Hi all! I'm writing a story set in a Puritan town in the 1600s. In it, there is an arranged marriage and an attempt at arranged marriage. The actual marriage is for the sake of merging property and businesses between two families, the bride is 14 and the groom is 18. In the second scenario, a father in ill health is trying to get his daughter married before he dies. I've researched how realistic these two situations would be, and I've come across conflicting information. On one hand I've read that Puritans married for love and didn't arrange marriages, but I've also read that parents picked out spouses but encouraged their children to fall in love with the chosen spouse. I also found that the average age of marriage for Puritans was in the early to mid-twenties range. My questions are as follows: 1. Which set of information is closest to the truth? 2. Assuming arranged marriages and marriages with a very young bride were extremely uncommon, would the extenuating circumstances in the story (the father's illness and fear that he'll die and leave his daughter vulnerable/financially struggling, and the desire to merge assets in the other case) make the situations believable? Thanks in advance for any answers!
Hi there - we're happy to approve your question related to your novel, and we are happy for people to answer. However, we should warn you that many flairs have become reluctant to answer questions for aspiring novelists, based on past experience: some aspiring novelists have a tendency to try to pump historians for trivia while ignoring the bigger points they were making, while others have a tendency to argue with historians when the historical reality does not line up with what's needed for a particular scene or characterization. Please respect the answers of people who have generously given you their time, even if it's not always what you want to hear.
Additionally, as amazing as our flair panel is, we should also point out that /r/AskHistorians is not a professional historical consultation service. If you're asking a question here because you need vital research for a future commercial product such as a historical novel, you may be better off engaging a historical consultant at a fair hourly rate to answer these questions for you. We don't know what the going rate for consultancy work would be in your locality, but it may be worth looking into that if you have in-depth or highly plot-reliant questions for this project. Some /r/AskHistorians flairs could be receptive to working as a consultant in this way. However, if you wish for a flair here to do this work for you, you will need to organize this with them yourselves.
I think it would be helpful for you to read David Cressy’s Birth, Marriage, and Death. A woman technically could be married at the age of 14, but that would be extremely uncommon—generally only aristocrats would marry at such young ages, and often in such a case the marriage wouldn’t be consummated for a while. As you say, it was most common for people to marry in their twenties (especially for the man, who was supposed to be able to establish his own household before marrying). I would think a dying father would be much more likely to appoint someone to be his child’s guardian until she was married or came of age. In terms of arranging a marriage to settle property, parents might encourage a particular match on the grounds that it would be financially prudent, but actually forcing someone to marry against his or her will would be considered abhorrent.
I'm going to gently suggest that instead of trying to fit historical circumstances to your plot, you instead try to learn more about how 17th-century society in New England functioned, then build your plot around that.
I assume you are setting your story in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, rather than in the the Carribean or in Britain?
I'd like to suggest you read the relevant chapters in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which is one of the most definitive guides to the social customs of English settler colonies in 17th and 18th century North America.
Overall, I think the scenario you are suggesting is fairly unrealistic.
For one thing, in mid-to-late 17th century Massachusetts, mean age at first marriage for women was somewhere around 20.5 years old, and for men was somewhere around 25 years old. So the age your are suggesting for both the bride and groom are several years too young.
Second, if a father was concerned about leaving assets for the support of his underage daughter, he would be much more likely to set up a type of legal trust, to grant her access to the property when she turns 18, and make arrangements for her to live with relatives or family friends.
Furthermore, I cannot overemphasize how unusual it would be for a woman in 17th-century New England to be married before the age of 16. It would seem almost as profoundly weird to them as to us.
Again I encourage you to read both Fischer's Albion's Seed (1989) and maybe also Taylor and Crandall's edited volume Generations and Change: Genealogical Perspectives in Social History (1986).
Please do not hesitate to ask if you have any other questions.