In the early 1740s, when gin drinking was out of control, there were twice as many burials as baptisms in London; and ‘can it be necessary to add to this shocking loss’, asked Corbyn Morris, ‘the sickly state of such infants as are born who with difficulty pass through the first stages of life and live very few of them to years of manhood? … Enquire from the several hospitals in this City, whether any increase of patients and of what sort, are daily brought under their care. They will all declare, increasing multitudes of dropsical and consumptive people arising from the effects of spirituous liquors.’ Even when the worst years were over, an eighth of all deaths of adults in London were attributed by doctors to the excessive drinking of spirits.44
The government was slow to heed the warnings. In a Parliament largely occupied by landowners dedicated to the principles of laissez faire and self-aggrandisement it was difficult to pass any measures which interfered with agricultural interests; and the money derived by farmers and landowners from the distillation of spirits from English grain was an important source of their income. Acts were passed to restrict consumption, but they had little effect, and stronger measures were firmly opposed on various grounds such as those put forward by William Pulteney who declared that they would ‘produce such riots and tumults as may endanger our present establishment, or at least [could] not be quelled without spilling blood … and putting an end to the liberties of the people’. At length in 1751, however, an Act was passed which did have good effects; and thereafter, with the duty on spirits much increased and its sale in chandlers’ shops forbidden, the poor began to return to beer. ‘The lower people of late years have not drank spirituous liquors so freely as they did before the good regulations and qualifications for selling them,’ it was confidently asserted in 1757. ‘The additional excise has raised their price, improvements in the distillery have rendered the home-made distillations as wholesome as the imported. We do not see the hundredth part of poor wretches drunk in the streets.’45
By 1784 the home consumption of British spirits had fallen to one million gallons a year; and an American visitor to England, while noting the enormous amount of beer and porter drunk by the common people, added that they drank ‘but little ardent spirits because its excessive dearness [placed] it almost beyond their reach’.46
35 Marriage and Divorce
‘We saw a light in the parson’s chamber,’ says Captain Basil in Farquhar’s Stage Coach of 1704, ‘went up and found him smoking his pipe. He first gave us his blessing, then lent us his bed.’
Marriage in Farquhar’s day, and for many years before and after it, was certainly not difficult to contract. Nor were common law marriages which were recognized by the authorities. According to ecclesiastical law, promises made verbally before witnesses, such as ‘I do take thee to my wife’ or ‘I do take thee to my husband’, constituted irrevocable commitments for life, even though weddings in church to other persons might subsequently take place. There were local variations; but it was generally agreed that a binding marriage had occurred provided that there were witnesses to the mutual undertaking, that the man kissed the woman and gave her a present – usually a gold ring or even half a gold ring – and that sexual intercourse took place.1
In 1604 it had been ordained that a church wedding – by then generally recognized as a prerequisite of any proper marriage, whatever the law had to say upon the matter – must take place during the morning after eight o’clock, that it must be held in the parish church of either the bride or the bridegroom, that banns must be read for three weeks running before the ceremony to allow objections to the marriage to be heard, and that no one might marry before the age of twenty-one without the permission of parents or guardians.2 But there were many ways of evading these canons. ‘Every man may privately have a wife in every corner of London,’ so it was claimed in a parliamentary debate, ‘or in every town he has been in, without it being possible for them to know of one another.’3 There were, for instance, churches which claimed exemption from jurisdiction, one of them being St James’s, Duke Place, where, between 1664 and 1691, about 40,000 quick marriages took place; while there was ‘such a coupling at St Pancras that they stand behind one another, as ‘twere in a country dance’.4 Also, there were numerous clergymen who were prepared to conduct a brief marriage ceremony without asking embarrassing questions, provided they were given an appropriate fee. In London, Fleet marriages – which were not declared illegal until after the middle of the eighteenth century – were notorious. They were performed without licence, first in the chapel of the Fleet Prison and then in nearby taverns and houses, several of which bore signs depicting a male and female hand clasped together above the legend ‘Marriages Performed Within’. The marriages were mostly conducted by clergymen who were imprisoned in the Fleet for debt and were allowed the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’, that is to say were permitted to move about freely within a certain area immediately surrounding the prison. They could be seen standing beneath the hanging signs awaiting custom, like one described as ‘a squalid profligate fellow clad in a tattered plaid night gown with a fiery face and ready to couple you for a dram or a roll of tobacco’. The more usual fee varied between a couple of guineas for a well-dressed couple and three shillings or so for a couple that evidently could afford no more. If they had been brought in from the streets the tout had his share, as did the tavern-keeper if the ceremony took place on his premises. The couple could have an official-looking document if this were wanted – backdated when bastard children had to be legitimized – while all records could conveniently be lost if a secret or bigamous marriage were required. Nor was it only in London that these fly-by-night marriages could be contracted. In several country villages – Fledborough in Nottinghamshire, for example – there were known to be parsons prepared to conduct them.
After clandestine marriages were outlawed by Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, which came into operation in 1754, marriages conducted in taverns or private houses, or in places far removed from the parish where the bride or bridegroom lived, were to be declared invalid; and enforcement of the law was to be entrusted to secular rather than ecclesiastical courts, clergymen who broke it being liable to fourteen years’ transportation. The Act also decreed that only the church wedding, not the verbal promise, was binding and that all church weddings had to be entered on the parish register.
While marriages could be easily contracted before Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, the formalities to be observed in a conventional marriage among the gentry and well-to-do yeomen families were nevertheless elaborate. In Yorkshire, for example, it was customary for the prospective bridegroom’s father, or the young man himself, to write to the father of his intended bride ‘to know if he shall be welcome to the house’:
If the notion be thought well of, and embraced, then the young man goeth perhaps twice to see how the maid standeth affected. Then if he see that she be tractable, and that her inclination is toward him, then the third time that he visiteth, he perhaps giveth her a ten-shilling piece of gold, or a ring of that price; or perhaps a twenty-shilling piece, or a ring of that price; then 10s the next time, or the next after that, a pair of gloves of 6s 8d a pair; and after that, each other time, some conceited toy or novelty of less value. They usually visit every three weeks or a month, and are usually half a year, or very near, from the first going to the conclusion.
So soon as the young folks are agreed and contracted, then the father of the maid carrieth her over to the young man’s house to see how they like of all, and there doth the young man’s father meet them to treat of a dower, and likewise of a jointure or feoffment for the woman. And then do they also appoint and set down the day of the marriage, which may perhaps be about a fortnight or three weeks after, and in that time do they get made the wedding clothes, and make provision against the wedding dinner, which is usually at the maid’s father’s.
Then so soon as the bride is [attired] and that they are ready to go forth, the bridegroom comes, and takes her by t
he hand, and saith: ‘Mistress, I hope you are willing’, or else kisseth her before them, and then followeth her father out of the doors. Then one of the bridegroom’s men ushereth the bride … to church.
