Pubs, debtors and parties: marriages in London's Fleet Prison and the impact of Hardwicke's Marriage Act
Welcome to the Fleet Prison. In the eighteenth century, it is mostly inhabited by debtors. The prison is a for-profit fee-taking exercise and its fees are some of the highest around. There is the confined, squalor ‘common side’ and there is the more comfortable, rent-paying ‘master’s side’. It is possible to live in the vicinity of the prison, providing you’re paying to cover the keeper’s lost earnings on fees. The area around the prison is technically outside control of authorities and the church jurisdiction so it is subject to general lawlessness referred to as the ‘Rules of the Fleet’.
There are a variety of pubs on offer for the patronage of the imprisoned. An entrepreneurial disgraced clergyman might have offered their services for a small fee to help alleviate their situation. If you meet a clergyman down a Fleet pub, they will provide you with a clandestine marriage. With a large choice of entertainment and music, plenty of food and drink, excellent venues, and as many guests as can fit around the table, these marriages are an excellent choice for a couple who enjoy a party. On top of that, your dodgy clergyman will offer their bespoke services including backdating to cover up an illegitimate child, a wavering of stamp duty, no need for a marriage licence to dispense with banns, and turning a blind eye to the age of consent.
It is hard to get exact numbers (the privacy of these weddings was a selling point) but it is thought over half of marriages in London in the first half of the eighteenth century were Fleet Marriages. However, in 1753 this all changed with Hardwicke's Marriage Act that rendered all such marriages illegal and non-binding. From this point, all marriages must be Anglican, recorded in the local parish register, have parental consent if under the age of 21, and follow the official ceremony.
What was the effect of this Act? Did it leave women vulnerable to abandonment? Did it make any difference at all?
1753 Hardwicke's Marriage Act
Before the Act, promises of marriage were considered to be just as valid as a church ceremony. This meant that, in Eve Tavor Bannet’s view, women who were abandoned after a promise of marriage could make the case that her partner should return to her, a particular security if she was pregnant; after the Act, this was no longer the case.[1] Bannet uses contemporary accounts, like Frances Sheridan's novel Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, 1761, to demonstrate the damaging side of the Act, in this case the division between the generations before and after 1753. Marriage has changed so much that Sidney’s mother cannot give her daughter useful advice. Bannet uses these accounts to show that the legislators’ intentions and the actual effects did not match. They wanted the Act to force men to marry in order to have sex, but instead the number of illegitimate children doubled; they intended to stamp out polygamy, but instead women who followed to old customs, and had sex before ceremonial marriage, became whores. It was a law for economic means, aiming to increase the number of healthy, educated children who could contribute to growing industrialisation. Its side effects were to make women into whores and their children bastards.
Rebecca Probert challenges this argument. To her, the legislators were predominantly concerned about unregulated marriage occurring in the Fleet.[2] Probert criticises Bannet’s use of sources: Sidney Bidulph was set fifty years before the Act and therefore conclusions taken from it have little relevance. In contrast, Probert argues women were not simply victims of marriage disputes but able to sue if a marriage promise was not upheld, showing that previous protections were translated under the context of new law. Furthermore, illegitimacy did increase over the period, but this was the same in other countries and it came alongside a rise in marital fertility; it cannot be solely attributed to the Act. The new strict laws were not there as an injustice but could be bypassed if courts desired to uphold long-term partnerships. Probert says ‘there seems to be a tendency to focus on the way in which laws operate to the detriment of women’, meaning it would be a mistake to only state evidence showing the plight of women before or after the Act.[3]
One of the Act’s intended effects was to make the process of proving a marriage much simpler. The law on this issue had been largely unchanged since the twelfth century. Other countries had updated their laws, such as the 1563 decree by the council of Trent that changed marriage across Catholic Europe, but no such thing happened in Britain.[4] Under the old law, informal marriages caused problems for women: disputes were difficult to solve when it relied on one word against another and pregnant women were not always protected if they were abandoned. Failing to prove a pair was married could leave a pregnant woman without the necessary support for her or her children and to face the societal shame alone. After the 1753 Act, however, each marriage was required to be recorded in the parish register. As many couples hurried to wed before the child was born to avoid illegitimacy, women were protected from the type of abandonment they risked under the previous system.
