Writing the Middle Ages

I didn’t start this blog to write about writing, but I thought it might be interesting to discuss some of the difficulties of writing historical romances set in the Middle Ages when you want to get the details as accurate as possible.

One of the main problems is the ages of the protagonists. I have usually taken the easy way out and made them older than they would have been in the fourteenth century, although I’ve been vague about the heroine’s age in a couple of cases.

Most women of the class and status I write about would have been betrothed at a young age. Recently I read about a noblewoman who was betrothed at the age of three. Her husband was of a similar age. The marriage would not have been consummated until she was fourteen or fifteen, but that seems to be unacceptably young for the heroine of a romantic novel.

In order not to offend sensibilities my female protagonists tend to be in their late teens or early 20s and the males in their early to late 20s.

This is old for the Middle Ages. Many women had had two or more children by then. Edward III’s wife, Queen Philippa, was a few days short of 16 when she had her first child. I’ve just started reading a book by Christine de Pizan who was married at the age of 15 in 1379. By the time she was widowed ten years later she’d had three children.

When the heroines are older than they should be I have the problem of explaining why they’re not already married.

In a couple of the novels the heroine’s father has used her dowry for something else and she grows older without a husband. Two were betrothed before the start of the novels, but the betrothed husbands went off to fight for a couple of years. One of them was betrothed as a young teenager and more or less abandoned by her much older husband before the marriage could be consummated. The other was betrothed to a man she loved who died in France, allowing her to fall (gradually) in love with another man.

One of my heroines is a nun, removed from her convent just before she can take her vows, and one of them lives as a man. I’m not quite running out of ways to explain away the heroines’ single status when they’re past marriageable age, but it’s something to be considered with each novel.

With the men there is less of a problem. Unless they were the oldest son and going to inherit everything from their father, fourteenth-century men had to find some way of securing enough money to buy property so that they could marry. This would take time.