I posted the following reply to a question on another list and thought you might like to see what I found. She had been worried her question was "stupid." Liz, "...we took each other's word for it." Wow. Absolutely NOT a stupid question. And it can be tied into some other marital questions that come up frequently, such as age at marriage and illegitimacy. The book has some fascinating quotes which I may try to extract and post more fully. Essentially - Marriage, for the ordinary people, was only recently (say 1500 on) a religious rite. Before it was an "agreement" or arrangement between people and families. That custom lingered into the 1700s and 1800s. There was also the sentiment that the church rite of marriage was simply a way to get money. He also cites cases where it sounds as though we today aren't, at core, different from our ancestors - "keep your nose out of my business." [my phrasing] "Church and state are relatively recent additions, which have been grafted onto older popular rites..." In Wales (c.1790) there was a thing called" 'besom weddings,' a form of public, secular rite..." "In Yorkshire, Lancaster and Cheshire those who had gone through some kind of common-law rite were said to be '...married on the carpet and the banns up the chimney' or 'married but not churched'..." Another term was "living tally." And "jumped the besom." "Many simply pleaded...' it wasn't convenient to get a bit of money together, and so we took each other's word for it.' " " ' We don't see any need of such a thing: we have agreed between ourselves and that is enough.' " "If and when urban couples married, they normally did so by the cheapest and quickest means they could find." "Manchester Cathedral's low fees attracted hundreds, especially on Christmas and Whitsun, when the applicants had to be married in batches." Where it is really fascinating is when he ties together in a "forest" look all of the "trees" that we so often see in our research. He has figures for age at marriage, prenuptial pregnancy and illegitimacy, and has made an estimate for common-law marriages, and then links them all together. All of these are actually only indices of the "rite of marriage", and have varied greatly. But, and I think he makes a strong case, [again my phrasing] if figures could be derived for cohabitation (and as a "family unit") it would be a flat line. His estimate of common-law marriages he admits is difficult to ascertain and defend. It is on a graph so is a little hard to be exact ; but he says common-law as a percentage of all marriages was : 1650-1725.....4% 1725-1800.....raises steadily from 5% to 10% 1800-1900.....appears to be a bell curve going from 10% up to 13% back to 10%. He gives numerous examples from contemporary sources and current registry research. One is : In the "...Kent parish of Ash-next-Sandwich, where an estimated fifteen percent of the couples living together between 1740 and 1834 leave no evidence that they were married..." Good question, Liz. Thanks for the prod to look it up. Regards, David PS The book is : "For Better, For Worse British Marriages 1600 to the Present" John R. Gillis Oxford University Press 1985 In a message dated 7/29/03 2:45:35 PM Central Daylight Time, liz.brown57@ntlworld.com writes: > how many couples married in the 19th century as opposed to just living > together