Title: Western European marriage pattern - Wikipedia
Headings: Western European marriage pattern
Western European marriage pattern
Contents
Overview
Effects
Compared to other cultures
Variation within Western Europe
Background
Antiquity
Middle Ages
Christianity and manorialism
The beginnings of consensual marriage
Early Modern Europe
See also
References

Content: An unmarried Tuscan woman 21 years of age would be seen as past marriageable age, the benchmark for which was 19 years, and easily 97 percent of Florentine women were married by the age of 25 years while 21 years was the average age of a contemporary English bride. While the average age at first marriage had climbed to 25 years for women and 27 years for men in England and the Low Countries by the end of the 16th century, and the percentage of unmarried Englishwomen rose from less than 10% to nearly 20% by the mid-17th century and their average age at first marriage rose to 26 years at the same time, there was nonetheless great variation within Britain alone; while Lowland Scotland saw patterns similar to England, with women married in the middle twenties after a period of domestic service, the high birth rate of Highland Scotland and the Hebrides imply a lower age of marriage for the bride, possibly similar to Gaelic Ireland, where Brehon Law stated that women became legally marriageable at 15 years and men at 18 years. Similarly, between 1620 and 1690 the average age of first marriage for Swedish women was roughly 20 years, approximately 70% of Swedish women aged between 15 and 50 years were married at any one time, and the proportion of single women was less than 10%, but by the end of the 18th century it had risen to roughly 27 years and remained high with the celibacy rate as a result of falling infant mortality rates, declining famines, decreasing available land and resources for a growing population, and other factors. Similarly, Ireland's age of marriage in 1830 was 23.8 for women and 27.47 for men where they had once been 21 and 25, respectively, and only about 10% of adults remained unmarried; in 1840, they had respectively risen to 24.4 and 27.7; in the decades after the Great Famine, the age of marriage had risen to 28–29 for women and 33 for men and as much as a third of Irishmen and a fourth of Irishwomen never married due to chronic economic problems that discouraged early marriage. Background
Antiquity
The beginnings of this marriage pattern might be found as early as the time of the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar, writing in the first century B.C, wrote that while the Germanic tribes to the north of the empire were communal with their land, living under the Sippe kinship system, the homesteads were largely separate from each other, unlike the closer proximity in Roman towns. And Tacitus, writing a century and a half later, also observed these many private households among the Germanic tribes, although there was public ownership of pastures and controlled use of the forests.