A Lost Frontier Revealed by Alan Fox

Author:Alan Fox [Fox, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Historical Geography
ISBN: 9781907396366
Google: kqWVGljk1RMC
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
Published: 2010-04-15T00:33:58+00:00

Marriage licences and bondsmen

The marriage registers perhaps provide the most valid and reliable evidence for discovering links between parishes in the late eighteenth century. They have the advantage of covering all sections of society and allow fairly quick collection of data over a large geographical area. There are other sources for investigating links between parishes, but they have the disadvantage that they refer only to wealthier people and data collection is more time-consuming. In the remainder of this chapter these other sources, which provide evidence of eighteenth-century links between parishes on either side of the border between Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, are described. Data are found for fourteen parishes, four in Leicestershire and ten in Kesteven, comprising the so-called Focus Area. The four Leicestershire parishes are Croxton Kerrial, Saltby, Sproxton and Buckminster with Sewstern, all adjacent to the county boundary. The ten Kesteven parishes are Wyville-cum-Hungerton, Skillington, Stainby and Gunby, all adjacent to the county boundary, and Little Ponton, Great Ponton, Stoke Rochford, Colsterworth and North Witham, all in the Witham Valley. The sources which provide the data include marriage licence data, probate records and a full family reconstitution based largely on the parish registers.

For people wishing to get married there were two methods available in the eighteenth century. The normal way was the reading of banns three times before the marriage in the church in which the marriage was to take place, and if applicable, also in the parish church of the extra-parochial partner. The second process required obtaining a marriage licence from the Archdeaconry Court or Diocesan Court, or more usually from a local clergyman acting as a surrogate of the archdeacon or bishop. All the Focus Area parishes were in the Lincoln Diocese but the four Leicestershire ones were in Leicester Archdeaconry and the ten Kesteven ones in Lincoln Archdeaconry, although in practice the Diocesan (Consistory) Court was used for the Lincolnshire cases. In the Focus Area, applicants from the four Leicestershire parishes applied to surrogates of the Archdeacon of Leicester, particularly Edward Dixon, the Vicar of Buckminster and, after 1773, Thomas Ford at Melton Mowbray. In the ten Lincolnshire parishes the Vicar of Grantham, in particular, acted as the surrogate of the Bishop of Lincoln.

The application for a licence was usually more costly than the reading of banns so the wealthier sections of the community were more likely to use this method. For example, over half the people who were farmers and yeomen at some time in their lives applied for licences when they married, but only 15 per cent of the some-time labourers and 11 per cent of the some-time cottagers did so. Licences were more likely to be used when one of the partners was extra-parochial and especially when a partner was out-of-county. In these cases the alternative was to have the banns announced in both parishes, which may have brought the cost nearer to that of a licence. The main reason for preferring licences was probably to avoid the embarrassment of hearing the banns

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