Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales, 1600-2012

R. Probert, R. Probert, R. Probert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137396273
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Today, cohabiting relationships account for most births outside marriage. But what was the situation in earlier centuries? Bringing together leading historians, demographers and lawyers, this interdisciplinary collection draws on a wide range of sources to examine the changing context of non-marital child-bearing in England and Wales since 1600.

1

Bridewell, bawdy courts and bastardy in early seventeenth-century London

Eleanor Fox and Martin Ingram¹

Introduction

By the turn of the seventeenth century London was a phenomenon, a source of wonder to both English and foreign visitors. Already by far the largest urban centre in England – easily surpassing regional capitals like Norwich, Exeter and York – it was growing extremely fast. Around 1500 it is doubtful whether the city had more than 50,000 inhabitants. Yet counting as part of the metropolis not only the old city of London and its liberties, but also Westminster, the rapidly expanding northern and eastern suburbs such as Clerkenwell and Stepney, and Southwark and adjacent areas south of the river, its population around 1600 had reached 200,000. Sustained by immigration – a net rate of maybe 8000 a year, though there was also much temporary migration in and out of London – the number of inhabitants was almost to double to something over 375,000 by 1650.² Did births out of wedlock likewise increase exponentially in this teeming urban agglomeration, a settlement on a scale hitherto unknown in England and in an intricate demographic relationship with its hinterland? Historians have been surprised to find that parish register analysis suggests that it was less rather than more common than in the country, but such evidence raises many questions.³ Certainly a number of distinctive features may be identified, both of the circumstances in which illegitimacy occurred and the ways in which church and secular authorities, along with ordinary Londoners, responded to illicit conceptions and bastard births. Overall it is a moot point whether metropolitan illegitimacy is best seen as unique or as a variant on the patterns found elsewhere in lowland England.

Illegitimacy in provincial England

Even in the provinces, illegitimacy was by no means a uniform phenomenon. The precise demographic information required to establish illegitimacy rates is lacking. But it is possible to construct illegitimacy ratios by calculating the numbers of births that are either stated, or can be inferred, to be illegitimate, as a proportion of total births recorded in parish registers. For this purpose baptisms, which is what these registers mostly record, usually have to be taken as a proxy for births;⁴ and, of course, there are many other potential pitfalls in using for demographic purposes what are essentially ecclesiastical documents, compiled in often unknown but certainly less than ideal circumstances, by fallible and sometimes negligent humans in the remote past. But the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure has taught us that, if these materials are handled with appropriate caution, skill and sophistication, they can yield plausible and certainly highly suggestive results.⁵

Broadly speaking rates were higher in the north and west; more particularly, Lancashire and Cheshire display some distinctive features that have as yet been only partly elucidated.⁶ In contrast, in lowland England – the east Midlands, East Anglia, the south and south east – in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the ratio was usually quite low. Admittedly in towns it is common to find somewhat higher rates. But this was not, it would seem, because urban conditions in themselves were conducive to illegitimacy, but because some women who became illicitly pregnant in the country moved into towns in order to give birth, either for purposes of concealment or to seek succour. Whether in town or country the illegitimacy ratio was by no means constant over time. While there were numerous variations, overall it may be said that in the lowland zone the ratio increased in the later part of Elizabeth’s reign to peak at about 2.4 per cent in the decade after 1600. Thereafter, there was a marked decline, to below 2 per cent in the 1630s. Nonetheless, as a social phenomenon illegitimacy was not as inconspicuous as these figures at first sight suggest. The ratio is calculated with reference to all births; as a proportion of first births the figure is much higher.⁷

To take a less statistical view, the figure of the unmarried mother would have been a familiar sight in many villages in lowland England. She was also of grave concern to local officials. Partly this reflected concern that the cost of supporting the bastard child might fall on the parish. But a more general conviction that illegitimacy was a matter of importance is suggested by the fact that most parish registers (though not all) did distinguish bastard children, even though there was no legal obligation to do so.⁸ Births out of wedlock must also be seen in relation to the more common phenomenon of bridal pregnancy. Parish register analysis demonstrates quite clearly that a sizeable proportion of women – say 20 per cent – were pregnant by the time they got married in church. Presumably an even greater proportion, perhaps a majority in some communities, had sex before marriage.⁹

What attitudes, values and patterns of behaviour lay behind these figures? On the basis of church court and quarter sessions cases from Somerset in the early seventeenth century, Geoffrey Quaife argued that for many ordinary people of the time, whom he characterized as ‘peasants’, ‘sex was not a moral issue’. Men commonly ‘believed they had a right to a wench’ and acted accordingly.¹⁰ The consensus among other historians is much more circumspect. There were certainly cases of sexual relations between masters and maidservants, and a variety of other liaisons that could not – or at least were most unlikely to – lead to marriage. Women, especially servants, were vulnerable to seduction or worse.¹¹ On the other hand, some women had a succession of bastards. These cases are sometimes referred to as ‘repeaters’, while historians have inferred that some of those concerned were village prostitutes or ‘whores’.¹² There is some contemporary warrant for such a term. In the small Wiltshire village of Wylye, for example, the compiler of the very detailed parish register referred to a woman who had a succession of bastards as ‘meretricula’ – little whore.¹³