The 1553 Ecclesiastical Licences Act allowed couples to dispense with banns (a public announcement of the marriage) if they paid for a licence. For many, a public marriage involving banns was undesirable and some went as far as to travel abroad to wed in private.[5] In St Saviour parish, Southwark, banns marriages accounted for less than half by the 1630s and this trend is reflected across the country.[6] Instead, it was preferred to marry privately with a license. In London, couples could marry in the Fleet, thus avoiding additional fees for a licence. A Fleet marriage could provide an informal environment, the possibility of backdating a marriage, a private setting without family involvement and it was a cheaper alternative. For many couples, it was a preferable experience that was taken away after 1754.
Fleet Marriages lacked the regulation and rules of a church wedding, so they were inevitably prone to questionable practices such as one incident described in a 1739 edition of the Whitehall Evening Post: [8]
On Tuesday last, a woman… was there married to a soldier; in the afternoon she came again, and would have been married to a butcher, but that Parson who had married her in the morning refused to marry her again, which put her to the trouble of going a few doors further, to another who had no scruple.
Many Fleet Marriages should not have been valid, but under the law before 1753 they were technically allowed. With few checks, it was possible to remarry while a previous partner was alive and unaware of the proceedings. Furthermore, John Aston describes two men exchanging wives before partaking in an evening of entertainment.[9] This was a concern for parliament who were not only alarmed at the subsequent disputes that made their way into marriage courts, but also the perceived idea that the lower classes were falling into immorality.[10] Once the Act was in place, there was no opportunity to have multiple marriages, exchange partners or anything else that might cause later disagreement. The effect was that London marriages were universally regulated, more secure and easier to record. A disadvantage, however, was that couples could become trapped in an unhappy marriage without a means to find a new partner.
The extent to which people were affected by the 1753 Act depended on their location. When the Act was conceived, it was predominantly in relation to marriages occurring in London, particularly the Fleet. In rural areas, clandestine marriages accounted only for an estimated fourteen per cent at their peak, with the motivations behind them focussing on parental opposition.[11] Furthermore, cohabitation instead of marriage was sometimes advantageous in areas outside of London. For instance, women textile workers could have control over their earnings.[12] Probert and Brown show in their case studies of marriage across Georgian England that the Act affected the location of marriage but not the practice of marriage.[13] After 1754, couples were required to wed in their local parish, meaning travelling for marriage was no longer an option. However, most were complying with the church’s formal marriage requirements by 1753; the exception for this was in London. The Act’s social effects were predominantly felt in London. The rest of the country had been following church requirements and so felt little change after 1753.
For the historian, it is clear that marriage records improved significantly after 1753. This makes the task of compiling marriage statistics and evidence from after 1754 far easier than doing the same for marriages before this date. It could be argued that historians experience the effects of the Act more than many eighteenth-century couples themselves. The Act also affected the legal definition and official process of marriage. The social practice had been shifting for centuries, but it was in 1753 that the law changed to reflect this. With the exception of London, Church of England marriages were the most common and accepted and, when this was not the case, clandestine marriages were very similar to canon law.[14] There were economic incentives for complying with church marriage before 1754, for example, common law courts did not consider a marriage held without a priest valid.[15] Many, therefore, were already following the rules of the Act before its inception. The Act’s marriage requirements were not as strict as they may seem on first glance: Lord Kenyon, contemporary politician and barrister, stated they were ‘merely directory and need not be strictly followed’.[16] Actual marriages practices did not change as dramatically as first assumptions would suggest.
