[...]... its meaning in the eighteenth century, any more than the Gothic revival of the early nineteenth century should lead an outsider to assume architectural continuity from the Middle Ages 8 Marriage Law and Practice in the Long 18th Century in strict accordance with the requirements of canon law. 29 Both the negative and the positive aspects of this should be stressed: the failure to comply with the law was... marriage in any eighteenth- century text, and the term ‘irregular marriage but rarely;27 by contrast the term ‘clandestine marriage , widely used in the eighteenth century, had a specific meaning, and one that is crucial for the correct interpretation of contemporary legal texts and cases Although to modern readers the term ‘clandestine marriage might suggest secrecy and romantic elopements, in the eighteenth. .. if this inspires greater confidence in the results actually obtained Without giving away the ending, it is worth making the (somewhat obvious) point that the ability to ascertain that a particular marriage occurred depends on the information available, both about the couples in question and in the archives Searching for a marriage is far easier if (as in the case of the settlement examinations) the parties... questions For example, in determining whether a particular practice was a full alternative to a regular marriage, we need to know what its status was in the eyes of the law; in examining how far the 1753 Act was an innovation we need to be able to situate each of its nineteen provisions in the legal context of the time; and in assessing how far the courts’ interpretation of the Act was harsh, there is no substitute... relation to each the same questions are posed: given the law and practice of the time, what would the impact of the 1753 Act have been? Was each of these practices a full and/ or functional alternative to a regular marriage in church? Chapter 6 then examines the reasons for the 65 66 67 69 Such as the Europe-wide increase in illegitimacy in the second half of the eighteenth century despite the lack of legislative... the law was not the sole defining feature of such a marriage, since exchanges that did not involve an Anglican clergyman30 were not described as clandestine marriages.31 The term ‘clandestine marriage will therefore be used in this book in the way in which it would have been understood in the eighteenth century This usage also has the advantage of drawing a sharp distinction between marriages that were... has explored the case law on the interpretation of the Act in any depth.21 And there is very little information about the way in which ordinary people experienced the law: few parish-level studies have been devoted to the specific issue of conformity When I began to look at the operation of the law of marriage in the eighteenth century I was constantly surprised by the disjunction between the claims made... Parker, Informal Marriage, who employs the term ‘informal marriage in a similar fashion At least in England and Wales, in contrast to the position in Scotland: see e.g., T C Smout, ‘Scottish Marriage, Regular and Irregular, 1500–1940’, ch 9 in R Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society (London: Europa Publications Ltd, 1981), and, on the differing terminology of the Bill that dealt with Scottish marriage law, ... of information and detected misspellings of names in 10 per cent of the entries, different forenames in 0.6 per cent, and different surnames in 0.4 per cent 18 Marriage Law and Practice in the Long 18th Century Several couple as been married at our church during that clerk’s time which was not entered in the Redgester, owing to his negligence, he being a very Drinking Man.61 The simple fact that the. .. immediately before and after 1754, when the Act came into force:23 too often in other accounts, as we shall see, evidence from the sixteenth, seventeenth, or nineteenth centuries is pressed into service as ‘evidence’ of trends in the eighteenth The extent to which the 1753 Act was an innovation, and the impact that it had, can only be judged by examining law and practice as it stood in the eighteenth century . Cambridge Recent series titles include Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century A Reassessment REBECCA PROBERT The Rise and Fall of the English Ecclesiastical. England in the Later Middle Ages J. G. BELLAMY William Sheppard, Cromwell’s Law Reformer NANCY L. MATTHEWS MARRIAGE LAW AND PRACTICE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY A