All About Clandestine Marriages In Historical London
Fleet and other clandestine marriages
Fleet and other clandestine marriages
All right.. so what are they, you may cry?
The response, that I'd give, is that Clandestine marriages were wedding ceremonies which most likely had an element of secrecy connected to them.
Quite a number of UK marriages will have been performed in a different part of the country a long way from the home parish of the couple without banns being read nor a licence obtained. The reasons for keeping the marriage secret could be for one of many different reasons. For example there may have been an absence of parental consent and so the marrying couple skipped off to London to tie the knot. While the former is perhaps a more innocent reason for marrying in this way, there were other more unsavory reasons such as in cases of bigamy!
The reality of these nuptials were that fees were often paid to the clergymen for marrying the pair and a blind eye turned to the normal requirements. The promise of enumeration meant that some clerics were willing to carry out this kind of wedding ceremony, even though it was frowned upon by the Church of England and the volume of these unions were really quite extensive, especially in the London area.
If you investigate Clandestine marriages, you will discover that certain churches were important centres for this kind of trade. In the 1740s it seems that more than one half of all London wedding ceremonies were taking place inside the environs of the Fleet Prison. Now it is certain that not all of these brides and grooms married here would have been from the capital city of England.
"Fleet Marriages", as they were known, were often performed by some fake priests as well as by the disgraced but correctly ordained clergy.
So what period did they take place in? Although there were almost certainly ones previous to this, the earliest Fleet Union on record is from 1613, while the first documented in a Fleet Register took place in 1674. The Marriage Duty Act of 1696 had sought to end the practice elsewhere, but a legal loophole meant that the Fleet Prison was not included.
As a prison in London, the Fleet was outside of the jurisdiction of the Church. The prison warders took a share of the earnings of the cleric performing the marriage, despite the fact that a statute of 1711 imposed fines on them for doing so. What this law did, however, was to shift the clandestine wedding trade away from the prison. It was within the lawless environs of the Fleet that many debtors resided and some of them may well have been disgraced clergymen in want of making some sort of living. Marriage houses, or taverns, now continued the trade lost inside the prison. The local hostelry owners, seeing a market, sought out this type of business by utilizing the services of touts to positively drum up weddings on behalf of their hostels.
If, in your family tree research, you need to seek out these Clandestine marriages on-line then you are in luck because you are able to locate them at: www.ancestry.co.uk. Their London Marriage Licences data collection allows you access to the details of over 25,000 marriages in London spanning four centuries.
This data set is not simply concerned with "Fleet marriages" but also features those marriages made outside of the Church of England's approval those taking place in another place from the parties' home parish and it is often possible to find the names of brides and grooms, parents and witnesses in addition to residence, age of spouses and the occupation of the groom. This collection offers marriage licences granted in the dioceses of London by the Bishops office from 1521 to 1828, the Dean and Chapter of Westminsters office from 1599 to 1699 and two offices of the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1543 to 1869 and 1660 to 1679. As such it is an important resource for the family historian.
by: Nick Thorne
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