Westmorland weddings : a study of the 1787 census

There has been much speculation about marriage practices in 18th century England, and many commentators have assumed that cohabitation was common, particularly among the lower orders. More recent work on southern parishes has, however, suggested that formal marriage was the norm, and cohabitation vanishingly rare, both before and after the passage of the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753. This article sets out to test whether that conclusion holds good for those more remote parts of the north-west in which, it has been claimed, informal practices still flourished. Drawing on a cohort of over a thousand couples identified from the Westmorland ‘census’ of 1787, this article discusses the challenges in tracing where and when those couples had married, and shows how all the evidence nonetheless suggests very high levels of compliance with the formal legal requirements. This in turn has important implications for the assumed completeness of parochial registers and the likelihood of family historians being able to trace a marriage

Identical addresses at marriage and pre-marital cohabitation : a reassessment of the evidence

It has been widely assumed that cohabitation before marriage was common in the Victorian East End (and elsewhere). This assumption, however, has been based primarily upon the observation that couples often gave the same address on the marriage certificate, and until the recent digitization of census data it had been impossible to assess the truth. Now, a comparison between Bethnal Green's census data and marriage registers for the three months after the 1851 census in fact reveals that the majority of couples who gave the same address were not living together. Nor were those couples found to be residing under the same roof necessarily in a 'cohabiting relationship' in the modern sense: half of those who were sharing a home with their spouse-to-be were also sharing it with his or her parents and siblings, and were there as a visitor or lodger. Pre-marital cohabitation in late-Victorian England, it turns out, was far rarer than has previously been thought