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Question: What were some mannerisms in the 1500s in England!?
Women and Men and arranged Marriages Www@QuestionHome@Com


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All moralists agreed that marriage was the bedrock of society and there was a great deal of prescriptive literature on the subject!. It was also an economic necessity, especially for women!.
In most of northern Europe couples married at a relatively high age (27-8 for men, 24-5 for women), and only when they had the resources to support an independent nuclear family!. Many who never managed to save the absolute minimum required to set up a home remained unmarried all their lives!.!.!.
Whereas French moralists tended to believe that parents should arrange their children’s marriages, English writers stressed the importance of the young couple’s consent!. The Church also insisted that marriage be made by free consent!. However, in practice only the poorer classes were able to marry for love!. Great dynastic marriages – Ferdinand and Isabella, Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York – changed European history!. Among the European aristocracy, parental dominance of match-making was strong, especially for daughters (and even more so for heiresses)!. Even wealthy peasants could contract arranged marriages!. In the village of Artigat in the county of Foix, the 14 year old Martin Guerre married Bertrande de Rols, who was probably even younger!. The Guerres were immigrants from the French Basque country!. They ran a tileworks and the de Rols evidently considered them a good family to marry into!. Bertrande’s dowry was probably a cash payment of from 50 to 150 livres and a vineyard
Among the mass of the population, adolescents of both sexes in England (though not in southern Europe) enjoyed considerable freedom by virtue of the simple fact that they left home to enter service in their early teens!. They met fellow-servants at hiring fairs, in the alehouses, at village dances and at church!. This meant that in the final analysis, the choice and arrangements were very much in the hands of the couple themselves!. But for the very poor the parish could exercise some constraint!.

It is important not to romanticize marital choice!. Marriage was clearly seen as providing emotional satisfaction, but it was primarily an economic imperative!. A peasant farmer needed a wife!. An artisan who had completed his apprenticeship and was finding it difficult to open his own workshop could find that an ideal solution was to marry with widow of a master artisan and set up in his house!. Men believed that only close female relatives could guard them from trickery and look after them when they were sick!.
For women, marriage was even more of a necessity as their wages were so low that it was impossible for most of them to live independently!. A sixteenth-century French proverb ran: ‘Love may do much, but money more’ (Davies, 1)!.

Rituals
The ring had a long tradition, dating from the Romans!. In the early Middle Ages amongst the German peoples it was used in the desponsatio, which committed the parties to the marriage contract!. But in the eleventh century the Church started to turn what was in effect the engagement ring into the principal symbol of legitimate marriage (Sarti, 68)!. The handing over of the ring became the moment of marriage, and this challenged the German and Lombard traditions in which the central moment was the procession that took the bride to the husband’s house!. In the 17th and 18th century the Church eradicated the popular beliefs that any item (such as a piece of fruit) could be exchanged!. There was generally only one ring, which the husband placed on his wife’s finger!. But the spindle and the distaff remained important symbols and often took pride of place in the items the bride took to her new home (Sarti, 69-70)!.

The marriage vow was easily made!. The Church had long allowed that the free exchange of vows before witnesses followed by sexual consummation constituted a valid union!. When these unofficial marriages broke down, the cases came before the church courts!. The Church worked hard to tighten up the regulations, forbidding, for example, marriage during Lent and Advent!. The most popular time for marriage was the time of the annual hiring fairs after the harvest when young farm servants received their wages and left their masters’ houses to seek new opportunities!.

The celebration of marriage was a public and joyous occasion – and frequently an expensive one!. The wedding procession and the carriage of the chest and wardrobe with the trousseau were the visible and material expression of the woman’s rite of passage (Sarti, 71)!. The ceremonies made great play of fertility!. At midnight, when they were put to bed, Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols were given a resveil, a drink heavily seasoned with herbs and spices!. (Even so, the marriage was not consummated!.) In the Pyrenees the couple were given leek soup; in Burgundy mulled wine spiced with a special concoction of herbs; in Brittany milk, eggs and herbs!.

Dowries
Where there was property a satisfactory dowry had to be negotiated!. For an aristocratic family this was a considerable outlay, and the trend of dowry outlay was ever upwards!. This was especially serious in southern Europe because in Roman law no marriage could be formed without a dowry; if the bride’s family did not pay to the groom what they had promised, the marriage could not take place and any previous understandings were nullified (Hufton, The Prospect Before Her, 67)!. In Italy and Spain lack of appropriate dowry provision filled the convents!. Three quarters of the daughters of the Milanese aristocracy before 1650 were sent to convents!. In 1601 Galileo negotiated the dowry of his sister Livia, paid for the ceremony and the wedding feast and bought her a dress of black Naples velvet with light blue damask that cost more than 100 scudi!. In 16th century Augsburg, families that were too poor to give their daughters a real dowry, attempted at least to give them a bed!. The city had a dowry fund for this!. In Florence and Lucca the dowry for weavers’ daughters included, along with the trousseau and money, the loom that the new family needed to earn its living!. This reflected a belief that the nunneries were already well endowed and that a dowry fund represented a more pressing social need!. One great advantage was that this fund served as a dowry bank – capital that could not be touched by the husband (Hufton, 69)!.

In northern Europe there was no legal requirement for a dowry, but most brides tried to scrape something together!. At the very bottom of the social scale a wife’s input could mean no more than a bed, a cow or household utensils (Hufton, 67)!. She might have acquired this ‘nest-egg’ (pécule) partly from her parents and partly from her own labour (usually as a domestic servant)!.


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Girls of gentry, got married at the age of 12, a suitor (preferably with lots of money) would have already been picked out and they went into their married with a dowry for the husband!.

Boys got married at the age of 14, because "they took longer to mature"!.

It was mainly the gentry that had arranged marriages, the poor people would marry people they wanted and dowry's weren't really applicable!.

Hope this is sort of what you wanted
:o)Www@QuestionHome@Com

Watch the movie The Other Boleyn Girl!. It takes place in the 1500s and involves the royal family!.

Depending on your social status, your family arranged for you to marry a certain child of another prestigious family at a very young age!.Www@QuestionHome@Com