-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT p. 341.
I think that Carl means "...in most earlier eras..."
Children or teenagers who come to the rescue or save the day on frontiers or in other milieus where adult responsibilities must be shouldered early are a staple feature of juvenile fiction, I think. See Escape The Morning. However, this young man has only a spear-carrying role - metaphorically speaking, of course. Carl has just returned from an era when young men did wield and use spears.
The duty officer works only in his own period. Carl visits only the periods that he studies or when he consults his superiors. Only the Unattached may go anywhen. But Carl and the duty officer can have "...vacations in mighty exotic milieus." (p. 345)
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
A nice, easily overlooked touch by Anderson, showing us how Carl had to kind of "mentally readjust" himself as he left the fourth century AD to this far later era. Yes, in most earlier eras most men and women would have been married by age 14 or 15.
I recall reading of how the Catholic Church, in pre-Famine Ireland, tried to discourage the Irish from marrying TOO soon, to at least wait till reaching the minimum ages for a valid marriage set by canon law. Which was 14 for women, 16 for men.
Sean
Actually, that's "people got married at 14" thing is simply not true.
In point of fact, in most cultures marriage doesn't take place until well after puberty -- usually at least 3 years. It's violently unsafe for women to have children before then; the skeletal adjustments of maturity aren't complete and it increases maternal and infant mortality rates quite drastically.
As for NW Europe, in most eras -- as far back as we have any data, which means well into the medieval period -- the average age of marriage was about the same as now.
Mid-20's for women, a year or two later for men, a few people marrying in their teens, lots not married until after 30.
In that area aristocrats and rich people married earlier, and had larger families, though marriages weren't usually consummated until at a minimum the late teens, something that was often written into marriage contracts. In those circles the groom was usually substantially older than the bride but that wasn't the pattern further down the scale, where a difference of 1-3 years was more typical.
Ordinary people delayed marriage for about 10 years after puberty basically because:
a) there was a taboo against two sexually active married couples under the same roof, and
b) it took that long to establish your own "hearth" for most people.
The typical pattern was for most people who weren't heirs to land or an established trade to leave home in their mid-teens as servants or apprentices, work for about a decade to build up skills and some savings, and then marry when they had their own place and trade (a farm, a workshop, or something of that order). This pattern extended fairly far up the social scale, into what we'd consider the middle classes.
Really poor people didn't marry at all, and usually died (at least technically) 'virgo intacta' and childless.
The percentage of never-married people was generally about 10% and sometimes (in late Stuart England, for example) hit 25%. The population of England was declining at that time, by the way.
This system functioned as an automatic population-control mechanism. Illegitimate births were quite rare, and usually didn't survive (the death rate in "foundling hospitals" where bastard children were often left was over 90%).
So if times were hard, people had to delay marriage, more people never married at all, and the birth-rate fell and population growth slowed or went into reverse.
When times improved, marriage became more common and a bit earlier, and population growth picked up.
This is why British settlers in the American colonies married younger and more often and population growth was three or more times faster: land was cheap and relatively easy to get, food was cheap, wages were high. (And death rates from disease were lower due to better nutrition and more dispersed living patterns.) Women in colonial America usually married at 20-24, two to four years earlier than their English relatives.
Typically women had their first child within a year of marrying and then had more at 2-year intervals until menopause or natural infertility set in. Some families in Europe were very large, but 4-5 was typical, with 2-3 surviving to adulthood. Couples with no children or one or two were fairly common.
So the eldest child usually married about the time their father died of natural causes, which typically happened between the mid-50's and mid-60's. Some people lived past 70, but it was unusual except in special circumstances (colonial New England, for instance.)
18th and early 19th-century Ireland had somewhat higher nuptially rates and rather lower average ages at marriage than England, because it was easier to sub-lease land -- get a small acreage on a secondary lease from a tenant farmer in return for providing labor -- and grow potatoes on it.
I want to thank Poul Anderson for initiating these discussions and the commentators for contributing heir historical knowledge.
Demographic history is a fairly new field -- didn't really get started until the 70's.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Many thanks for your explanation of demographics and the practicalities of marriage.
I am confident of your greater knowledge in these matters and accept your explanation.
Sean
Incidentally, in the pre-Famine period ordinary Irish people were taller and healthier, though poorer, than their English equivalents. The Irish poor lived on potatoes and skim milk, basically, with some oatmeal; usually food they raised themselves on some scrap of sub-leased land.
