*EDITED POST* (10/29/24)
The medieval period spanned from around the 400s to the 1400s so we are not using the Tudor period--a period much shorter than the medieval--to define the entirety of the European marriage vs consummation pattern.
- Early Middle Ages – c. 476 [Fall of Roman Empire] - 1000
- High Middle Ages – 1000 - 1300
- Late Middle Ages – 1300 - 1500s
Consummation vs Marriage
And actually, as I've recently researched, medieval peoples (parents and "doctors" of medicine, philosophy, jurists/law writers, etc.) usually wanted daughters' marriages to be consummated when they passed 15 at least. So nobles'd usually arranged for their daughters to marry before they became 16 & later have them marry according to distance and resources and legalities & then later they'd actually have them consummate. So the time between marriage and consummation is shorter but both partners have reached the better ages to be married AND because the younger the brides were, the more dangerous childbirth would be for them and the child they'd carry. Lower classed people had more freedoms and thus married later--19-20s. More free-willed marriages, too.
So yes, marrying any younger than 16 and up was frowned on by at least a number of those writing medical texts, parents, and other people in the immediate community. Humans broadly would have knowledge of when it was best for a girl to start having kids since the beginning of human existence, so it follows that they would not usually marry/allow consummation b/t their children younger than 15 or 16.
Age of Consent and "Adulthood"
Marrying before 15-16 was mostly an aristocratic thing for lineage-making, accruing resources, and alliances. People of other classes, in rural and urban locations, or of lower ranks/stations married--more than nobles--of their own volition AND older, at least in their late teens (Peter Laslett--1965; The World We Have Lost).
At one point, the Catholic Church made it canon that girls as young as 12 could get married, which comes from numerous 70s-80s written sources about Church canon law. This site informs that the "canon" age of consent for girls in late-13th century England was 12:
An age of consent statute first appeared in secular law in 1275 in England as part of the rape law. The statute, Westminster 1, made it a misdemeanor to "ravish" a "maiden within age," whether with or without her consent. The phrase "within age" was interpreted by jurist Sir Edward Coke as meaning the age of marriage, which at the time was 12 years of age.
That part comes from the medieval tradition of following and using Roman law, which said to list 12 as the minimum for a girl to get married. People already didn't follow Church laws to a T or sometimes at all (sex, prostitution, drinking, festivals, etc.). For the medieval-only context--how people protected and made laws to protect more girls from getting raped by trying to make sure that the rule of the age of consent made it so that these girls could never be seen as giving consent to having sex with a man regardless if they fought back and resisted or not.
I am not saying it was ever okay for 12 year olds to have sex with older people! I'm pointing out there was a lot more room and social allowances to make room for nobles and royals to marry way too young, so it follows that they will form relationships pretty young and it was likelier than today that would pass if arranged. The feelings on part of the couple wouldn't as likely be tempered with fear and shame unless we got a really crazy age difference, which was uncommon.
Humoral theory connected adolescent bodies with adolescent behaviour. The excessive heat and moisture of male youths predisposed them to hot tempers, lustfulness, courage and sociability. These physical and mental characteristics were considered to continue well past the age of physical puberty. It was in the late twenties or thirties that youths’ bodies cooled and dried sufficiently that they became reasonable, even-tempered, and ready to head their own households as husbands and fathers.
How did this theoretical imagining of adolescence translate into practice? In legal terms, such a relaxed attitude towards the onset of adulthood was not possible; fixed ages were required for legal purposes, such as the age of consent and the age of inheritance. In canon law, boys were considered rational enough to give marital consent after the age of 14, but legal majority for the purposes of inheritance was usually reached at the age of 21.
Marriage was understood in similar terms. While a boy might have the capacity to understand consent at the age of 14, resulting in the canonical minimum age for marriage, this was not the socially desirable age to wed. Age at marriage for males in medieval England varied across social groups, but among the gentry and mercantile elites we find a consistent avoidance of young adolescent marriage, with men marrying in their mid-twenties and women a little earlier. Where males married in early adolescence, it was usually because they were wards and their guardians had sold their marriages (a common medieval practice) or married them to their own children.
The 13th-century jurist Henry of Bracton said a woman reached maturity when she was able to take on the responsibilities of a housewife, but few other writers concerned themselves much with the female life cycle. Women were believed to experience the prime of their lives during adolescence, as this was the age when they were considered to be most spiritually pure and physically beautiful. For a female youth, adolescence was tied to her ‘maidenhood’ – both her youth and her virginity – and so with marriage and the loss of her virgin status she was usually perceived to have exited the most ‘perfect age’ of a woman’s life. In short, girls usually became women because of their relationships with men: when they left their natal families and became wives. Boys’ transition to manhood was a longer and more variable process.