As I concluded in my video, Fleet Marriages and Hardwicke's Marriage Act show that the history of weddings is not as rigidly traditional as we might assume. Marriage was based predominantly on verbal agreements and the actual practice of marriage may have been adapted to suit a couple's needs and preferences. This may lead us to question why marriage today seems to have so many traditional requirements behind it. Was the modern concept of marriage invented in the nineteenth century? How about the 1950s? Do we really need all the frill and formalities or would we be happier getting married in a pub? Is the modern ideal wedding all just down to capitalism?
The impact of Hardwicke's Marriage Act has gathered attention from historians, with arguments ranging from it being a terrible thing for women to it having a positive effect on women's lives to it not having much effect at all. We are in a social climate that is concerned about representing history correctly and, in response, concerned about the subsequent 'rewriting of history'. I bring up different historical interpretations of Hardwicke's Marriage Act to demonstrate that history is only real when it is written and, just like our social expectations of a wedding day, it is constantly evolving and changing. The rewriting of history is nothing to fear because we are rewriting history every day with each lesson, lecture, book and video.
[1] Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘The Marriage Act of 1753: "A Most Cruel Law For The Fair Sex"’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30 (1997), 233-254.
[2] Rebecca Probert, ‘The Impact Of The Marriage Act Of 1753: Was It Really “A Most Cruel Law For The Fair Sex”?’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38 (2005), 247-262
[3] Ibid, p. 259.
[4] Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
[4] Rebecca Probert and Liam D’Arcy Brown, ‘The Impact of the Clandestine Marriages Act: Three Case-Studies in Conformity’, Continuity and Change, 23.02 (2008), 324.
[5] R.B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500-1850 (Ohio: Hambledon Press, 1995), p.129.
[6] Jeremy Boulton, ‘Itching After Private Marryings? Marriage Customs in Seventeenth-Century London’, The London Journal, 16.1 (1991), 25.
[7] Jeremy Boulton, ‘Clandestine Marriages in London: An Examination of a Neglected Urban Variable’, Urban History, 20.02 (1993), 191-210.
[8] Whitehall Evening Post, London, 24 July, 1739.
[9] Quoted from John Ashton, The Fleet: Its River, Prison and Marriages, (London: 1888).
[10] Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.44.
[11] Boulton, 'Clandestine Marriages in London', 202-3.
[12] Hay and Rogers, p. 49.
[13] Probert and Brown, 324.
[14] Probert, Marriage Law and Practice, p.340; Probert and Brown, p. 310.
[15] Probert and Brown, p. 323.
[16] Ibid, p. 257.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Ashton, John, The Fleet: Its River, Prison and Marriages, (London: 1888)
Hill, Bridget, Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology (London: Routledge, 1984)
Whitehall Evening Post, London, 24 July, 1739
Secondary sources
Bannet, Eve Tavor, ‘The Marriage Act of 1753: "A Most Cruel Law For The Fair Sex"’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30 (1997), 233-254
Barclay, Katie, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011)
Boulton, Jeremy, ‘Clandestine Marriages in London: An Examination of a Neglected Urban Variable’, Urban History, 20 (1993), 191-210
Boulton, Jeremy, ‘Itching After Private Marryings? Marriage Customs in Seventeenth-Century London’, The London Journal, 16 (1991), 15-34
Griffin, Emma, ‘A Conundrum Resolved? Rethinking Courtship, Marriage and Population Growth in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 215 (2012), 125-164
Hay, Douglas, and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Probert, Rebecca, ‘The Impact Of The Marriage Act Of 1753: Was It Really “A Most Cruel Law For The Fair Sex”?’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38 (2005), 247-262
Probert, Rebecca, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Probert, Rebecca, and Liam D’Arcy Brown, ‘The Impact of the Clandestine Marriages Act: Three Case-Studies in Conformity’, Continuity and Change, 23 (2008), 309-330
Outhwaite, R.B., Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500-1850 (Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press, 1995)
Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (London: Yale University Press, 1998)