Until the potato blight, this was a much healthier diet than the English poor, who basically ate white bread and a little cheese and bacon, all bought for cash from bakers and shops; they generally couldn't afford butter or other dairy products, or fresh milk. They were short, skinny, runty, often afflicted with rickets (over 90% in some areas) and skin diseases and had terrible teeth.
The English countryside was much more tightly controlled and commercialized and subsistence farming was much rarer -- growing your own food did happen, but mostly by yeoman farmers like my father's maternal relatives, who were big and muscular and healthy because of a good diet and clean spring water, combined with lots of healthy exercise and outdoor living. People in that situation were a small minority, though.
Ordinary people had to buy, and wages were miserably low.
And of course England was much more urbanized, and urban food supplies were terrible -- rotten and adulterated with toxic cover-up materials, milk from 'urban dairies' in basements with the cows hock-deep in filth, bread full of chalk and alum, vegetables dosed with copper salts and such to make them look fresh, 'old' fish, meat from animals that died of disease. You couldn't buy really sound produce in London at any price below 'price is no object'.
Even affluent town-dwellers in Victorian times had problems getting a decent quality of food, and rich ones usually had their food 'sent up' from the home-farms of their own county estates for precisely this reason. The Industrial Revolution produced an urban country before there were the technological or social mechanisms to supply a tolerable food supply for anything but a small country town close to its countryside. Water was usually tainted too.
The English poor had better housing and more consumer goods than impoverished Irish folk -- not hard, since this was a very low bar -- but poorer health.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And I remember Adam Smith making similar comments about the Irish and their diet in THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.
It does make me wonder, COULD the terrible conditions among so many of the English had been avoided if the Industrial Revolution had advanced more slowly? That might have given society time for catching up with the consequences of the new technology. Ditto if it had started earlier, as we see in Poul Anderson's A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST.
Sean
Well, the population was rising quickly. Previously, when the population of what's now England hit more than about 5 million, there was a Malthusian catastrophe, like the post-Roman one or one in the 14th century, where the population dropped by 60% due to famine and disease.
Agricultural yields in England grew very quickly in the period, particularly after about 1750, as better methods spread and agriculture was reorganized via enclosure.
But they only just barely kept up with the increasing population, and the shift away from farming work. England only really became adequately fed after imports (paid for by exported goods and financial services) started flooding in from the extra-European world in the 1870's; it wasn't until after 1945 that malnutrition from sheer lack of calories was finally eliminated.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Then I have to conclude the island of Great Britain was simply too SMALL to adequately feed from its own land the massive increase in population we started seeing in the 1700s. At least not till Britain was able to use exports and financial services to pay for imports of food.
Sean
Sean: that's about right. Though later use of artificial fertilizers and hybrid seeds changed matters again.
There was a "gentler" Malthusian check in the 1600's -- population grew rapidly throughout the Tudor period, after the low point of the mid-1400's.
Then in the late 1500's, famines started up again in bad years.
The response included mass emigration to Ireland, the Caribbean and North America, delayed marriage, and a very high rate of never-married women, hitting 25% in the mid to late 1600's, along with increased commercialization of agriculture (so food was shifted around internally more in response to regional shortages), and things like substituting coal for wood as a domestic heating fuel, which reduced the need for food and opened up more land for cultivation.
A number of new farming methods were also pioneered, though most of them weren't widely spread until generations later.
So population growth slowed and then, by the 1660's, went into reverse(*) -- population coasted down very slowly until the 1720's or 1730's.
By that time England was actually a major grain exporter, but that vanished as population growth picked up again.
The big difference was that it didn't hit the barrier and stop this time; instead it rose to an all-time peak by the 1810's and 1820's, and then stayed very high until the end of the 19th century.
Food production and imports kept pace, but only just, for most of that period. By the 1830's England was feeding nearly twice the population it ever had before.
But there was a -lot- of unmet demand.
In 1914, the sons of members of the House of Lords averaged 4-6 inches taller than the sons of the lower working class, and 40 pounds heavier.
(*) everything's connected: the growth of the African slave trade into the Chesapeake colonies was directly related to the fall in the supply and the increase in the cost of English indentured laborers.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, thanks for your explanations on British demographics and economics. You reminded me about the controversy over the "Corn Laws," statutes trying to prohibit the importing of foreign grown grain. So British grain growers could demand higher prices. I think these laws did little harm as long as Britain was actually exporting grain--but the rapid growth in population after about 1735 reversed that. The Corn Laws became more and more unpopular and blamed for making food dearer than it had to be.
Sean
Post a Comment