Bigamy in an Era of Clandestine Marriages

Previous generations of historians painted a vivid picture of clandestine weddings in early eighteenth-century England and the abuses – including bigamy – to which such weddings gave rise. More recent scholarship, by contrast, has highlighted the ordinariness of clandestine weddings and called into question some of the wilder claims that have been made about the extent of bigamy. It is therefore necessary to set aside any intuitive assumption that the availability of clandestine weddings must have encouraged or facilitated bigamy and look more closely at the evidence. Three claims about the relationship between clandestinity and bigamy will be tested: first, that marriages which had been celebrated clandestinely were particularly conducive to subsequent bigamy; second, that the circumstances under which clandestine weddings were conducted provided greater opportunities for bigamy; and third, that bigamous marriages which had been celebrated clandestinely were harder to prove, enabling those involved to escape conviction. Through a rigorous comparison of bigamous marriages that were celebrated clandestinely with those celebrated in church, a very different picture emerges of the link between clandestinity and bigamy.