MARRIAGE MARKET

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 487, 17 October 1928, Page 16

MARRIAGE MARKET

AN ANCIENT INSTITUTION OLD LONDON RECORDS The matrimonial agent is no new institution. About 1820 a professional match-making gentleman was advertising “An establishment where persons of all classes, who are anxious to sweeten life by repairing to the altar of hymen, have an opportunity of meeting with proper partners." Patrons were requested to "inquire for Mr. Jameson, 5 Great St. Helen’s Place, Bishopgate, London—up one pair of stairs.” Those who climbed the stairs must have been hard to please if they could not be suited with one of the many matrimonial “bargains” on Jameson's Books. They ranged from "an lieiresß to an estate in the county of Essex, to the value of £30,000 —religion, that of my future husband,” to a “mechanic of sober habits,” and presumably nothing but his soberness to recommend him. In the 18th century, money was so inseparable from respectable marriage contracts that the “Gentlemen’s Magazine” regularly reported the fortunes that brides brought to their husbands. Witness this announcement in 1731: “Married, the Rev. Mr. Roger Waina, of York, about twenty-six years of age, to a Lincolnshire lady, upwards of eighty, with whom he is to have £B,OOO in money, £3OO per annum, and a coach and four.” The celebration of marriage, without banns or licence, was a profitable and scandalous trade in those far-off days. Such ceremonies were mostly performed by disreputable parsons who were confined within the confines of the Fleet Prison, London. But other marriage hucksters flourished in Mayfair, the Mint, and the Savoy. Scores of alehouse landlords kept clergymen on the premises, sharing the fees, or paying the parsons a wage of a pound or so a week. Many parsons, however, were not willing to let the publicans have a picking of the profits, and ran their own marriage establishments. Marriages could be performed at any hour of the day or night. But the clocks in the marriage houses were always kept at the canonical hour. Certificates could be antedated for a “consideration,” or supplied even when no marriage had taken place. Needy fortune-hunters and profligates flocked to the notorious marriage markets, ladies up to their eves in debt, spinsters who wanted husbands immediately. In 1754 an Act of Parliament declared all marriages without banns or licence null and void. But in the same year this advertisement appeared in “The Public Advertiser: “Marriages performed with the utmost privacy, decency, and regularn? at the Ancient Chapel of St. John the Baptist, in the Savoy.” The proprietor of the chapel the Rev. John Wilkinson, many years afterwards continued issue lie ces on his own authority. But the authorities had him * • rested at last, and he was sentence® to fourteen years’ transportation—a by that sentence over 1,400 marriage became void.