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Clandestine weddings at the Fleet Prison, c. 1710–1750: who married there?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2017

JACOB F. FIELD
JACOB F. FIELD*
Affiliation:
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge.
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Abstract

During the first half of the eighteenth century, thousands of Londoners (and people from the rest of England) married clandestinely at the Fleet Prison. More weddings were celebrated there than any other location in England. This article will examine quantitatively who was marrying there, detailing their premarital status, origin and occupation. It will show that Londoners who married at the Fleet were broadly representative of London's population topography and occupational structure. The article also examines the non-Londoners who married at the Fleet, and shows that by c. 1750 the Fleet was hosting at least 10 per cent of all marriages in England.

Les mariages clandestins à la prison de fleet street: qui s'y marie entre 1710 et 1750 ?

Au cours de la première moitié du dix-huitième siècle, des milliers de londoniens (et nombre de personnes du reste de l'Angleterre) se sont mariés clandestinement à la prison de Fleet Street. Nulle part ailleurs, en Angleterre, autant de mariages furent célébrés. L'auteur étudie qui s'y marie, détaillant les données quantitatives, à savoir le statut matrimonial antérieur, l'origine et la profession déclarée. Il ressort de cet article que les londoniens qui se sont mariés à Fleet étaient largement représentatifs de la topographie et de la structure socio-professionnelle de Londres. L'article examine également les non-londoniens qui s'y sont mariés et montre que, vers 1750, la prison de Fleet accueillait au moins dix pour cent de tous les mariages en Angleterre.

Untergrundehen im fleet-gefängnis, ca. 1710–1750: wer heiratete dort?

Während der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts heirateten Tausende von Londonern (und Leute aus dem übrigen England) heimlich im Fleet-Gefängnis. Dort wurden mehr Eheschließungen gefeiert als an irgendeinem anderen Ort in England. Dieser Beitrag untersucht auf quantitativer Basis, welche Leute dort heirateten, und fragt nach ihrem Zivilstand vor der Heirat, ihrer Herkunft und ihrem Beruf. Es zeigt sich, dass die Londoner, die im Fleet-Gefängnis heirateten, weitgehend repräsentativ für die räumliche Bevölkerungsverteilung und Beschäftigungsstruktur Londons waren. Der Beitrag untersucht auch die Nicht-Londoner, die im Fleet-Gefängnis heirateten, wobei sich zeigt, dass dort ab etwa 1750 wenigstens 10 Prozent aller Eheschließungen in England stattfanden.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , December 2017 , pp. 349 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

ENDNOTES

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14 From 1747–1753 Keith's chapel averaged over 1,000 marriages per year. Benton, Irregular marriages, 31; Brown, ‘Rise and fall’, 117.

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27 Lemmings, ‘Marriage and the law’, 345; Stone, Road to divorce, 115–16.

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31 Outhwaite, Clandestine marriage, 95.

32 Probert, ‘Lord Hardwicke's Act’, 146; Lemmings, ‘Marriage and the law’, 345–6; Bannet, E. T., ‘The Marriage Act of 1753: “a most cruel law for the fair sex”’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, 3 (1997), 239–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 The National Archives, UK (hereafter TNA), Fleet Chapels Marriage Registers, 1710–1712: MSS RG7/7, 10, 18, 20, 23–9; 1750–1752: MSS RG7/216, 224–5, 229–30, 233, 239–41, 245–7, 249–53, 255–7, 260–2, 264–8. As the same marriages were sometimes recorded twice in different registers, there was a problem regarding duplicates. When a marriage was a potential duplicate (for example if there were two records of a bachelor carpenter from Manchester marrying a spinster from Liverpool), the names of the marriage were checked in the manuscript to see if it was the same one recorded twice. If so, the duplicate entry was deleted.

34 Brown, Fleet marriages, 1–2.

35 Benton, Irregular marriages, 29; Brown, ‘Rise and fall’, 121.

36 Although the Act came into effect in March 1754, it is possible that the news of its passage may have inflated the number of people marrying at the Fleet in the second half of 1753, thus distorting the later sample. Outhwaite, Clandestine marriage, 95.

