Westmorland Weddings
A Study of the 1787 Census
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12669271 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rebecca Probert (0000-0002-2998-2613, corresponding author), Liam D’Arcy Brown |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 32-44 |
| Publication date | 2013-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Family & Community History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1463-1180 • E-ISSN: 1751-3812 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1179/1463118013z.00000000011 |
| OpenAlex | W1996822038 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 25 |
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
Census · Geography · Media studies · Population · Sociology · Census and Population Estimation · Demography · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
The Oxford History of the Laws of England
Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism
Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations
The population history of England, 1541-1871
Mother Leakey & the Bishop
The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation
Informal Marriage, Cohabitation and the Law 1750–1989
English population statistics before 1800
Love, Religion and Power in the Making of Marriages in Early Nineteenth-Century Rural Industrial Lancashire
Chinese whispers and Welsh weddings
The impact of the Clandestine Marriages Act
Chance Encounters? Paths to Household Formation in Early Modern England
How Reliable Is Our Knowledge of the Demographic Characteristics of the English Population in the Early Modern Period
Mother Leakey and the Bishop
Unmarried Cohabitation and Parenthood in Britain and Europe
Living In Sin
For Their Own Reasons
A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain
The evolution of cohabitation in Britain, 1960-95
Courtship, the Clandestine Marriage Act, and Illegitimate Fertility in England
English rural societies and geographical marital endogamy, 1700-1837
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |