Marriage Act 1753 - Modern Misinterpretation

Modern Misinterpretation

Modern commentators, after the work of historians such as Lawrence Stone and Stephen Parker, have often misconstrued both the requirements of the Act and the canon-law requirements which directly preceded it. It has been widely but wrongly asserted, for example, that the Act rendered invalid any marriage involving minors, i.e. those under 21, unless parental consent had been given. In fact, this was true only for the minority of marriages celebrated by licence.

While the parent of a minor could forbid the banns and so prevent a marriage from going ahead, a marriage by banns that took place without active parental dissent was valid. This gave rise to the practice whereby underage couples would resort to a parish where they were not resident to have the banns called without their parents' knowledge. Since the Act specifically prohibited the courts from inquiring into the parties' place of residence after the marriage had been celebrated, such evasive marriages were still valid. The only way in which an aggrieved parent could challenge such a marriage was if there had been a mistake amounting to fraud in the calling of the banns.

It has also been mistakenly asserted that the Act abolished common-law marriage, along with informal folk-practices such as handfasting, broomstick weddings and mop weddings. However, since neither the name nor concept of “common-law marriage” existed in England and Wales at this time, this can be shown to be untrue, while recent scholarship has argued that ideas such as handfasting and "broomstick" or “mop" weddings are the result of Victorian folk-lore and late 20th-century New Age mythology.