On November 24, 1615, French King Louis XIII married Ann of Austria. They were both fourteen years old. Many non-historians have pointed to the relatively young age of some of the royal weddings to insisted that everyone was getting married at a young age prior to the 1950s, especially for girls. That just isn’t true. Death and marriage records out of England and France since the 1500s have shown that the average age of the first marriage for young women who weren’t nobility, was between 20 to 24 years of age. Apparently fathers and mothers of the working class loved their daughters even back then and knew that getting pregnant after 20 years of age increased their chances to survive childbirthing. Facts; busting common myths that everyone knows to be true.
It’s almost an inversion of the myth that each generation of humans is “worse” than the last (spoiler: they’re not) and that the era of your childhood is objectively “better” than the ones before and after (spoiler: it isn’t). Share this post to protest that music/movies/TV from your era really WAS better.