But most illicit sexual activity seems to have taken place between eligible young men and women whose sights were ultimately set on marriage. Their economic and social lives provided many opportunities for unsupervised interaction. This was particularly true of servants, especially fellow servants in a household. In the early seventeenth century some of the more extreme among ‘godly’ Protestants tried to suppress games, dances, church ales, and the like, not least because they supposed them to encourage licentious behaviour. Such efforts provoked uproar and were only very partially successful, not least because the royal Declaration of Sports, issued by James I for Lancashire in 1617 and for the whole country in 1618, then reissued by Charles I in 1633, upheld the lawfulness of many traditional sports on Sundays after evening prayer.¹⁴ In any case there is not much evidence that the puritans ever put a stop to kissing and other forms of youthful dalliance. It can only be speculated how much sexual experimentation went on before youngsters got involved in serious courtship. The indications are that they were fairly circumspect, and of course to pursue any kind of serious sexual activity it was usually necessary to evade the supervision of parents, masters and mistresses. But it would seem that, as Keith Wrightson aptly put it, ‘restraints … crumbled once marriage was in sight’. It is clear that accepted courtship patterns involved growing physical intimacy. Sometimes sex followed on from a promise of marriage, whether an informal understanding between the couple, or in the guise of a binding contract, sometimes called ‘spousals’ or ‘handfasting’, which might well be witnessed and accompanied by elaborate ceremonies. In other cases, pregnancy probably precipitated a decision to marry that might or might not otherwise have taken place.¹⁵

The various possibilities are consistent with what we know of bridal pregnancy from parish register analysis. But plainly they also go far to explain the illegitimacy statistics. Given these fluid courtship patterns, it was inevitable that some women would be unlucky and end up not as pregnant brides but as bastard bearers. They might be the victims of deception, or of their own miscalculations or false expectations. For any number of reasons the man might change his mind. They might also be the victim of adverse circumstances. Sometimes marriage plans were wrecked by illness, death, loss of work, or unexpected failure to secure a house or holding. Occasionally the man could not fulfil his obligations because he went to sea or was pressed for a soldier. While these accidents could affect almost anyone, the people most likely to suffer them were most certainly the poor.

The whole set of circumstances also helps to explain changes in the illegitimacy ratio over time and in particular the peak at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Since illegitimacy was so closely associated with courtship, it was likely to increase in line with fertility and nuptiality, as in the later part of Elizabeth’s reign. In the years around 1600 the effect was reinforced by the disruptions caused by the war with Spain and in Ireland, combined with adverse economic circumstances – the terrible sequence of bad harvests from 1594 to 1597 was succeeded by serious epidemics in some areas. In such conditions, marriage prospects were particularly liable to mishap. Several lines of argument are needed to explain the decline in the illegitimacy ratio in the early seventeenth century. To an extent it reflected a process of readjustment after earlier stresses and dislocations. Marriage became a more remote possibility for many among the poorer sort and the demographic indications are that expectations were adjusted accordingly – it was precisely in this period that the proportion of people who never married rose to the startlingly high figure of 20 per cent.¹⁶

On the other hand, the institutions of sexual repression were reinforced. At the parish level, the minds of local ratepayers were sharply focused by the provisions of the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, which made them liable to support the indigent. They looked increasingly askance at individuals who bore or begot bastards – especially at those who were poor, but also at the better off because they set a bad example. They learned to demand that those responsible for bastard children should post bond or find sureties to ‘save the parish harmless’, and they looked to the local magistrates for assistance in enforcing such measures. Already, by an act of parliament of 1576, justices of the peace were empowered to examine the circumstances of the birth of any bastard child deemed liable to be a charge on the parish, to make an order for maintenance and, at their discretion, to punish one or both parents. These provisions were implemented with increasing frequency in the early seventeenth century, and were strengthened by an Act of 1610 directing that unmarried mothers of chargeable children should be sent to the house of correction for a year. While only a minority of bastard-bearers suffered these statutory penalties, they unquestionably had real bite and no doubt served as a deterrent.¹⁷

