Some Reflections on the Evidence for the Origins of the `European Marriage Pattern' in England.

The article reports on the evidence for the origin of the European Marriage Pattern in England. Societies displaying this trait had to possess two basic characteristic Marriage Patterns in their marriage behavior. Firstly, marriage among both men and women must take place at a relatively advanced age (26-27 years or more for males and 23-24 years or more for females). Secondly, a considerable proportion of persons have to remain definitively celibate (among women aged 45-49, 10 to 15 per cent would have remained unmarried). John Hajnal argued that this marriage pattern was and is still only encountered in the societies of Western Europe. Hajnal did not offer a precise moment of appearance for this pattern and his comments on the matrimonial comportment of the medieval period were prudently cautious. However, he was inclined to see a major change in behavior in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. When Hajnal tentatively proposed the existence in medieval England of a non-European marriage pattern he was basing his statements upon two sets of evidence; the calculations of marriage ages of the English peerage and the proportions married in certain published data.