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Marriageable age (or marriage age) is the age at which a person is allowed by law to marry, either as a right or subject to parental or other forms of consent. Age and other prerequisites to marriage vary between jurisdictions, but generally is set at eighteen. Until recently, the marriageable age for girls was lower in many jurisdictions than for boys, but in many places has now been raised to those of boys to further gender equality. Most jurisdictions allow marriage at a younger age with parental or judicial approval, and some also allow younger people to marry if the girl is pregnant. The marriage age should not be confused with the age of majority or the age of consent, though in some places they may be the same. In many developing countries, the official age prescriptions stand as mere guidelines. In some societies, a marriage by a person (usually a girl) below the age of 18 is regarded as a child marriage. The 55 parties to the 1962 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages have agreed to specify a minimum marriage age by statute law‚ to override customary, religious, and tribal laws. When the marriageable age under a law of a religious community is lower than that under the law of the land, the state law prevails. However, some religious communities do not accept the supremacy of state law in this respect, which may lead to child marriage or forced marriage. The 123 parties to the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery have agreed to adopt a minimum age for marriage. ==History and social attitudes== Historically, the age of consent for a sexual union was determined by tribal custom or was a matter for families to decide. In most cases, this coincided with signs of puberty: menstruation for a girl and pubic hair for a boy.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society )〕 In Ancient Rome, it was very common for girls to marry and have children shortly after the onset of puberty. Roman law required brides to be at least 12 years old. In Roman law, first marriages to brides aged 12 through 24 required the consent of the bride and her father; but, by the late antique period, Roman law permitted women over 25 to marry without parental consent.〔Anti Arjava, ''Women and Law in Late Antiquity'' Oxford, 1996, pp. 29–37.〕 The Catholic canon law followed the Roman law. In the 12th century, the Catholic Church drastically changed legal standards for marital consent by allowing daughters over 12 and sons over 14 to marry without their parents' approval, even if their marriage was made clandestinely.〔John Noonan, "The Power to Choose" '' Viator'' 4 (1973) 419–34.〕 Parish studies have confirmed that late medieval women did sometimes marry against their parents' approval.〔J. Sheehan, "The formation and stability of marriage in fourteenth century England" ''Medieval Studies'' 33 (1971) 228–63.〕 The Catholic Church's policy of considering clandestine marriages and marriages made without parental consent to be valid was controversial, and in the 16th century both the French monarchy and the Lutheran church sought to end these practices, with limited success.〔Beatrice Gottlieb, ''The family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age'' Oxford, 1993, pp. 55–56.〕 In western Europe, the rise of Christianity and manorialism had both created incentives to keep families nuclear and thus the age of marriage increased; the Western Church instituted marriage laws and practices that undermined large kinship groups. From as early as the 4th century, the Church discouraged any practice that enlarged the family, like adoption, polygamy, taking concubines, divorce, and remarriage. The Church severely discouraged and prohibited consanguineous marriages, a marriage pattern that has constituted a means to maintain clans (and thus their power) throughout history.〔Bouchard, Constance B., 'Consanguinity and Noble Marriages in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries', ''Speculum'', Vol. 56, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp. 269-70〕 The church also forbade marriages in which the bride did not clearly agree to the union. After the Fall of Rome, manorialism also helped weaken the ties of kinship and thus the power of clans; as early as the 9th century in northwestern France, families that worked on manors were small, consisting of parents and children and occasionally a grandparent. The Church and State had become allies in erasing the solidarity and thus the political power of the clans; the Church sought to replace traditional religion, whose vehicle was the kin group, and substituting the authority of the elders of the kin group with that of a religious elder; at the same time, the king’s rule was undermined by revolts on the part of the most powerful kin groups, clans or sections, whose conspiracies and murders threatened the power of the state and also the demand of manorial lords for obedient, compliant workers.〔Heather, Peter. 1999. ''The Visigoths from the Migration Period to the Seventh Century: An Ethnographic Perspective''. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. Pgs 142-148〕 As the peasants and serfs lived and worked on farms that they rented from the lord of the manor, they also needed the permission of the lord to marry, couples therefore had to comply with the lord and wait until a small farm became available before they could marry and thus produce children; those who could and did delay marriage presumably were rewarded by the landlord and those who did not were presumably denied said reward.