A Brief History of Marriage

By Samantha Callan - Care for the Family

The Implications of Civil Divorce

After 1857, by virtue of the Divorce Act of that year, a new court of the crown undercut the ecclesiastical ideal of the indissolubility of marriage by making statutory provision for divorce on the grounds of adultery. By making divorce legally possible on the grounds of adultery this planted the idea that marriage was a matter of contract rather than status. As many will know adultery became the gateway through which people could gain divorces and adultery was feigned in order to give grounds to one party to enable them to terminate the marriage.

Although legal provision for divorce became available gradually, folk customs were followed for the very poor which enabled them to ‘unmarry’ and then remarry. Such folk customs include wife sales in local markets in which the consent of the wife was required and the whole event was often carried out in a jocular manner, with a ‘planted’ purchaser. As with marriage there was an underlying view that something ‘done rite’ ie. according to certain recognised cultural forms was made legal. Such forms of ‘self-divorce’ may have reflected the endurance of a sense of social obligation rather then its breakdown. In more anonymous settings such as large towns people separated and remarried without recourse to ritual. However in smaller-scale settings niceties had to be observed. For the majority in the middle however the fear of prosecution and social stigma made such accommodations inappropriate.