The church courts, meanwhile, continued their traditional role of prosecuting adulterers and fornicators. It was local churchwardens who had the duty of ‘presenting’ offenders during the course of ecclesiastical visitations – which took place twice or thrice a year in most areas – and the evidence is that the parishes mostly co-operated, especially in detecting the fathers and mothers of bastard children. Those who were convicted faced the prospect of performing public penance on pain of excommunication. Clad in a white sheet, they were required to make abject confession of their sin in front of the whole congregation assembled in the parish church on a Sunday or major holiday. Since many undoubtedly evaded this humiliating experience, the courts have sometimes been seen as inefficient, but their ability to harass offenders was certainly considerable. When they excommunicated an individual, as like or not this meant in practice that the offender had left the parish – and this was often precisely what local ratepayers wanted. The changing pattern of church court prosecutions also reflects a declining tolerance of sexual laxity even in the context of courtship. By the early seventeenth century in many areas, the courts had begun to punish couples (as previously they had rarely done) for bridal pregnancy or even simple ‘antenuptial incontinence’. This sent a clear message that any form of sexual activity outside marriage was unlawful, and indeed the incidence of bridal pregnancy does seem to have declined in some areas. By this time also the courts were far less willing than they had been earlier to adjudicate in favour of disputed marriage contracts or ‘spousals’ made in advance of the church wedding. Indeed, by the early seventeenth century suits to enforce marriage contracts were few in number, and in many areas there seems to have been a decline in the practice of ‘spousals’ or ‘handfasting’. By this time it was widely accepted that the actual wedding was the important thing, so when people talked of ‘marriage’ they normally meant marriage in church. Births out of wedlock were events that should not happen, a source of scandal and shame or, at best, massive inconvenience to the individuals concerned.¹⁸

Estimating London illegitimacy

How did illegitimacy in London compare with this broader pattern? For many years the sheer scale and complexity of addressing the metropolitan evidence deterred researchers, but Roger Finlay made an initial attempt in 1981, while Richard Adair followed this up with a much more thorough study in 1996. The results were surprising. Whereas A.L. Beier, writing in the mid 1980s, was still confidently asserting that ‘London illegitimacy was undoubtedly high’, Adair found a varied but basically different picture. Of city parishes within the walls, only St Peter Cornhill revealed an illegitimacy ratio comparable (at 2.5 per cent) with those commonly found in lowland England; other city parishes displayed rates below 1.0 per cent. Rates in Southwark parishes (St Saviour’s and St Olave’s) were scarcely higher. Figures for both the northern suburbs (St Andrew Holborn, St Giles Cripplegate and St James Clerkenwell) and adjacent parishes east of the city (St Botolph Aldgate, St Dunstan Stepney) were higher but not dramatically so. In combination the city and suburbs revealed generally low values, reaching a seventeenth-century maximum of 1.0 per cent in the 1620s – some two decades later than the peak found elsewhere in England.¹⁹

Inevitably these numbers are subject to many uncertainties. Higher ratios may be constructed for city parishes if it is assumed that ‘foundlings’ – infants registered as having been ‘laid’ or abandoned – were in fact mostly bastards. This is Finlay’s position, while less explicitly Laura Gowing tends to conflate the two phenomena.²⁰ But Adair argues to the contrary, concluding after a review of the admittedly limited and opaque evidence that ‘[a]lthough some foundlings may well have been illegitimate, they were very likely a minority before 1650’. In any case, there were few foundlings in the suburbs – mothers chose wealthier parishes in which to ‘lay’ children that they either did not want or could not care for – and overall the inclusion of foundlings does not alter the impression that the incidence of illegitimacy in early seventeenth-century London, as measured by entries in parish registers, was quite low. On the other hand, Adair explains, ‘the [London] illegitimacy ratio is far less useful an index … than for rural parishes’. The population of early seventeenth-century London included markedly more young males than females. Hence the ‘skewed age and sex structure … makes it likely that … [the ratio] understates the extent of bastardy in the capital compared with the rural areas until the Civil War, because there was a smaller proportion of the population in London falling into the category of eligible fertile females’.²¹

Completeness of recording is another issue. Adair argues that the best-kept parish registers – those that are plainly defective, or even raise serious doubts as to their reliability, are obviously of little use for calculating illegitimacy ratios – reflect a high level not merely of competence and diligence on the part of local officers, but also of their zeal as active information gatherers, rather than merely passive recorders of information brought to them. For the eastern suburban parish of St Botolph Aldgate there survives a series of memoranda books that in Adair’s view suggest that successive parish clerks were ‘virtually omniscient. They all took great pride in their position and expected to know everything that was going on. Clea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Bridewell, bawdy courts and bastardy in early seventeenth-century London
• 2 Cohabitation in context in early seventeenth-century London
• 3 ‘All he wanted was to kill her that he might marry the Girl’: Broken marriages and cohabitation in the long eighteenth century
• 4 ‘They lived together as man and wife’: Plebeian cohabitation, illegitimacy, and broken relationships in London, 1700–1840
• 5 Bastardy and divorce trials, 1780–1809
• 6 Cohabiting couples in the nineteenth-century coronial records of the Midlands Circuit
• 7 The kindness of strangers revisited: Fostering, adoption and illegitimacy in England, 1860–1930
• 8 The context of illegitimacy from the 1920s to the 1960s
• 9 Cohabitation and births outside marriage after 1970: A rapidly evolving phenomenon
• 10 Cohabitation and marriage in Britain since the 1970s
• Notes
• References
• Index