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=medieval manoralism and the hajnal line )〕 For example, Medieval England saw the marriage age as variable depending on economic circumstances, with couples delaying marriage until the early twenties when times were bad and falling to the late teens after the Black Death, when there were labor shortages;〔Hanawalt, Barbara A. 1986. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England Oxford University Press, Inc. Pg 96〕 by appearances, marriage of adolescents was not the norm in England.〔Hanawalt, p. 98-100〕 In medieval Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the Slavic traditions of patrilocality of early and universal marriage (usually of a bride aged 12–15 years, with menarche occurring on average at 14) lingered;〔Levin, Eve. 1995. ''Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700''. Cornell University Press. pgs 96-98〕 the manorial system had yet to penetrate into eastern Europe and had generally had less effect on clan systems there and the bans on cross-cousin marriages had not been firmly enforced.〔Mitterauer, Michael. 2010. ''Why Europe?: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path''. University of Chicago Press. Pg. 45-48, 77〕 The first recorded age-of-consent law dates back 800 years. In 1275, in England, as part of the rape law, a statute, Westminster 1, made it a misdemeanor to "ravish" a "maiden within age", whether with or without her consent. The phrase "within age" was interpreted by jurist Sir Edward Coke as meaning the age of marriage, which at the time was 12 years of age. In the 12th century, the jurist Gratian, an influential founder of Canon law in medieval Europe, accepted the age of puberty for marriage to be between 12 and 14, but acknowledged consent to be meaningful if the children were older than 7. There were authorities with a claim that consent could take place earlier. Marriage would then be valid as long as neither of the two parties annulled the marital agreement before reaching puberty, or if they had already consummated the marriage. It should be noted that Judges honored marriages based on mutual consent at ages younger than 7, in spite of what Gratian had said; there are recorded marriages of 2 and 3 year olds.〔 Still, in most of Northwestern Europe, marriage at very early ages was rare. One thousand marriage certificates from 1619 to 1660 in the Archdiocese of Canterbury show that only one bride was 13 years of age, four were 15, twelve were 16, and seventeen were 17 years of age while the other 966 brides were at least 19 years of age at marriage. And the Church dictated that both the bride and groom must be at least 21 years of age to marry without the consent of their families; in the certificates, the most common age for the brides is 22 years. For the grooms 24 years is the most common age, with average ages of 24 years for the brides and 27 for the grooms.〔Laslett, Peter. 1965. The World We Have Lost. New York, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. p 82〕 While European noblewomen married early, they were a small minority〔Coontz, Stephanie. 2005. Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York, New York: Viking Press, Penguin Group Inc. p 125-129.〕 and the marriage certificates from Canterbury show that even among nobility it was very rare to marry women off at very early ages.〔 The American colonies followed the English tradition, but the law was more of a guide. For example, Mary Hathaway (Virginia, 1689) was only 9 when she was married to William Williams. Sir Edward Coke (England, 17th century) made it clear that "the marriage of girls under 12 was normal, and the age at which a girl who was a wife was eligible for a dower from her husband's estate was 9 even though her husband be only four years old".〔 Reliable data for when people would actually marry are very difficult to find. In England, for example, the only reliable data on age at marriage in the early modern period come from records that involved only those who left property after their death. Not only were the records relatively rare, but not all bothered to record the participants' ages, and it seemed that the more complete the records are, the more likely they are to reveal young marriages. Additionally, 20th- and 21st-century historians have sometimes shown reluctance to accept data regarding a young age of marriage, and would instead explain the data away as a misreading by a later copier of the records.〔 In France, until the French Revolution, the marriageable age was 12 years for girls and 14 for boys. Revolutionary legislation in 1792 increased the age to 13 years for girls and 15 for boys. Under the Napoleonic Code in 1804, the marriageable age was set at 15 years for girls and 18 for boys.〔Art. 144 of the Civil Code〕 In 2006, the marriageable age for girls was increased to 18, the same as for boys. In jurisdictions where the ages are not the same, the marriageable age for girls is more commonly two or three years lower than that for boys. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Marriageable age」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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