“He Would Never Consent in His Heart”: Child Marriages in Early Modern England

On the day before Michaelmas in 1558, thirteen-year-old John Bridge was married to Elizabeth Ramsbotham in the parish church of Bury. He was, according to witnesses, “but a child . . . having no mynde of marriage,” while Elizabeth was “a bigge woman,” presumably considered more mature than her groom (Elizabeth’s age is not recorded). Before the wedding, John told his neighbor that he would “go to the Churche, and say the words,” but he “wold never consent to them in his heart.” He had to marry, he realized, in order to save his father from financial ruin. When John was two years old, his grandfather received money from Elizabeth’s father and purchased land with it. In return, he promised that John would marry Elizabeth. At the time of the marriage, the grandfather had died, but John’s father was forced to carry out the provisions of the agreement, otherwise he would have to return the money. During the wedding feast, John did not eat. When it was time for the bedding of the couple, John began crying and wanted to go home with his father. After much convincing, both by his father and the officiating priest, John finally did go to bed, but he resolutely turned his back on his bride, laid completely still all night, and carefully avoided touching her. The following morning, John left, and he never came into Elizabeth’s company again. Three years later, he brought a suit to the diocesan court of Chester, claiming that since he been below the age of consent when married, and since he had continually dissented, the union was not valid.¹

Historians of marriage often remark on the primacy of consent in the making of medieval and early modern English marriage. Since the High Middle Ages, the consent of the parties to be husband and wife, expressed in the present tense, theoretically created a binding marriage.² The church, both before and after the Reformation, also required that the marriage be officiated by a priest in a public place (preferably in church) and with a license or banns called, but the violations of these requirements did not necessarily make a marriage invalid, only illicit, leaving consent as the only essential requirement. The change to this “consent-only” rule did not come until the Hardwicke Act passed in 1753. According to the bill, persons under the age of twenty-one also had to have the consent of their parents or guardians in order for the marriage to be valid. In the realm of marriage, England thus differed from continental Europe during most of the early modern period, since new rules established in both Protestant and Catholic territories in the mid-sixteenth century had established the necessity of the consent of parents and guardians for a valid marriage much earlier.³

Basing the age of consent on Roman law, medieval canonists argued that marriage should not occur before children had reached an age of maturity appropriate for the marriage duties, specifically sexual intercourse and child birth, which essentially translated to puberty. The ecclesiastical legal system developed a standard age of twelve years old for girls, and fourteen for boys, in order to be able to give full legal consent to marriage.⁴ The prevalence of the consent theory notwithstanding, early modern parents and guardians often arranged the marriages of their charges without much consideration for the children’s desires and wishes, as we can see in the case of the reluctant John Bridge. However, in order to underscore the importance of consensual marriage, the church allowed children who had been married underage to express their dissent to a marriage once they came of age, and the union could then be annulled.

Studying this legal loophole provides us a glimpse into the agency of early modern children. Our view of the relationship between early modern parents and children has become much more nuanced and complex compared to the ideas expressed in early works, such as those of Lawrence Stone and Philippe Aries, who argued that sixteenth-century parents developed little affection...