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Archiver > SUFFOLK > 2004-11 > 1099519632


From: "Lyn Boothman" <>
Subject: RE: [SFK-UK] "Marriage" in England pre-Hardwicke's Marriage Act
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 22:07:12 -0000
In-Reply-To: <007301c4bd49$1b4b52c0$a4ea8351@ezpc>


Charles

In the pre-reformation period and beyond the important thing was that two
people had agreed to marry. Once this happened they were betrothed and if
one of them went back on the decision, the other could take them to the
church court and try and enforce the betrothal.

If everyone had got married in church and paid the fees, the Marriage Act
wouldn't have been necessary. There were clandestine marriages, and people
who didn't officially marry at all, and therefore didn't have to pay the fee
to have the marriage entered in the register, or have any of the other costs
of marriage in church.

I suspect, with no proof whatsoever, that if you were intending to live in a
parish where you were known, you probably got married 'properly', but if you
wanted to avoid the costs you might move elsewhere - especially before
settlement became important.

On a related topic, although it was the later seventeenth century before
fees for registrations were introduced by law, I know that at least some
parishes charged for having the baptisms, marriages and burials put in the
register. In Long Melford in the 1660s-1670s the rector notes that he had
registered paupers' deaths, although the overseers were not prepared to pay
the fees. If that refusal was common, but the rector's decision was not,
that might explain all sorts of absent records.

Lyn B






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