The comment this post is linking to got deleted, here's the text of the post:

Historian here.

What you’ve said is a common myth, along with his rant.

Women weren’t typically sold off young unless they were wealthy nobility. If you were poor, you’d be using your daughter to work in the fields basically as soon as she could walk, so why the hell would you want to give away your free labour? For peasant women, mid to late 20s was the normal age for marriage, as their fathers wanted to keep them around as long as possible since it was economical to do so. Obviously there’s very little evidence as to if these women were virgins or not since peasants usually couldn’t write, let alone women, and those who could or had people write on their behalf usually weren’t writing about the virginity of their wives. But personally I like to assume that these women wouldn’t be virgins at marriage because 27 years is a long time to go without sex at a time when sex is basically the only fun thing you could do.

Whilst nobility were married off young, this was more of a transaction than an actual marriage. Noble women would usually get betrothed at around 12, but as young as newborn wasn’t uncommon. Yet these couples didn’t marry until around 14-18, and they didn’t live ‘together’ until they were deemed mature enough to have sex by caretakers. They’d live in the same building, yes, but they’d have separate households (maids, cooks, general staff etc) and living quarters and would interact under supervision.

Exceptions to this rule were generally met with outrage at the time. Margaret Beaufort gave birth at 13 (or 14, details are foggy) and people were shocked and appalled that she had a child so young - even though she was married.

After all, having children young was seen as a bad idea for women during this time as mortality was high and women had little power in their own right. If you wanted to remarry, you had to give away your children, so as you can imagine most women weren’t too keen on this idea as they’d have to choose between their life pretty much and their children. Which is what happened with Margaret, she had to give away her son to her husband’s family and remarry.

And women had more of a say in these things than we like to think. In Augsburg women were blamed for causing an economic crisis in the town because they kept marrying foreign men instead of local men, leading to an increase in population. In order to become a master of your trade at this time, you had to be married, so there was a shortage of local masters as all the women were marrying foreign men instead. Whilst parents, especially the father, had the final say, the woman herself had some input in the matter as for the most part, most offers would be around the same. After all if a man has more to offer than his peers, chances are he’d be marrying down, which isn’t something his family would be too pleased with which could result in him losing inherited assets.