine, daughter of the Bishop of Chester, and Richard Parre, aged three, was enticed by promise of an apple to go to church to be married to a child of his own ago, “though he could hardly speak.” Even in 1683 the then Archbishop of Canterbury did not scruple personally to conduct the marriage service for John Power, aged eight, and his cousin Catherine Fitzgerald, aged 12. The motive behind child marriages was quite different from any that may lead to early marriages today. A marriage was then a feudal perquisite, and if a land-holder died before his heir was married his lord might sell the right of marriage of the heir, often to the detriment of the estate. The landholders preferred to make their own arrangements for the marriage of their children, and therefore married them when they were little more than babies.. Love was not then considered as even a desirable factor in matrimony, property was the essential reason for marriage, and love, it was assumed, would follow.

The uncertainty of life in the Middle Ages was another reason for early marriages, and was one of the reasons for the gross misuse of ecclesiastical patronage by bishops. Feeling that their time might be short the bishops, with scarcely an exception, made haste to fill all their vacant livings with relations, regardless of whether they were of proper age. When William Bothe, a Barton-upon-Irwell man, was Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry in the fifteenth century, he made one of his nephews master of Denwall Hospital and rector of Burton when he was 14 years old. Another nephew was collater rector of Northenden when only 10. Another member of the same fortunate family became a canon of Beverley when in his fifteenth year, thanks to the same benevolent uncle who by that time had become Archbishop of York.