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Hi Jules

Interesting to hear you say you don't have any preconceived ideas about marriage customs - I've been working on the history of marriage law and practice for a while now, as Prof Probert's husband and sometime publisher, and the family history world seems to divide into people who start out with a belief in widespread 'folk' customs such as "jumping the broom" and "handfasting", and people who've never heard of them (because they didn't exist!). The long and the short of it is that before the late 1960s formal marriage was almost universal amongst couples who had a stable, sexual relationship. Basically, they married! The option of not marrying if you were in a sexual relationship, especially one that led to pregnancy, only dates back to the 1960s in statistically significant numbers. It was no more a lifestyle choice than getting dressed before you left the house!

Good luck with the genealogy!

Liam

I heartily agree that it'd be nice to have a forum for questions regarding the laws (and practices) relating to marriage, but then I'm the publisher of the definitive guide to the marriage laws and practices of England and Wales from 1600 onwards, aimed squarely at the kind of questions genealogists come across, so I'm utterly biased!

Adamb - it's not at all uncommon to find examples of bigamy before the early 1970s, when divorce was harder, rarer, and more socially unacceptable than today, but one point I'd note is that such people were nevertheless prepared to marry illegally rather than openly cohabit (in the current sense of the word) - bigamy has today become a rare crime, as nobody turns a hair at a couple living together unmarried. I assume that what you mean by "common law marriages" in your ancestry are examples of couples living together in a stable and enduring relationship out of wedlock? Do you know for sure that this was the case, or is this an assumption based upon not having found a marriage? Have you perhaps found that one was already married to a third party (and was presumably unwilling to commit bigamy)?

As to watercress sellers and prostitution - as a suggestion, you might like to try searching online full text historic databases such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online, or The Times Online for examples of the use of the phrase. I know Professor Probert hasn't come across this phrase in all her research. An interesting observation here might be that Victorian and early C20th middle class writers and journalists were very quick to portray the working classes as living depraved and immoral lives: Henry Mayhew, for example, is always quoted these days as having discovered that more than 90% of London's Victorian street costermongers lived together unmarried. In fact, he was thoroughly condemned almost straight away by a public meeting of London street-sellers, who were outraged at what they called "a downright falsehood", and who pointed out that Mayhew had paid his (very disreputable, and in fact drunken) informants to tell him what he wanted to hear. They challenged him to appear at a meeting to substantiate his claims, but he refused to attend. Yes, prostitution was rife, but being a prostitute by necessity at times in one's life didn't equate to not being married, which was the norm throughout the period.

Liam

I'm really not on the ball right now, it appears - I'll admit I'm all but a complete novice when it comes to using web forums, and I hadn't even spotted that there are names on the left hand side, if you can believe it - I was simply going on a name I'd spotted at the foot of a previous post. Sorry!

Those figures strike me as a little high compared to other national data on illegitimate births for 1700-1837 (which would, roughly and from memory, start at around 2% and rise to between 5% and 10%). A more important point I'd make is that I did say "a vanishingly small number of couples lived together as husband and wife without going through a formal Anglican ceremony", not that there were a vanishingly small number of illegitimate births, which I accept wouldn't be true. There's a stark difference throughout that period (and in fact all the way through to the late C20th) between illegitimate births per se and illegitimate births to a woman who was living in an ongoing non-marital relationship with the father, ie what we'd call 'cohabiting' today.

The reason I've been looking through posts on various genealogical forums concerning marriage laws and practices is that I'm the publisher of Professor Rebecca Probert's latest book, Marriage Law for Genealogists, which she wrote because of the ubiquity of mistakes as to the law and practices in previous centuries (especially before 1754) in existing guides for family historians. Rebecca has, as it happens, done a number of large, detailed cohort studies on illegitimacy and the prevalence of cohabitation for two other books she's written (Marriage Law & Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and The Legal Treatment of Cohabitation, 1600-2010: From Fornicators to Family (CUP, 1012)). She's found, consistently, that such women tended to bear a single illegitimate child and then remain single thereafter. I don't have a copy of her relevant articles or these two titles to hand, but my recollection is of a study of Northamptonshire illegitimacies for the same kind of timeframe, in which the percentage of women bearing an illegitimate child to the same father (as an indication of an ongoing, sexual, non-marital relationship) was something in the order of 0.1-0.5% of illegitimate (not total) births. That's what I'd mean by "vanishingly small".

Of course, there's always the argument that some couples had illegitimate children because they weren't validly married, even though they were living in a stable, sexual relationship, for example when one was already married to somebody else, but I think these are of a different nature to couples who set up home unmarried although able to marry if they wished. I didn't make that point in the previous post, admittedly, but Rebecca's research nevertheless indicates that these couples were for the most part anxious to be seen to be married, even committing bigamy rather than be known to be "cohabiting" (not a contemporary term in this usage).

You clearly know a lot about this area, Stan, and the Dorset Bastards study sounds very interesting. It might be that Rebecca has already come across it, but I myself haven't, I don't think, read the name anywhere in her research. Do you have any link I could pass on to Rebecca, so she can take a look at the findings? I know she'd be very interested.

Liam