So according to those present, there could SOMETIMES be more concern with boys' younger ages-at-marriage-sex-and-consummation, bc they were the ones entrusted to inherit/lead the household and its resources one day. Reading this passage, I concluded that parents didn't want to give their businesses or titles/lands to their sons "too early" while also making sure their daughters were married off as soon as they felt they could birth children which are also considered "attractive" (appealing bc they can birth but also desirable bc youth=beauty + the longer birthing period) to other families/sons, which is why the women's marriage ages tended to be earlier still than their husbands...or you'd see that more often.
Again, it'd be more often that they wanted the girls to marry earlier than boys did (but still late enough to survive and able to reproduce again) unless they felt that they had to take an opportunity to "seal a deal" earlier for whatever economic, or sociopolitical reason. But it's an exaggeration to say all or most marriages were b/t 12 yr olds and 25 yr olds. And at the same time, the rules are not as tight on this, which for some people might as well mean that everyone was a pedo; the ole' fallacious "if it happened, then that means that they didn't care" argument.
So there would be 14-17 girls marrying 19+ men-boys but those types of marriages would occur more often in aristocratic and royal marriages/levels of society through most of medieval history and regardless of location because the lower the stakes a marriage has for the state/dynasties, the more the individuals have in choice of who and when they marry.
Again, generally, yes people tried & wanted to keep the age gap as small as possible...but:
- it mattered what class, region, and time period you were in
- were flexible according to the competing-influences matrix of perceived needs, relationship to those kids, how much/well they actually looked out for their needs over the "family's", and what they believed their kids' were obligated to do/the benefits from such marriages
After marriage, esp in noble/royal ones but you could find them in their "peasant" families, one could expect that consummation is not too long after if there aren't already careful arrangements for the couple to live apart in any sort of manner, or for there to be people monitoring their behavior if they did live together.
Sometimes noble people were engaged/betrothed/married as soon as they were born, before then, or a little later.
Sometimes noble people didn't even have the two marry and see each other for the first time, having instead people represent one or both of the persons in proxy marriages until the parents/guardians decided to put the two physically close together. The last was usually in the case where the two families had a broad distance between them or otherwise couldn't travel. Proxy marriages were considered as legitimate as nonproxy ones, but at one point the marriage still needed physical consummation to make that marriage more secure and safer from possible annulments.
Examples of (mainly) ages in noble marriages:
- Margaret Beaufort (12) --- Edmund Tudor (24)
- Eleanor of Aquitaine (14) --- Louis VII of France (16-17)
- Margaret of Anjou (14) --- Henry VI of England (23)
- Empress Matilda (8-betrothed; married-13-14) --- Henry V of Germany (24-betrothed; married-29-30)
- Isabella of France (*13) --- Edward II of England (24-25)
- *Isabella I of Castile (18) --- Fernando II of Aragon (17)
And these were outliers. For Margaret Beaufort, it is claimed that at least her own physicians were concerned over the effect on her body before and after childbirth at so young an age.
Most parents loved their kids as most parents nowadays love theirs, wanted what they thought was best for them, and wanted them to be physically healthy/alive, but even if they didn't they wanted them to stay alive after having kids if only to have even more kids--part of the point of marriage, to secure that bag and create a combined lineage. And they weighed their choices by what was told available to them to manipulate, influence, provide, resist, teach, etc. vs what they believed to be in their ability or their duty.
So while there were definitely girls married at 12 by:
- noble/royal people
- either anxious or greedy & ambitious and/or uncaring parents/guardians/hosts
- forced to by a single, much older person who was head of his house
more often people preferred and arranged for their kids to have sex within arranged marriages in mid-to-late teens and they could/did take measures to make sure their kids consummated as soon as possible while also making sure that asap increased the mother's chances of survival...and as one could guess, even that would end up with below-18 marriages being consummated. Since a marriage could be annulled, if it wasn't consummated, so noble/royal parents/guardians/hosts could push for their kids to have sex as soon as possible to prevent that, and there were critics for that sort of thing from the Church writers, clerics, jurists, etc.
Going back to the age of consent, female consent, to the Church in the mid to late medieval period, was also important and often included in legal requisites for marriage even without parental consent (Noonan, John Noonan--1973; "The Power to Choose"). The Church's hold on cultural practices was not consistent, though it also grew more so towards the end of the period.
