The popularly held belief that in Victorian times a rigid code of sexual behaviour was in operation throughout the country, and that transgression of the code resulted in loss of respectability, has been under attack for some time now. One of the weapons used in the assault has been the extent of prenuptial pregnancy during the period compared with earlier centuries. In the first of his two papers on prenuptial pregnancy in England, published in 1966, P. E. H. Hair demonstrated that the phenomenon was of long duration. Roughly one-third of his sample of 1,855 brides traced to a maternity between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had been pregnant at marriage, and he considered that this was an under-estimate of the true proportion. Data from a number of reconstitution studies published in a recent work edited by Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith show that prenuptial pregnancies, measured in 50-year periods from 1550–1849, peaked in the second half of the sixteenth century at 31 per cent of all marriages traced to the birth of a child, only to decline over the next hundred years through the heyday of Puritanism and beyond to their nadir of 16 per cent by the end of the seventeenth century. From the early eighteenth century onwards, however, the proportion of such pregnancies increased, at first slowly and then gathering pace until by 1800 the previous peak at the end of the sixteenth century had been passed, the proportion of prenuptial pregnancies standing at 33 per cent. The rate continued to rise through the early years of the nineteenth century into the Victorian era, reaching 37 per cent for the 50 years ending in 1849.