Rebecca Probert
If your ancestors didn’t want banns read out but couldn’t afford to pay for a licence, there was another route they could take, as Rebecca Probert explains
Prof Probert is a leading academic on the history of marriage law, and the author of Marriage Law for Genealogists.
Leafing through my parents’ wedding album one day, I came across a folded piece of paper. Headed “Marriage Appointment”, it was a record of how my father had given notice at Coventry Register Office of his intended wedding there. It also warned that the wedding could only go ahead if a certificate had also been issued by the superintendent registrar for Rugby, which was the registration district where my mother was living at the time.
Such documents are valuable for adding detail to our knowledge of family weddings. But even when they have not survived, we can draw inferences from the records that have made it through the years. Even a certified copy of an entry in the marriage register – the genealogist’s familiar friend! – may yield useful clues.
The process of giving notice at a register office is one that dates back to the 1836 Marriage Act. This made it possible to marry in the register office itself, or in a non-Anglican chapel that had been registered for weddings. All such weddings – together with Quaker and Jewish weddings – had to be authorised by a superintendent registrar’s certificate. Couples marrying in the Church of England could also use this new civil process instead of banns or an ecclesiastical licence, but this option was never popular.
Much of this will be familiar to anyone who has wed in more recent years, but the finer details and implications of giving notice of a marriage have changed considerably since the 1830s. In interpreting the records of our ancestors’ marriages, we need to know what different terms meant at different times, and what these can tell us about our ancestors’ actions and choices.
Residence & Notice
From the beginning, notice had to be given to the superintendent registrar of the district in which the couple had been resident for at least the
previous week. If both were living in the same district then just one of them could give notice. The records show that this was something that either the bride or the groom could – and did – do. If, as with my parents, the bride and groom were living in different districts, then each had to give notice in their own district.
All notices of marriage were entered into a marriage notice book. Sadly, these have not been digitised to anything like the same extent as books of banns. But where the original marriage notice book can be traced, it can give the family historian some additional clues about where a marriage was likely to have taken place. This will be particularly important where the registers themselves are not available, and where the only information we have about a marriage is the bare details obtainable from sources such as FreeBMD ( freebmd.org.uk). Knowing when a marriage took place, and that the notice specified that it was to take place in a specific register office, say, may save family historians sending off for unnecessary certificates.
Marriage notice books can also offer insights into marriages that did not take place. It was possible for a disapproving parent or guardian to prevent a certificate being issued by writing “FORBIDDEN” in the margin. These objectors had to give their own details, telling us who exactly opposed the marriage.
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How far we can trust the details given in a marriage notice book is another matter. No proof of address or even identity was required.
If you discover that your ancestors married in a different registration district from where they lived, you might well assume that they had sneaked off to marry where they were unknown. However, the true situation will depend on exactly when and how they married.
Since only a small proportion of chapels were registered for marriage in the early years, the options for getting married in any particular registration district rarely reflected the religious diversity of its inhabitants. Superintendent registrars were not allowed by law to issue licences for marriages outside their own district, and they took the view that this restriction also applied when issuing certificates. This meant that non-Anglicans could not travel outside their district to marry in a church or chapel of their own religious denomination.
Frustrated, in 1840 a Catholic couple brought a test case to try to force their superintendent registrar to grant a certificate to marry in a Catholic chapel in a neighbouring district. Although they lost, a sympathetic MP introduced a Bill to change the law. From August 1840, superintendent registrars could authorise marriages in registered places of worship in a district in which neither of the couple lived, if their own district had no suitable place of worship.
Of course, if they were marrying in a register office in a different district, then the couple had either established a temporary residence there or were simply fibbing about their address!
Clergy complained of couples evading the scrutiny of their neighbours and the potential opposition of their parents by going to cities where they were unknown and marrying in the register office. The author Ford Madox Ford, for one, eloped with his girlfriend in 1894 and falsely claimed to be of age. And reports of bigamy trials show that individuals lied about their marital status, altered their ages, and sometimes gave false names.
Faced with evidence of a blatant lie, the family historian might well doubt that their ancestor’s marriage was valid. Yet as long as notice had been given, it did not actually matter if the details were false. In one case from 1907, a widow deliberately used her maiden name in order to conceal her remarriage. If she had remarried after having the banns read out in church, her new union would almost certainly have been annulled because she was no longer known by her maiden name. When the matter came to court, however, the judge ruled that using her previous name when giving notice did not affect the validity of her marriage.
This does not mean that such lies went unpunished – a person who gave false details was still guilty of perjury. Reports of criminal trials reveal a number of prosecutions for making a false declaration, and people whose lies had facilitated a bigamous marriage received particularly harsh treatment.
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When giving notice, couples had a choice: they could either wait 21 days for a certificate to be issued, or they could pay more for a civil licence and cut that waiting period significantly.
The difference in cost was significant. A licence cost £3, and had to be stamped at an additional cost of 10s. A certificate, by contrast, cost just 2s. However, even this was more expensive than having the banns called in the Church of England, which may well have influenced poorer couples’ decisions over where to marry.
The difference in waiting times was originally less significant. Even a licence did not guarantee
Marrying Out Of District It’s easy to jump to conclusions, but don’t be fooled – couples who married away from home didn’t necessarily have something to hide
an instant wedding. Until 1856, couples marrying by civil licence still had to wait seven days. In that year, the waiting time was slashed to a single day, making a licence much more attractive for those who for whatever reason needed to get married in a hurry.
A licence was also more attractive to those who wanted some privacy – at least in the early years. Between 1837 and 1856, notices of marriage had to be read out at meetings of the Poor Law guardians before a certificate could be issued. Middle-class Dissenters understandably resented this, and they campaigned for change. The new law simply required notices to be posted up in the office of the superintendent registrar. As many pointed out at the time, this was really no publicity at all.
Once the wedding had taken place, there was no reason for the happy couple to keep hold of the certificate or licence that had allowed them to marry. A certified copy of an entry in the marriage register will normally record whether the marriage was by certificate or licence, however, and from this we can draw inferences about the wealth of the couple or the possible urgency of the wedding.
Civil Preliminaries & Anglican Weddings
The 1836 Marriage Act offered couples marrying in the Church of England the choice of marrying after obtaining a superintendent registrar’s certificate, on top of the long-established options of either having the banns read or paying extra for a common or special licence. But Anglican
‘Some clergy simply refused to accept the new civil certificates’
clergy were not given a choice. Under an 1837 amendment, they were obliged to marry couples who had obtained a certificate.
Judging from the registrar general’s reports, there was no rush among couples to take advantage of the new option. In the first year, just 493 marriages took place in the Anglican church on the basis of a certificate, a meagre total compared with 13,677 by common licence and 68,140 by banns.
Some clergy, though, simply refused to accept the new civil certificates. From the late 1840s, the General Register Office found itself embroiled in correspondence with indignant officials and obdurate clergymen. After one particularly high-profile stand-off between Church and State, policymakers clearly took the view that trying to impose civil preliminaries upon the Church of England was more trouble than it was worth. From 1856, clergy were allowed to refuse certificates if they so wished. The following year saw a small fall in the percentage of Anglican marriages celebrated on the basis of a superintendent registrar’s certificate, indicating that the clergymen who had opposed them had been a small, if vocal, minority.
Yet even if a vicar was happy to accept a certificate, the chances of it surviving among the parish records are sadly slim. One clergyman, asked to produce the certificate only a few months after the wedding took place, admitted, “We don’t like these certificates, and therefore we always burn them.”
These changes and controversies illustrate how important it is to know what was required for a marriage at different times. Today, paying more to shorten the waiting period is no longer an option: marriage by superintendent registrar’s licence was abolished in 1999. Since then, documentary evidence has been required, making it more difficult for couples to make a false declaration. And since 2014 the waiting period has been extended to 28 days. Altogether, the process of giving notice is much more rigorous now than in past decades and centuries – something for which future generations of family historians may well be grateful when investigating the records of today’s weddings!