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Archiver > SOG-UK > 1999-01 > 0915455737


From: "Ann & Andy ANDREWS" <>
Subject: Re: [SOG-UK-L] Missing spouses
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1999 13:15:37 -0000


Hello Peter

You might be interested in the following quotation from a book I purchased
from the SoG bookshop called The Labourer 1760 - 1832 by J.L. Hammond and
Barbara Hammond - pub. Alan Sutton, Far Thrupp, Stroud (1995) ISBN
0-7509-0965-X. This is a book combining three previously published volumes.
In The Village Labourer (pub. Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1911), they
discuss the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners 1834 that examines the
community created by the Speenhamland system:

"… there were labourers who actually saved considerable sums out of the
system.
The most obvious and immediate effect was the effect which had been foreseen
without misgiving in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The married man was
employed in preference to the bachelor, and his income rose with the birth
of each child. But there was one thing better than to marry and have a
family, and that was to marry a mother of bastards, for bastards were more
profitable than legitimate children, since the parish guaranteed the
contribution for which the putative father was legally liable. It was easier
to manage with a family than with a single child. As one young woman of
twenty-four with four bastard children put it, 'If she had one more she
should be very comfortable.'² Women with bastard children were thus very
eligible wives. The effect of the whole system on village morals was
striking and widespread, and a witness from a parish which was overwhelmed
with this sudden deluge of population said to the Commission, 'the
eighteen-penny children will eat up this parish in ten years more, unless
some relief be afforded to us'.³ Before this period, if we are to believe
Cobbett, it had been rare for a woman to be with child at the time of her
marriage; in these days of demoralization and distress it became the habit.
" (The Village Labourer , Chapter 10, pp. 228-9)
² Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834 p. 172.
³ Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834 p. 66.

I'd need to look a bit further to find a quote that fits the situation
you've discovered a bit more accurately as it sounds to me as if your lady
was someone's mistress, but the above is interesting nevertheless (I sent it
to the editor of Derbyshire FHS in response to a query, and to my surprise,
it was published in the last journal).

Kind regards

Ann

Web page: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/pd65/
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-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Gardner <>
To: <>
Date: 03 January 1999 19:02
Subject: [SOG-UK-L] lMissing spouses

>I would appreciate opinions on another topic. One of my female ancestors
>appears to have borne no less than four illegitimate children to the same
>named man in the same parish during the period 1790-1803.She herself was
>married and there appears to be only one child of that marriage, baptised
at
>an earlier date. Of the four illegitimate children only the first is
>referred to as a 'bastard child', the remaining three being not so
>stigmatised, according to the baptismal parish records, suggesting that the
>local clergy viewed the situation leniently. Later references to the
>children use the wife's married surname as theirs.
>My interpretation of this is that the mother's lawful husband had vanished
>but since his death had not been confirmed she was not free to remarry. Are
>there other possible explanations? Did the established church then
>acknowlege 'common law' relationships such as this? Could she have been
>'sold' by her husband at a fair (vide Thomas Hardy's Mayor of
Casterbridge),
>and again, was this practice recognised by the church? In the case of a
>missing spouse, under what circumstances or period of time might he/she be
>assumed deceased and the other party be free to re-marry?
>All comments on this topic will be appreciated.
>
>Peter Gardner
>

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