37 Benton, Irregular marriages, 33.

38 E. A. Wrigley, ‘The PST system of classifying occupations’, http://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/occupations/britain19c/papers/paper1.pdf [updated 31 May 2016]. Many thanks to the late Ros Davies for her invaluable help in linking the Fleet datasets to PST.

39 John Rocque's Survey of London, Westminster and Southwark (1746), Place and map search 1674 to 1834, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/forms/formMaps/jsp [updated 4 March 2016].

40 Brown, ‘Rise and fall’, 124.

41 Ibid., 123.

42 These figures exclude 146 grooms in c. 1711 and 334 in c. 1751 who gave their occupation/status as ‘gentleman’ or ‘esquire’.

43 Brown, ‘Rise and fall’, 126; Gillis, For better, for worse, 95–6.

44 Boulton, ‘Itching’, 22–3.

45 V. B. Elliott, ‘Single women in the London marriage market: age, status and mobility, 1598–1619’, in Outhwaite ed., Marriage and society, 81–100.

46 Gillis, For better, for worse, 95–6.

47 In St James Duke's Place (1698–1700) 61 per cent of marriages were between bachelors and spinsters, 18 per cent between bachelors and widows, 11 per cent between widowers and spinsters, and 10 per cent between widowers and widows. For St Paul Shadwell (1701–1710) the figures were 65 per cent, 20 per cent, 4 per cent and 11 per cent. For St Katherine by the Tower (1710–1712) the figures were 63 per cent, 19 per cent, 11 per cent and 7 per cent. Boulton, J. P., ‘London widowhood revisited: the decline of female remarriage in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Continuity and Change 5, 3 (1990), 331 Google Scholar; Clark, A. W. Hughes and D'Elboux, R. H. eds., The registers of St Katharine by the Tower, London (London, 1946), 129–36Google Scholar.

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51 Shown to be statistically significant by Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, using distance of the county town from London as a proxy. Grooms c. 1711, R = 0.732 (P < 0.01); Brides c. 1711, R = 0.750 (P < 0.01); Grooms c. 1751, R = 0.758 (P < 0.01); Brides c. 1751, R = 0.783 (P < 0.01).

52 TNA MSS RG7/26, fo. 96r.

53 Brown, Fleet marriages, 83.

54 Keith notes that he was once in a public house in Ratcliff and saw ten couples leave to get married after a sailor claimed ‘I will be married just now; I will have my partner; and B----d we will get a boy who shall kill the French King.’ After they returned they ‘went up into an upper room, where they concluded the evening with great jollity’. Keith, A., Observations on the act for preventing clandestine marriages (London, 1753), 24 Google Scholar.

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57 Schwarz, ‘London 1700–1840’, 650. Using this method the population in 1711 was c. 595,645 and the population in 1751 (based on annual growth rate of 0.716 per cent between 1750 and 1801) was 679,830.

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59 Their populations relied on the Marriage Duty Assessments and the Bills of Mortality. Locating London's Past, ‘Estimating London's Population’, https:// www.locatinglondon.org/static/Population.html [updated 13 September, 2016].

60 Hitchcock, T. V., English sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke, 1997), 106 Google Scholar; Brown, ‘Rise and fall’, 126. D. A. Kent's study of settlement examinations for the poor of St Martin-in-the-Fields found that in 1750–1751, 59 per cent of those examined claimed to have been married at the Fleet. Kent, D. A., ‘“Gone for a solider”: family breakdown and the demography of desertion in a London parish, 1750–91’, Local Population Studies 45 (1990), 39 Google Scholar.

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64 The subsequent percentages should be regarded as minima given the under-reporting of origin at the Fleet and the fact that the registers are incomplete. Including these ‘missing’ marriages could raise the figures by c. 30 per cent in c. 1711 and around 40 per cent in c. 1751.

