Medieval children transitioned into adulthood with growing responsibility in their profession or with marriage. Girls, as always, married earlier, so we’ll start with marriage from the girl’s point of view.
Aristocratic girls could be betrothed or married at very young ages, so as to keep their destiny secure in case of the father’s death. Royal girls were actually married as “adults” as young as 12. The four daughters of the Count of Provence (Raymond IV) all married French or English royalty when they were between the ages of 12 and 16; their betrothal negotiations began as young as 10. But poorer girls did not marry so young. Even at that time, people were aware that bearing children was safer in later teen years. So marriage was typically between 16 and 20, for girls, though it varied widely with time and place.
There was one really key issue for girls: dowry. When we talk of dowries today, we think of contemporary India where the dowry is a burden on families of girls and makes the girls seem less valuable in themselves. But in history, dowries were the family’s way of ensuring that a girl would not be mistreated. First, when relative strangers marry, they view each other according to social status. When a girl came into a new extended family with solid social status, they were less likely to pick on her. Second, at some points in history, girls were permitted to take their dowries back home if they could prove that their husbands were abusive. The dowry was the husband’s property, but only provisionally. Separation and divorce were extremely uncommon in medieval Europe, so the dowry was rarely used this way, but the marriage contract sometimes provided that the girl’s dowry stayed with her in the event of widowhood. So dowry requirements could be real burdens on a family, but they were also viewed as part of ensuring the girl’s future well-being.
The young man’s family was expected to bestow property on the couple, too, and this was called the dower. (We’re probably seeing the Indo-European root “da” for “give” here, also used in “endowment.”) Marriage negotiations could be carried out with several prospective brides and grooms at the same time, since they were blatantly contract negotiations. Again, we can look down on this process, but if a girl’s family could pull together a neat enough dowry to merit a dower offer of a small farm with a real stone house, the girl was more likely to survive into old age with a warm house and an adequate diet. The stakes were high.
Even poor girls brought something into the marriage. There are records of betrothal agreements that record dowries consisting of a set of sheets and a copper pot. If that’s what the family could give her, that’s what she had. At the very bottom would be girls who could only be given a set of pewter spoons; at the top were girls who brought with them manors and farms.
In this system, love meant the way you treated someone. A girl could promise to love her husband without knowing him because it meant that she would keep his secrets, cook his food, and make sure he got basic medical care if he was sick or injured. The man’s promise to love was similarly pragmatic. In an unsentimental time when most marriages ended a few years later with death, the stakes were high, but the expectations were low. Happiness was staying alive.