CLANDESTINE AND IRREGULAR MARRIAGES

Prior to 1753 and under English common law, a marriage was valid if each spouse had simply expressed to each other an unconditional consent to the union. This was a binding contract which the courts would enforce if necessary. No particular words were necessary and the marriage was legal if the male was over fourteen years of age and the female was over twelve years of age. There was no requirement for a clergyman to conduct a ceremony, for witnesses to be present or for an actual record to be made of the event.

This all changed in 1753 with the implementation of Hardwicke's Marriage Act which required all marriages to accord to canon law in a Church of England church after publication of banns or obtaining a licence. An exception was made for Jews and Quakers. Prior to 1754 marriages which did not comply with ecclesiastical law were known as irregular or clandestine marriages.

This subsequently led to a huge number of marriages being conducted in places like the Fleet Prison and Liberty of the Fleet in London as well as many recognised parish churches including:

The chapel of the Tower of London

King’s Bench prison

Holy Trinity Minories

St James' Duke’s Place

Fledborough, Nottinghamshire

Keith’s Mayfair Chapel

The Mint, Southwark

To some extent the Savoy Chapel in the Strand and the parish of Temple in Cornwall were also centres for clandestine marriages.

The Fleet registers alone contain details of around 250,000 marriages most being recorded in the officiators' notebooks. Many such officiators were those incarcerated in the prison as insolvent debtors, working to pay off their debt.

Those parties who married in the Fleet came from all over England although most marriages were between couples who came from the area we now class as the Home Counties. The majority of Fleet marriages were for honest purposes when couples simply wanted to get married quickly or at low cost. Both rich and poor alike availed themselves of this facility.

It is known that not all the Fleet registers have survived. Most were in private hands until the early 1800s when the government purchased them and ultimately transferred them to the General Register Office. The original notebooks are now held by The National Archives and can be viewed online via The Genealogist website.

Many clergymen were conducting irregular or clandestine marriages in other areas for a suitable fee. A clandestine marriage also allowed a man who had deserted his wife to remarry bigamously with no questions being asked. Such marriages were not subject to banns waiting time and were undertaken at speed.

The Marriage Duty Act 1695 put an end to many irregular marriages at parish churches by penalising clergy who married couples without proper publication of banns or licence. The cases may appear within ecclesiastical court records. In the 1740s, over half of all London marriages took place within the environs of the Fleet Prison.

The earliest marriage recorded in the Fleet took place in 1613 although there may have been earlier ones, but the earliest recorded in a Fleet Register was in 1674. Because the Fleet was a prison, the church had no jurisdiction. The prison warders took a commission despite legislation from 1711 which imposed fines upon them for doing so, effectively moving the clandestine marriage centres to outside the prison.

In fact there were so many debtors that the prison itself was overcrowded which meant that so many lived in the area outside the prison under the "rules of the Fleet". The clergy and others performing marriages lived outside the prison so marriage houses or inns carried on the process. There were also many legal clerks who made money recording the ceremonies from notebooks into registers. It follows, therefore, that there may well be duplicate marriage entries and a few transcription mistakes.

During the 1740s, around 6,000 marriages were taking place in the Fleet area annually performed by around seventy to one hundred officiators.

Series RG7 is the collection of registers and notebooks of clandestine marriages and some baptisms in the Fleet Prison, King's Bench Prison, the Mint and the May Fair Chapel ranging from 1667 to c1777, despite the fact that Hardwicke’s Act had supposedly ended this type of marriage in 1754.

The contents and format of the notebooks and registers varies but most include the following details:

• names of the couple although a maiden  name for the bride may not be included
• marital status
• residences generally the home parishes although not all include this detail
• occupation of the groom
• minister's name or initials.

The records also include just under 3000 records of baptisms.

Within the records, it is important to remember that a marriage may be recorded more than once in different registers and notebooks but differences may occur in content, so it is important to look at all entries relative to the same marriage. Notebook entries are likely to be more accurate than the entries copied into the registers.

In the information in the Fleet documents, pre-1714 dates given may be inaccurate and couples sometimes requested not to record their surnames. Some even gave false names to disguise their real identity.