The Golden Princess is 546 pages of uninterrupted prose, covering about two months and one week of Change Year 46. It begins with Orlaith at her father's funeral pyre at sunset on the last day of a month and I begin to read with interest...
Monday 4 September 2017
A Partial Parallel And A New Beginning
The Golden Princess is 546 pages of uninterrupted prose, covering about two months and one week of Change Year 46. It begins with Orlaith at her father's funeral pyre at sunset on the last day of a month and I begin to read with interest...
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7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
One thing that puzzled me is why Montival set the age for when a king or queen can assume full powers at 25. That's far older than what most monarchies chose. The age of a sovereign's majority ranged from as low as age 13 to 21. I know UK law fixed the age of majority at 18. So age 25 seems rather "elderly."
Sean
It's the age at which people stop undergoing radical physical and neurological changes, for the most part. The brain is radically rewired at puberty, and doesn't settle down until after the mid-twenties. It's also, in Western culture, the commonest age to get married and start a family, the markers of genuine adulthood.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Thanks for explaining why you had Montival fixing age 25 as the sovereign's majority. Yes, what you said does make sense--even tho 25 still seems a bit "elderly."
But most monarchies seem to favor either age 18 or 21 as the age of majority today. Also, in the past there were many times and places when people married long before age 25. I recall reading of how, in pre Potato Blight Famine Ireland, the Church had to struggle to persuade the Irish to not marry TOO soon. Many were marrying before the minimum ages set by canon law, 16 for males and 14 for females.
Sean
Yeah, it varies widely.
However, -on average- west and northern Europeans rarely married before their late teens, and usually in their mid-twenties. This was the average age in Shakespeare's time in England, for example; about 25 for women, a year or two later for men. By the 1680's, it had risen to around 27 for women and 30 or so for men.
The basic reason was what amounted to a taboo against having two married couples of childbearing age living under the same roof and in the same household.
To get married, you had to have an 'independency' -- a trade, a farm, something of that nature. It might be very modest, but it meant you had your own dwelling and hearth.
Generally speaking, live-in 'servants' -- people in full-time direct employment by someone else, farmworkers and apprentices and so forth -- didn't marry at all as long as they remained in that status and would never be considered adults, and would always be addressed as "boy" or the equivalent.
The poorer you were, the longer it took to accumulate the necessary resources to have your own hearth; longer still in bad times. Conversely, the richer your family, the earlier you married.
Since extra-marital pregnancy was extremely rare (and usually a sentence of death for the child) this meant that the number of children people had was sharply limited, especially in difficult times; usually about 4 was average, of which slightly more than 2 on average would live to adulthood. It was a homeostatic mechanism that tended to adjust population to resources. So did the fact that cities, to which a substantial proportion of each generation migrated, had net negative population growth of 3% or more -- usually several burials for every baptism.
A substantial number of people never did marry; usually around 10%, though in late Stuart times it rose to 25%, and the population of England actually declined through a surplus of deaths over births between the 1680's and the 1720's.
Behavior in the American colonies, where food and land were cheap and wages high, was very different -- the English colonists there bred like rabbits, since marriage was nearly universal and much earlier than in the homeland.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, many thanks for your comments. I agree, there were PRACTICAL reasons why western/northern Europeans married fairly late. The poorer you were, the less likely you would get an "independency," etc. Yes, there were exceptions, like pre-Famine Ireland and the English colonies.
Sean
In pre-Famine Ireland, it was relatively easy to become a "sub-tenant"; not a tenant farmer, but a laborer renting a small piece of ground for a cottage and a potato-patch. It was "cottars" like these and landless men and their families who died in the Famine, mostly -- few people renting actual farms died of hunger. People a little higher scraped together enough money to get out of Ireland, to mainland Britain or across the Atlantic.
The predominance of peasants in the Irish population is a product of the Famine; so is the habit of very late marriage, and the high percentage of never-married individuals, whether becoming celibate religious or just hanging on and never marrying.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
All of what you wrote fits in with what I read elsewhere, except the bit about "sub-tenants." Perhaps the agitation I read about tenants demanding greater security of tenancies were from sub-tenants.
Sean
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