So, 8-12-year-old brides were more uncommon than not. And 8-12 is a huge difference from 15-16, no matter the time. Even with people dying earlier in comparison to modern Western peoples--because again, what's the point of further endangering someone who already made it past infant mortality, who you raised and watched grow up and endanger your economic prospects by making them give birth too young? Yes, they could die, but usually, if you saw no present signs of an illness or heard of any possible assassination attempts, if those dangers felt far enough, the host or guardian (if they truly cared) c/would and didn't push their kids into consummation if they didn't feel they had to.
Lots of self-contradictions in medieval marriage practices and beliefs. This actually opens them more to having more of those age gaps than what most of us 2024 moderns are comfortable with (I've seen some argue over 4 year differences, 20 and 24), but that doesn't mean that they were 100% avoided in various marital practices and laws.
ASoIaF and Age/Marriage and Sex
What is discomfiting for some people about GRRM's main romantic couples and their age gaps is that a larger number of the ones featured occur between people with 10+ age gaps and the girl is less than 17 in romantic AND nonromantic setups. In comparison, those romantic couples do not have as large a gap with the girl being above 17. Sansa and the Hound; Rhaenys and Corlys; Rhaenyra and Daemon, Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister, etc. It's actually completely valid for people to be concerned and disgusted with such appearance of teen/child marriage and too-large age gaps in their marriages and relationships GRRM writes for their own sake.
A number of things could have happened after Daemon was giving gifts, singing/writing poetry, etc. and before Viserys kicked Dameon out that alerted Arryk into reporting them to Viserys. People/viserys would have likely already suspected Daemon bc they would think he's out to get the throne any way he can or otherwise stir up trouble. We don't know if Daemon and Rhaenyra had sex, if they were found kissing, or hugging erotically, or what have you. But, it's very clear that he wasn't "courting" her with Viserys' permission, that he was using Rhaenyra against Viserys (partly bc of what happened with Mysaria and the whole denial of having his own child and heirship), and Rhaenyra herself for a while didn't want him near before she traveled to Driftmark and befriended Laena Velaryon.
But I don't particularly agree with the idea that some characters in their own psyche/character are automatically pedophiles or groomers for marrying AND having sex with under-18s (as long as they remain in their 20s simultaneously, no matter how uncomfortable that makes me) when even in real medieval-Tudor societies:
- some of those (noble or otherwise) marriages were arranged without asking either party, yes even when there are marrying parties in their 20s bc marriages involved delegating resources which involved the entire family and having that pressure on you would still exist
- the court lords and ladies of power & parents sometimes pushed for consummation
- (even if this was far less often) older women, though less often than the reverse, did marry younger men/boys--Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII
- there were contemporary philosophical pretexts for women/girls to be married off below many modern societies' ages of consent (17-18) to either other children or adults versus men/boys marrying older, which shows a society and mindset meant to prey on girls/women's reproductive labor and make them sex
So the argument that there was no canonical romance or romantic feelings between Lyanna and Rhaegar or Rhaenyra and Daemon in the text itself can't be one-and-done.
In ASoIaF, GRRM made it a bit simpler & exaggerated in comparison to what occurred in real life for noble people BUT real-life noble girls were considered marriageable at the very least as soon as they got their periods and "beddable" only a few years after. Kids and adults get married and consummate early and at any time, while they can make decisions for the house at 16. It's also clear that he is aware of how girls vs boys could have their sexual maturity treated differently to the point where a girl's maturity is dependent on her sexual role of bringing about heirs and their overall roles within the economic household/noble house unit.
Once more, noble and common-born girls are considered their most "attractive" in their "midlives" (adolescence)--bodily and spiritual purity. Thus the focus is on wombs more than humors and the capability to retain their lives and embryos. Whereas boys' maturity is conceptually considered as how well and "cool" they will be to run households and make "executive" decisions, and not harm themselves through indulgence in sex ("hot-blooded" activities), thus throwing themselves off balance. But there are differences in when noble vs nonnoble people marry due to their marriages having different stakes on the whole.
So I feel that he wanted to emphasize the "girls get married young(er) and build relationships younger not far from self-preservation or being torn from their childhood through violence" motif but only for the purpose of focusing on its place under a war-context. (Sansa, again) Then again, I could be terribly wrong and giving too much credit, but I would like someone to bring forth some info or arguments for how GRRM is just being sick, keeping in mind my thoughts to counter.
