Love and marriage, so the song says, go together like a horse and carriage. But it wasn’t always so.
From the modern perspective, love is the most common reason cited by Westerners for getting married (or, more commonly today, cohabiting). But the modern West is a quite peculiar place by the standards of much of the human race, especially in the past. While we regard arranged marriages with horror, they were, not so long ago, more the rule than the exception.
As for love, that’s in many ways a modern luxury.
At the most basic level, love was limited by geography. In early modern Europe, the royalty and upper aristocracy sometimes courted and married across great distances, but the romantic range for the vast majority of people was as far as they could walk or ride. In his book, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, the English Historian Laurence Stone notes that in 17th century England, almost eighty percent of local gentry married someone in their own county. Among the peasantry, ninety percent married within a ten-mile radius.
Somewhat peculiarly, though, it was the poor who often had the most choice in marriage partners.
If wealthy parents did not select their child’s spouse outright, they would at least retain veto power over the relationship. The poorer the family, the less property the parents had “to withhold as a threat” if their children chose an unacceptable mate.
When choosing their child’s partner, wealthy parents, especially aristocratic ones, usually sidelined love and affection in favor of social and economic gain. In the marriage between Jemima Montagu and Philip Carteret, which Stone describes as “typical,” the two aristocratic families accepted the marriage and ironed out the financial details before even notifying the bride.
Love and marriage were particularly onerous for women. Women were the legal property of their husbands — the final stage of a lifetime of drudgery. Working-class women were the servants of, first their parents, then maybe an employer, and, finally, their husbands.
As for the “love” part — it was hardly the stuff of romantic dreams.
Regardless of the social circumstance, the physical side of love was, for the most part, dirty (in a bad way) and dangerous.
First of all, there was no privacy […] The poor often had to share a bed with two or three other people, leading to some awkward situations. Court records from Elizabethan-era Essex “turn up evidence of a man having intercourse with a girl while her sister was in the same bed and of a case in which the girl’s mother was in the same bed.”
Then there was the matter of hygiene — or lack thereof.
Hygiene was terrible across all social classes, and among the poor, it was atrocious. Soap was too expensive to use regularly, and decent sanitation was basically non-existent. Stone writes that in 19th century Rennes, “there was a population of seventy thousand, but only two houses with bathrooms, and only thirty public bathhouses.”
In modern France, that’s improved… marginally. According to a 1998 survey, only 47% of French shower or bathe daily (although French health authorities pointed out that national soap consumption was half what that sort of frequency would indicate). In the same year, only 60% of French men and 75% of French women said they put on clean underwear every day.
But if potential lovers were dirty and smelly, they were quite likely packing a lot worse than a bit of a pong in their pants.
Using an 18th century English census, researchers at the University of Cambridge estimate that around eight percent of the population of Chester, a small English city, was treated for syphilis before the age of 35. In London, over twenty percent may have sought treatment. By all accounts, syphilis was common, and gonorrhea was rampant. The (admittedly libertine) Scottish biographer James Boswell (1740-1795) contracted gonorrhea at least nineteen times.
Human Progress
I’m almost impressed.
As H. G. Wells once said, anyone who waxes romantic about “the good old days” would change their mind as soon as they got their first toothache. Or that strange new itch in their undies.