A dinner followed the church service, but the bride and bridegroom did not immediately go away together. Instead, a month or so elapsed before the husband went to fetch his wife, accompanied by ‘some of his best friends, and young men his neighbours’.5 This period was known as the ‘honeymoon’, a word which did not until later come to mean the holiday which the bride and bridegroom took together, the bride usually being accompanied by a companion until the middle of the nineteenth century. Before the honeymoon holiday became an accepted practice for those who could afford it, the first night of a marriage was often attended by banter and by a ritual almost as public as that which traditionally accompanied the wedding night of an heir to the throne who would be undressed by his gentlemen, while the bride was being undressed by her ladies, then conducted to the bridal bed whose curtains were drawn back to reveal the couple together before being closed again for the night. It was customary for the bride to wear gloves; and as late as 1708 a girl who had questioned this practice in the correspondence columns of The British Apollo was told that since it was ‘the custom and fashion to go into the bridal bed with gloves on, we think it not genteel to goto bed without’.6
Love was rarely a matter for consideration in most upper-class marriages; and, indeed, it was suggested that a marriage charged with excessive passion might result in the birth of unnatural children, a ‘cursed progeny [of] woeful imps’.7 ‘Beg first the assistance of God’, James Houblon, a rich merchant, advised his daughters when they began to ‘undertake the matching’ of their children, ‘and see that you match them in families that fear the Lord and have gotten their Estates honestly.’8 After the Civil War it had become so common a practice for merchants such as Houblon to arrange socially satisfactory marriages for their daughters and granddaughters that Sir William Temple condemned it as ‘a public grievance’; and Sir William Morice lamented that his own daughters were ‘commodities lying on [his] hands’, pushed out of the marriage market by ‘merchants’ daughters that weigh so many thousands’.9 While it was generally considered quite proper, however, for a gentleman’s son to marry a merchant’s daughter for her worldly goods, it was by no means so for the merchant’s son to marry the gentleman’s daughter. Lord Sandwich, for instance, was far from being alone in deciding that he would rather see his daughter ‘with a pedlar’s bag at her back’, provided her husband was a gentleman, than have her demean herself by a marrying a mere citizen.10
In Sandwich’s day a father’s decision was usually final in such matters. In 1701 a young lady wrote to The Athenian Oracle – a magazine that answered questions from young ladies – to ask for advice: she had vowed to leave her parents as soon as an opportunity offered itself because they had treated her so unkindly; she now had the chance to do so: did her vow take precedence over her duty to her father. ‘Your vow does not oblige you,’ she was advised categorically, ‘for your Body is the Goods of your Father, and you cannot lawfully dispose of your self without his knowledge and consent, so that you ought to beg God Almighty’s Pardon for your Rashness.’11
Indeed, it long remained the custom among the gentry for the father of the intended bride to be consulted before any steps towards marriage were taken. In the 1740s one Mr Grosvenor, having lost all his money gambling, decided he would have to look for a rich wife. He was offered one by his friend Hungerford who invited him down to the country to see the property that would one day be his if he married the Hungerfords’ only daughter and heir. Grosvenor accepted the offer to view the property and the girl, and asked his man of affairs, a barrister named Elers, to accompany him so that he could look through the title deeds and, if all was satisfactory, draw up the conveyances. On arrival, however, Grosvenor was disappointed in the human part of the bargain: he found Miss Hungerford, while good-natured enough, a plain, clumsy, plump, ‘unfashioned girl with little knowledge of any sort and no accomplishments’. He sadly confessed to Mr Elers that he did not much fancy her, that she was ‘a sad encumbrance upon the estate’. When Elers demurred, Grosvenor suggested that the lawyer should take the whole thing over himself. The father was, therefore, consulted; he agreed; the daughter then consented ‘with blushes and becoming filial duty’ to marry the lawyer. So the match was settled.12
In the upper and landed classes the eldest sons and heirs almost invariably married so as to produce heirs themselves. Younger sons, however, did not marry as a matter of course, about a fifth of them remaining bachelors, either by choice or, more usually, through financial necessity. In the seventeenth century upper-class daughters were also less often likely to be married than their female forebears had been a century before, since the practice of keeping estates intact for the benefit of the male heir had meant that there was less money and property available for his siblings. So, whereas only 10 per cent of daughters in landed families were still spinsters at the age of fifty in the sixteenth century, the proportion rose to 15 per cent in the early seventeenth century and to almost 25 per cent between 1675 and the end of the century. The proportion of unmarried women in the country as a whole at this time seems to have been much lower than this, perhaps no more than 9 or 10 per cent.13