Real--and assumedly some Westerosi--medieval/Tudor people do not conceive of "maturity" the exact same way moderns do, so we'd have to analyze more than just when they married but HOW they married and saw their sexual partners (who did not have to be the same as their married partners) to then see if they were pedophilic &/o sexually predatory. Again, arranged marriages and 15-16 year olds marrying.
At the same time, I also recognize how exposing people in their mid-teens and younger (mostly girls) to possible sex with older people (men) actively on a real-life legal scale lowering the ages of consent generates more pedophilic feelings because men are encouraged to seek out "sexually pure" girls as a commodity and a sign of personal masculine virility. Also to take advantage of their lack of life knowledge/emotionally isolate them from their families for continued abuse.
For the society of Westeros, as it gave the space for more sexual interaction b/t adults and children, the main intention & purpose behind arranged marriages amongst the nobility wasn't about keeping young girls as sex pets so much as power struggles between families and retaining properties/privileges, and young people became the devices of their parents/guardians more often than some would like. It definitely enabled men to make a "pet" out of their wives and gave them more power in general over women, yes, if they so chose, but it's too simple to say that was what the "first" peoples were going for. Resources.
One could say: yet wouldn't the result be similar? As I already stated a child of 12 could be forced to consummate by elders/spouse and a 20-year-old could be told they have to consummate such a marriage. The younger a spouse could be, the younger a prospective sex partner could be, and the more power one has, the less subject to a law a person could be the more likely they can indulge themselves...the more likely they will not be held accountable for raping/sleeping with too-young persons. I'd agree, because isn't that what happens with Robert Baratheon and Aegon II, who both sleep with 12 or 13 yr olds/rape them? These examples and it's phenomenon is "different" under the usual practice of political marriage amongst nobles in Westeros--even with comparatively (to real history) more prepubescent girls marrying and having relationships with much older men--also opens up the independent/consented/voluntary sexual and romantic relations between these people. Again, in Westeros, a dramatized and inaccurate portrayal of medieval Europe (actually England).
Once you enter another world, once you go another place it's not really about making sure you morally evaluate whatever happens there immediately in some sort of conformist agenda so much as see what the world is already like, what challenges it brings to its characters, how those characters rise or fall to the occasion and why, etc. This comes first, otherwise, how could one make any moral conclusions or evaluate the conclusions of ethics WITHOUT ignoring what conditions they had to answer to?
Conclusions (For Now)
A number of things could have happened after Daemon was giving gifts, singing/writing poetry, etc. and before Viserys kicked Dameon out that alerted Arryk into reporting them to Viserys. People/viserys would have likely already suspected Daemon bc they would think he's out to get the throne any way he can or otherwise stir up trouble. We don't know if Daemon and Rhaenyra had sex, if they were found kissing, or hugging erotically, or what have you. But, it's very clear that he wasn't "courting" her with Viserys' permission, that he was using Rhaenyra against Viserys (partly bc of what happened with Mysaria and the whole denial of having his own child and heirship), and Rhaenyra herself for a while didn't want him near before she traveled to Driftmark and befriended Laena Velaryon.
However, I also think GRRM is trying to point out how Daemon doing whatever he did with 14/15 year old Rhaenyra (that got him kicked out) was a line-crossed other than disobeying Viserys/the King's directives...we have Dany who was 13 and pregnant with Drogo's child, a line that was meant to be taken as objectively terrible. We can see that Daemon's actions were somehow not to be taken as neutrally moral, but him taking advantage of Rhaenyra, even if not exactly him seeking to have sex with someone he thought of as a child (Dany & Rhaenyra, different environments in-world, but simultaneously, OBJECTIVELY/OUT OF WORLD, not-good). So, Daemon is kicked out, marries someone else, grows to be a father/husband/they spend years apart, Rhaenyra has Harwin as a lover/they come back together and marry.
It's not that what was going on wasn't wrong so much as how do I use the moral indictment against men & women marrying teenagers--esp arranged by other authorities--as the fault of the individual alone when it's clearly a social practice. One that needs a total razing of the entire world (not just Westeros) to deal with.
I'm saying that if we critique the series concerning age gaps, even with GRRM bringing the "spirit" of noble marriages into fiction, that is more a critique of GRRM's writing. Should Daemon have pursued Rhaenyra or had access to her enough to do so? No. However, I also can't let that overtake the fact that Rhaenrya would have gained more agency in marrying him out of everyone her father would have rather stuck her with. With him, she practiced a lot more autonomy and room to be herself and feel safer than with others (even w/Harwin, he was attracted to her and had their affair with her when she was 17-ish and married to Laenor, hence how Jace came about so quickly after the marriage[both in 114 A.C.]).
