A Brief History of Marriage
By Samantha Callan - Care for the Family
Marriage ‘done rite’
As I said earlier, before 1753 marriages did not need any kind of religious ceremony to be legally valid. As late as the 12th century ritual was the only way marriages were established and by the time of the Marriage Act of 1753 there was a variety of rites which, if performed correctly, secured a marriage. Ecclesiastical law regularised the ceremony of marriage by insisting that banns were read and licenses paid for but civil law, in practice, merely required that a marriage could be proven to have taken place. An attending clergyman was sufficient for this, which led to the notorious Fleet registers. Clergymen incarcerated in private debtors’ prisons such as the Fleet prison, made a living by solemnising vows made by people who didn’t have parental consent and who wanted to avoid the costs of tax and licence. The first Fleet register began in 1674.
Various Acts were passed to try and halt such clandestine but legal marriages but none were successful until the Hardwicke Act of 1753. Indeed on 25th March 1754,the day before its implementation, 217 Fleet marriages were registered. Under the Act’s provisions religious control was brought to bear on the marriage ceremony and it was not until the Marriage Act of 1836 that the state reverted to the essential view of marriage ie. that it is effected by mutual consent and not religious ceremony. During the intervening period many people refused to get married because they did not recognise the authority of the Church of England. Reverend Haw, in his scholarly work on the history of marriage in this country makes the following comment “The long history of ecclesiastical law has shown that the lives of men and women cannot be sanctified by canons, edicts, excommunications or other forms of compulsion. The Church of England’s primary responsibility to English people is not to attempt to compel them to a way of life or to a belief for which they have but a dim understanding but to go forth and teach. Her [that is the church’s] adherents, faithfully accepting the church’s discipline as well as its privileges must show to the country such a standard of fidelity to the marriage bond made possible through Divine Grace as will the more readily supplement that teaching.”