Hardwicke's Marriage Act — new rules, eight months old
The record of this wedding owes its very shape to an Act of Parliament that was eight months old when the couple stood at the altar. Before 1754, English law had held a marriage to be made by consent — a promise exchanged, sometimes no more — and around that looseness a trade had grown: clergymen in and about the Fleet prison in London married tens of thousands of couples with no banns, no licence and no questions, and a secret or disputed marriage could surface years later to unmake an inheritance. Lord Hardwicke's Act, passed in 1753 and in force from Lady Day 1754, ended all that. From that day a marriage was valid only if performed in the parish church, after banns called on three Sundays or by licence; every wedding was to be entered in a register in a prescribed form, numbered, and signed by the parties and by at least two witnesses; and a clergyman who broke the rules faced fourteen years' transportation. Quakers and Jews were left to their own usages, and Scotland lay outside the Act altogether — which is why eloping couples now rode for Gretna Green. In a small parish the new machinery was worked with village practicality: the curate kept the forms, and the churchwardens stood as the signing witnesses to every wedding of the year — which is why their names, and not the families', appear at the foot of the entry. The banns called for later generations of this family — at Eastrington in 1880, at Selby in 1908 — were the same instrument still running, a century and a half on. And the numbered entry, the set words, the witness lines that let a marriage be found and proved two hundred and seventy years later: all of it begins here, within a year of the Act's first day.