Rhaenyra doesn't get to choose her first marriage/sexual "legal" relationship--her father does. This is true of most royal and noble marriages and becomes more common with the higher status.
"Grooming"--as a means to critique the character living in a world where girls marry very early, even if historically inaccurate, loses its neutral assessment of possible amorality on the character's part when the context for the accusation of grooming is not there. la-pheacienne says:
The problem with the word "grooming" is that it's not a neutral word. It's a word with a very heavy meaning, that frames an individual who has a perverse, unnatural sexual desire for children whereas the society this individual lives in has decided (fortunately) that these children are not to be considered in a sexual way.
Book!Daemon did do what we consider unscrupulous bordering on predatory in his gift giving and more "attention" spent after he comes back, and he does it so he can marry the girl. There are other ambitions for his approaching and spending time with Rhaenyra besides his probable genuine like for her personality. Watsonianly and Canonically, these two respect and liked and loved each other because they both were very similar and proud of their house & heritage. Using the term "grooming" makes it much easier for people to see and evaluate the characters and real-life persons as personally and independent evil actors without analyzing how regarding systematic contexts, things that are just bigger than the individual and actually create/affect the individual's decisions. Or at least that is the impression I get from some people who try to use Daemon as a gotcha for others for hating on Aegon...after they say Rhaenrya deserved to be usurped or to face femicide...because she "supported" a groomer.
It makes it as if the line that moderns draw is as obvious to these factors when it is not and has never really been, effectively making it as if "people back then" were just crazy people unworthy of examination.
It's almost like when we try to criticize Rhaenyra for asking for sex with Cole in HotD, when her position as a woman, even royal, is very different and treacherous than for a royal man asking sex of a non-knight noble woman, as noblewoman never become knights to even become Kingsguard. So Rhaenyra can be judged as exactly like a prince because she happens to be royal herself and there is some sort of possible power imbalance? Do power imbalances themselves, regardless of gender, at all make the relationship bad automatically? What if the entire society is built on power imbalances, does that mean that every single relationship, arranged or not, is an unhealthy and unreal one? That no one ever really fell in love or had real case-by-case satisfaction and a real sense of security in their partners? Can there ever be a true, loving relationship in such a world, or is every single person just kidding themselves?
Yeah, it appears GRRM is trying to convey that kids are made to grow up too soon and become victims/perpetrators (Dalton Greyjoy and Aegon II) faster and indelibly under such a hierarchical patriarchal society. Kids like Jaehaerys I when he came into kinghood become in charge of too much, they are entrusted with too much authority and privileges and power too soon, are exposed to violence too much too soon, become murderers and rapists, and are allowed to be and thus developed less empathy for others or even with similar aristocratic backgrounds, must learn how to survive on their own or on their own brain power, determination, etc (Arya and Dany).
I think that GRRM does do well sometimes to convey the nature or some basic principle (emotionally) of sexual violence through the power imbalances engineered through societal male-exclusive power over wives, daughters, mothers, etc., and their sexual liberties. But with sexual violence, it's not about naivete so much as:
- he focused more on wars w/o investigating rape and sexual violence for their own sake and why sexual violence is used in war or right before/after wars; how rape is used
- he wanted to create a fantasy story means to have us speculate more than actually glean facts about the actual medieval societies that existed as a historical fiction writer would more likely do...no matter what he says, bc that's simply not what fantasy fiction does as a genre, definitively
- he's an old white man who wrote his stories in the 70s-80s and published them in the 90s, no matter what his politics; he was not really thinking about the age aspect as a primary thing in power imbalances so much as secondary or tertiary and a consequence of closely-knit marriages in a system of such marriage * heir-making business; apart from the Targs, the society of Westeros itself practices marriage between first cousins & uncles x nieces [2 Stark marriages] or aunts x nephews. The Targs had the exclusive "right" to marry their siblings that reflects a similar motivation between the Andal first-cousin marriages and feudal marriage itself: allocate resources to people as closely blood related as possible to reduce competition and reserve wealth. That Rhaenyra or girls like Arianne (who had a fat crush on Oberyn at some point, her uncle) surprise that Rhaenyra could fall in love with Daemon in such a societal setting. There is no social taboo on such a relationship, so she does not feel/think it as such; she wasn't "convinced" or groomed into being in a relationship w/Daemon. Again, this is IN-WORLD/Watsonian!
I still find truth and satisfaction in his conveying the message I already named; however, I think we can simultaneously acknowledge and criticize the misogyny that he also writes when it occurs. One doesn't succumb to the other.
