A Brief History of Marriage

By Samantha Callan - Care for the Family

Alternatives to formal marriage

As I said before the history of marriage in this country is characterised by diversity and change. Before the 1753 Act there was no simple answer to the problem of defining what was and what was not a marriage. The ceremony of betrothal is historically relevant. This was not a quiet family affair but often a major public event which constituted the real beginning of marriage. It was at this point that individuals became ‘something other’ and were separated out in the eyes of the community before being finally incorporated into the married state. In some communities betrothal marked the beginning of sexual relations and it was binding although not indissoluble. So if a woman became pregnant before marriage the man would be liable to financial obligation. Some authors have suggested that cohabitation is the modern day equivalent of betrothal but the all important social dimension is lacking.

In this country, when the family ceased to be a unit of production, the marriage rate went up, that is when it was advantageous to have children off your hands and in their own households. Conversely, shoemakers in Northamptonshire who were dependent on their adult children’s labour encouraged their children to stay within the parents’ household. This resulted in a higher rate of premarital child bearing. There was effectively competition between parents and would-be suitors for daughters’ labour. Female workers in the early factories made a practice of separating motherhood from wifehood as matrimony was not considered to be a very permanent institution. Gillis describes the ability and willingness of women to have children outside marriage as a product of familial and communal cohesion rather than breakdown. New mothers lived with their kin and contributed to family income whilst receiving help with childcare. In Portland the greatest disgrace was to have no children and people rarely married before the woman was pregnant. This system of proving was institutionalised in the betrothal tradition which sanctioned having the first child out of wedlock. The point of all these examples is that there are communities throughout the UK in which there may not have been a strong tradition of marriage at times when economic circumstances did not accommodate the formation of separate households. Similarly in more affluent social circles in which the control of courtship remained essential, chastity was the norm during betrothal – inheritances were at stake, alliances which would mobilise wealth and power hinged on marriage and haphazard arrangements would have been completely inappropriate.

Living tally and other common law practices were embedded in whole communities and were especially common where there was enough work for adult children within the original family work unit – these practices were different to both casual cohabitation and formal marriage. Marital non-conformists abounded for a variety of reasons – “the folk of Framlingham say that none but whores and blackguards marry. Honest folks take each others’ word for it.” In the 18th and 19th centuries as much as 20% of the population may, at one time or another, have lived in an illegal relationship either as a prelude to getting married or as a substitute for it. Many people seem familiar with the nineteenth century tradition of besom weddings or ‘jumping the broomstick’. Unions were forged when the couple jumped over the broomstick together and dissolved by reversing the process. Although itinerant navvies went through this ritual before their one night stands there are other examples of long lasting relationships which were initiated in this way. Cultural mores made people more or less inclined to go down the legal marriage route which was socially acceptable only to subsections of the population. Social, economic and political changes were however altering the conditions of working class life to render alternatives to legal matrimony less feasible or attractive. Medical campaigns against VD and indeed Christian evangelism contributed to fears about all forms of extramarital sexuality. Respectability and chastity had become firmly linked in the minds of those aspiring to higher social status. A gradual decrease in the age of marriage after 1910 reflected the increasingly close association of marriage with normality, even among the poorest. Along with this trend had come a division of roles between male breadwinner and female homemaker. By the 1950s these two trends had become somewhat crystallised in people’s minds and appeared to have been there all the time. Two world wars had made informal arrangements less desirable. However to a large extent intimacy was lacking in many marriages. It was seen as the termination point for adolescence and took on the character of a rite of passage which marked the transition to adulthood and was therefore indispensable. Setting up a home of one’s own was still closely identified with marriage and this seems to be almost the only constant feature of British marriage history.

To recap, we need to see today’s high divorce and cohabitation rates not in the light of the prevailing social conditions of the 1950s but in the context of the last millennium. The popularity of marriage has waxed and waned, there was concern about marriage levels at the end of the 19th century and it seems to be an issue that is subject to fin de siecle angst whatever the actual figures. However an increasingly contractual view of marriage is driving the trend towards pre-nuptial agreements and easier divorce so there is cause for concern. I have briefly described socially accepted rituals to effect both marriage and divorce and have set the subject in a broader cross cultural frame. Finally I have touched on historical alternatives to marriage and shown that they have often been acceptable to whole communities depending on the prevailing social and economic circumstances.

By appreciating that strands of individualism can be seen in our culture from as far back as the 14th century, it is clear that the tendency for people to ‘do their own thing’ when it comes to marriage is not just a feature of modernity. Dr Jon Davies from the University of Newcastle deserves to have the last word with this succinct and illuminating comment, “At every level of society ‘coupling’ becomes marriage by being written into the broader practical considerations of household, kin and community; it involves entering a status fixed into the structures and concerns of others and not a means of satisfying oneself.”