The discrepancy in age in the ballad quoted by Guest may not have been as much as one would have imagined when one considers that boys as young as ten were packed of to sea and that girls as young as twelve were considered to be of marriagable age. Indeed a Duchess of Northumberland, in her own right, was wedded and bedded at the age of twelve by a fortune hunter aged 53 in the late 18th.C.,it being noted that this was no runaway marriage.