65 TNA MSS RG7/26, fo. 65r.

66 Probert, ‘Control over marriage’, 419.

67 Letter to the public: containing the substance of what hath been offered in the late debates upon the subject of the Act of Parliament, for the better preventing of clandestine marriages (London, 1753), 28–9Google Scholar.

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69 TNA MSS RG7/253, fo. 42v.

70 Gillis, For better, for worse, 95.

71 Brown, Fleet marriages, 107.

72 Pliers for the Fleet were paid a gratuity between 6d and 1s, and there were other ‘extras’, such as the purchase or hire of a ring for the ceremony. Brown, Fleet marriages, 83–4, 104; Ogburn, ‘Most lawless space’, 17; Boulton, ‘Clandestine marriages’, 203–4; Brown, ‘Rise and fall’, 124.

73 Boulton, ‘Itching’, 16–19; Stone, Road to divorce, 102.

74 Brown, ‘Rise and fall’, 124; Boulton, ‘Clandestine marriages’, 203–5.

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76 Fourteen parishes between 1690 and 1729 (St Nicholas Deptford, St Andrew Holborn, St Dionis Backchurch, St Dunstan in the West, St Faith under St Paul's, St Giles Cripplegate, St Mary Staining, St Mary Woolnoth, St Peter Cornhill, Poplar, St Paul Shadwell, St Leonard Shoreditch, St Olave Southwark, and St Saviour Southwark) and six from 1740–1769 (St John of Wapping, St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey, Greenwich, St Giles Cripplegate, St Olave Southwark, and St Saviour Southwark). Held at London Metropolitan Archives, available at http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1624 [updated 6 March 2016].

77 Footwear was also over-represented, by 0.8 per cent, in c. 1751 but this difference was not significant at the 95 per cent level.

78 Clothing was also over-represented by 1.7 per cent in c. 1711 but this difference was not significant at the 95 per cent level.

79 Domestic service was over-represented, by 0.5 per cent in c. 1751, but this difference was not significant at the 95 per cent level. Ogburn, ‘Most lawless space’, 15.

80 In c. 1711 R2 = 0.950, P < 0.001 and c. 1751 R2 = 0.902, P < 0.001.

81 S. M. Cooper, ‘From family member to employee: aspects of continuity and discontinuity in English domestic service, 1600–2000’, in Fauvre-Chamoux, A. ed., Domestic service and the formation of European identity: understanding the globalization of domestic work, sixteenth–twenty-first centuries (New York and Oxford, 2004), 279 Google Scholar.

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83 Boulton, ‘Itching’, 15.

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85 Percentage who married on Sundays: Primary 27 per cent in c. 1711 and 33 per cent in c. 1751; Secondary 31 per cent in c. 1711 and 23 per cent in c. 1751; Tertiary 21 per cent in c. 1711 and 18 per cent in c. 1751; Labourers 29 per cent in c. 1711 and 30 per cent in c. 1751.

86 Gally, Some considerations, 3.

87 Outhwaite, Clandestine marriage, 86.

88 Ogburn, ‘Most lawless space’, 15.

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90 Brown, ‘Rise and fall’, 128; Probert, ‘Lord Hardwicke's Act’, 132.

91 Stone, Road to divorce, 99–101; Outhwaite, Clandestine marriage, 59.

92 Gillis, J. R., ‘Married but not churched: plebeian sexual relations and marital nonconformity in eighteenth-century Britain’, in Maccubbin, R. P. ed., ‘Tis nature's fault: unauthorized sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1987), 36 Google Scholar.

93 Benton, Irregular marriages, 43.

94 Probert, ‘Control over marriages’, 429.

95 Boulton, ‘Clandestine marriages’, 206.

96 Brown, Fleet marriages, 107.

97 Probert, ‘Control over marriage’, 426.

98 Gillis, ‘Married but not churched’, 35; Lemmings, ‘Marriage and the law’, 340.

99 Keith, Observations, 3–4, 19–20.

100 Probert, ‘Lord Hardwicke's Act’, 143–4.