776 



iiF. 1STRATIOX. 



'.he war uyaiiist Franc? u-itli vigour." It is a very 

 long Act ; and the amount of duty to be paid on 

 births, marriages, and burials, according to rank or 

 condition, is minutely set down. All persons in 

 holy orders were directed, under a penalty of 

 100, to keep a register of marriages, christen- 

 ings, and burials, to which the collectors of tin- 

 rate were to have free access without fee. Parents 

 were bound to give notice to the collectors within 

 five days after the birth of a child, under a penalty 

 of 40s. A supplementary Act was passed, (the 

 9th Will. III. c. 3-2.) entitled, " An Act for pre- 

 venting Frauds and Abuses in the charging, col- 

 lecting, and paying the duties upon Marriages, 

 Births, Burials, Bachelors, and Widowers." 



Considerable excitement prevailed in 1753, re- 

 specting a Registration Bill which had been intro- 

 duced into the House of Commons. In the begin- 

 ning of that ycur, Mr Thomas Potter, son of Dr 

 Potter, archbishop of Canterbury, brought in a 

 Bill " For taking and registering an annual account 

 of the total number of Marriages, Births, and 

 Deaths ; and also of the total number of poor re- 

 ceiving alms from every parish and extra parochial 

 place in Great Britain." It passed the Commons, 

 but was rejected by the Lords." During its 

 passage through the lower House, it was most 

 strenuously opposed by a Mr William Thornton, 

 who declared himself utterly astonished that any 

 individual of the human species should be so pre- 

 sumptuous and abandoned as (o make such a pro- 

 position. His argument (which he held up in 

 various forms, until the minority that voted with 

 him increased on each reading from 2 to 17, and 

 57) was that "an annual register of our people 

 will acquaint our enemies abroad with our weak- 

 ness, and a return of the poor rate our enemies at 

 home with our wealth." 



The 52 Geo. III. c. 146, made some alteration 

 of the law respecting parish registers. This Act 

 was entitled, An Act for the better regulating 

 and preserving Parish and other Registers of 

 Births, Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials in Eng- 

 land. It received the Royal Assent on the 28th 

 of July, 1812. It directed that the registers of 

 parishes, and of cliapelries, (where the ceremonies 

 of baptism, marriage, and burial were performed,) 

 should be kept in books of parchment, or of good 

 and durable paper, on which should be printed the 

 heads of information required to be entered ; and 

 that the register books should be kept in a dry, 

 well painted iron chest, in the residence of the 

 officiating minister, or in the parish church or 

 chapel. Copies on parchment of all registers 

 were also to be sent annually to the registrar of 

 each diocese. The title of this Act is recited in 

 the preamble of the new Registration Act, and so 

 much of it as relates to the registiation of mar- 

 riages is repealed. 



" No person will be surprised," says Mr Rick- 

 man, " that one half of the registers anterior to 

 A.D. 1600 should have disappeared. If any other 

 nation possesses similar registers of that date, (a 

 valuable proof of uninterrupted civilization,) a 

 comparison might be instituted, and the preserva- 

 tion of such records through three hundred years 

 would not prove to have been of frequent occur- 

 rence ; but in point of fact, examination shows that 

 812 English Parish Registers commence in the 

 year 1538, about 40 of which contain entries 

 (copied probably from family Bibles and tomb- 

 stones) anterior to the date of Cromwell's injunc- 



tion ; 1,822 Parish Registers commence from A D. 

 1558 to 1603, when the canons authorized by 

 king James directed a copy of all parish registers 

 to be made and preserved ; and nearly one half of 

 them (5,082) have been preserved accordingly, and 

 are now extant. Parish registers, to the number 

 of 969, commence between that time to the year 

 1650; 2,757 from A.D. 1650 to 1700; 1,476 

 Parish Registers from A. D. 1700 to the year 

 1750; the rest (six or seven hundred) since that 

 time." 



The law relative to the solemnization of mar- 

 riage in England, previous to 1754, was in a very 

 undefined state. The following brief sketch was 

 given by Dr Lushington in the House of Commons, 

 March 17, 1835 : " By the ancient law of this coun- 

 try as to marriages, a marriage was good, if cele- 

 brated in the presence of two witnesses though 

 without the intervention of a priest. But then came 

 the decision of the Council of Trent, rendering the 

 solemnization by a priest necessary. At the Refor- 

 mation we refused to accept the provision of the 

 Council of Trent, and in consequence the question 

 was reduced to this state that a marriage by civil 

 contract was valid; but there was this extraordinary 

 anomaly in the law, that the practice of some of 

 our civil courts required in certain instances, and 

 for some purposes, that the marriage should be 

 celebrated in a particular form. It turned out 

 that a marriage by civil contract was valid for 

 some purposes, while for others such as the 

 descent of real property to the heirs of the mar- 

 riage it was invalid. Thus, a man, in the presence 

 of witnesses, accepting a woman for his wife, per 

 verba di prasenti, the marriage was valid, as I have 

 said, for some purposes ; but for others, to make it 

 valid, it was necessary that it should be celebrated 

 in facie ecclesice. This was the state of the law 

 till the passing of the Marriage Act in 1754." 



It may be added, that a common notion pre 

 vailed, that the solemnization of a marriage by a 

 person in holy orders rendered it sacred and indis- 

 soluble. This belief was one cause of the Fleet 

 and other marriages in London, to repress the 

 scandals and indecencies of which the Act of lord 

 chancellor Hardwicke was passed in 1753. But 

 this Act, in abolishing all clandestine and irregular 

 marriages, compelled all persons, except Jews and 

 Quakers, to be married according to the ri'.ual of 

 the Church of England so that, in curing one 

 evil, it created another, by laying a restraint on 

 those who differed from the Established Church, 

 which has only been remedied by the law passed 

 during a late session of Parliament. 



The authority of the archbishop of Canterbury to 

 grant special licences is derived from the 25 Henry 

 VIII. c. 21, entitled, "An Acte for the exoneration 

 from exactions payde to the See of Rome." Henry, 

 in furtherance of his quarrel with the pope, caused an 

 Act to be passed (32 Henry VIII. c. 38.) by which 

 he declares " all persons to be lawful that be not 

 prohibited by God's law to marry," and that "no 

 reservation or prohibition, God's law except, shall 

 trouble or impeach any marriiige within the Leviti- 

 cal degrees." 



During the commonwealth, a great number of 

 marriages were solemnized by justices of the peace. 

 Doubts having been raised about their validity, an 

 Act was passed, the 12 Charles II. c. 33, entitled, 

 " An Act for Confirmation of Marriage," in which 

 all such marriages solemnized from the 1st May, 

 1642, were confirmed. 