Marriages in the early seventeenth century were not usually contracted at nearly so early an age as the plays of Shakespeare suggest. One might suppose from Romeo and Juliet, as Peter Laslett has indicated, that girls were commonly married when they were about fourteen, as Juliet was herself, and sometimes at twelve or thirteen, as her mother was. In fact, girls were very rarely married at fourteen, virtually never at twelve and less often in their late teens than they are now, although the age of consent was fourteen for a boy and twelve for a girl.14 An examination of 1000 licences issued by the diocese of Canterbury in 1619–60 to people marrying for the first time, revealed that only one girl gave her age as thirteen, four as fifteen and twelve as sixteen. All the rest were seventeen or over, 85 per cent more than nineteen; the average age was about twenty-four. The bridegrooms were, in general, about three or four years older than the brides. These couples were, in fact, only slightly younger than are those who get married today when the average age for men is between twenty-eight and twenty-nine and for women twenty-five to twenty-six.15
In the landed classes the average age of brides was slightly younger than that of poorer girls, but not appreciably so, while bridegrooms from these classes were of much the same age as those who were artisans and who would have to wait until they had acquired the necessary means to support a wife. Similarly, the younger son of a squire might have to wait until he had established himself in a profession and, by the eighteenth century, might be in his middle thirties before he had done so.16
There were, of course, occasional arranged marriages in which one or both parties were very young indeed, no more than eleven or twelve. But these were exceptional cases. The age of sexual maturity in women was probably not as early then as it is now. Certainly, it has fallen in western countries within the last few generations. In mid-nineteenth-century Norway, which has the longest records known, girls began to menstruate when they were just over seventeen; but 100 years later they had begun to do so, as they had in England, at about thirteen and a half.17
At whatever age the partners were when they contracted it, a marriage was unlikely to be of long duration, for the poor about seventeen to nineteen years on average in the seventeenth century and twenty-two in the eighteenth, and for the children of squires about twenty-two in the earlier period and thirty in the later.18 Life expectancy was short: three score years and ten was accepted as the span of man’s life on earth, but few people lived to seventy and those who did were considered to be very old. In the seventeenth century when no more than about 5 per cent of the population was over sixty, life expectancy at birth was probably no more than twenty-two or twenty-three; and although a
child who lived to adulthood had a much better chance of surviving into old age than a baby had, a bride or bridegroom probably had the prospect of no more than twenty-five or thirty years of life together as compared with the forty-five or so today19 This relatively high mortality rate ensured that remarriage was common, particularly in the case of widowers who were better placed to find wives than widows were husbands. Indeed, about a quarter of all marriages in the seventeenth century were remarriages. At Clayworth, a deeply studied village in Nottinghamshire, there were, towards the end of the century, seventy-two husbands, twenty-one of whom had been married more than once, three of these four times and one five times. Of the seventy-two wives, nine had been married before.20
Contrary to popular belief families were not large, even though many women spent most of their adult lives pregnant. From the late sixteenth century until the early twentieth the average size of a household in England was less than five people. Couples had parents or parents-in-law living with them less often than they do now, partly because the parents did not live as long as their modern counterparts, and partly because housing was not only relatively easier to come by – there usually being one or two vacant dwellings in any village – but also cheaper, a simple cottage costing no more to build than the sum a labourer might expect to earn in three years. Also, married couples did not have as many babies as is commonly supposed. There were, of course, celebrated exceptions: Ann Hackett, a Kentish girl who married when she was eighteen, had given birth twenty times twenty-three years later; James Smith, the architect, had eighteen children by his first wife who died in 1699 and fourteen by his second; and it is well known that Queen Anne became pregnant nearly twenty times, though most of her babies that survived their birth died in infancy. In most families, however, the numbers of children were kept low not only by the rate of infant mortality which meant that nearly a third of all children died before they were fifteen, but also by the practice of birth control – usually, it is presumed, coitus interruptus – and by neglect or accident, an inexperienced mother’s carelessness in the early and critical weeks, perhaps, or a smothering in a bed shared with both parents and, in many cases, with other children as well. Moreover, since she was not likely to enter into marriage before her middle twenties, and her menopause would begin when she was about forty, there were not many years in which a wife could give birth. The number of children she was likely to have was further inhibited by the contraceptive effects of breast-feeding which usually lasted for at least eighteen months, lactation generally preventing menstruation for that period in under-nourished women and for six months in those well fed. This applied less, of course, to upper-class women who generally employed wet-nurses for their babies and were, therefore, more likely to conceive sooner after the birth of a child than poorer women. Also, since the rich wife was usually younger than the poor, and since malnutrition in poor homes reduced both male sexual appetite and female fecundity, more children were born, and were likely to survive, in the homes of the well-to-do than in those of the indigent.21
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