Weddings, weekdays, work and leisure in urban England 1791-1911: the decline of Saint Monday revisited

Past & Present, Nov, 1996 by Douglas A. Reid

On 6 August 1838 -- a Monday -- John Harrison, a Birmingham spring maker, briefly looked in at work at 7 a. m., before travelling two miles to a wedding at Aston parish church, returning to central Birmingham for a meeting of the Birmingham Political Union at noon. His absence from work irked his employer and he was sacked.(1) Notice that Harrison's friends or relatives were married on a Monday -- "Saint Monday" -- the day of leisure in artisan tradition at this period, but, as his case implies, a leisure day which was increasingly contested by employers. How general was the observance of Saint Monday and what were the key stages of its decline? These were questions I addressed in the pages of Past and Present fully twenty years ago; my conclusions were based on the historian's tried and trusted method of evaluating contemporary opinion.(2) However, Harrison's case subsequently prompted me to the idea that the pattern of choice of wedding-days might provide, by proxy, a hitherto unavailable quantitative guide to this issue.(3) Weddings, I deduced, represented regularities in social life which were profoundly related to the economic basis of society. Harrison's case thus suggested a broader question of comparative history: if the of weddings in Birmingham during the "long nineteenth century" revealed a pattern which was consistent with the picture derived from "literary" sources, would significantly different patterns be revealed in contrasting types of urban economy?

This was the genesis of the key proposition tested in the present article, namely that the timing of weddings within the framework of the week in several major English towns would demonstrate distinct patterns related to the differing socio-economic structures of these towns: more specifically, that the timing of marriages in two "factory towns", Blackburn and Manchester, would differ markedly from the more workshop-dominated economies of Birmingham and Bristol. My hypothesis was that these differences would be particularly marked by the extent to which people chose, or did not choose, Monday as the day on which to be married. I further surmised that the two types of town would also show different patterns of Saturday marriage as a reflection of the different times at which the Saturday half-holiday was introduced, either compulsorily or voluntarily, into the chief industries of the towns.(4)

If wedding-days were simply chosen at random then there would presumably be a rough equality between the numbers falling on any particular day of the week. On the contrary, there were huge disparities between the proportions married on particular days -- and distinct and regular trends are observable in the timing of the thousands of weddings investigated, many of which can be clearly linked to the patterns of industrial development in the four towns. To anticipate my conclusions briefly, Birmingham and Bristol had important similarities regarding the history of (Saint) Monday marriages, as I had envisaged. Blackburn was very different from them as regards both Mondays and Saturdays, though Manchester -- probably because of its size and its industrial and commercial diversity -- constrasted less obviously with the workshop towns. However, rather unexpectedly, in Bristol Sunday was a more important day, and elsewhere it was second in popularity for weddings -- perhaps because it was a sacred day, but, for those who were forced to work the other six, it was undoubtedly also a day sacred for leisure.

I

This study presents an aggregate analysis based on types of urban economy, and this section will discuss some methodological considerations raised by this approach. Manchester was chosen as the obvious place to compare with Birmingham, because of the strong historiographical tradition asserting the dominance of factories in the one place and workshops in the other.(5) Yet neither town was homogeneous. Manchester's image as a centre of production has obscured its importance as a centre of collection and distribution.(6) It is also true that Birmingham was by no means purely a centre of workshop production: it was developing a significant factory sector, and, equally, an important service sector.(7) Clearly, to study a problem at the level of the town is to study it at a high degree of aggregation, and I hope to undertake a systematic occupational analysis on another occasion. Nevertheless, an interim study exploring the relationship between marriage patterns and what is known of their economic profiles should have some utility.

The other towns chosen for analysis, Blackburn and Bristol, may seem to pose other problems of comparability, yet, as we shall see, the conspicuous trends in their wedding periodicity do appear to validate my central proposition. Blackburn, in central Lancashire, was chosen to represent the "factory town" type, though its earlier industrial character was in fact created mainly by handloom weavings.(8) Weavers, as independent workers, were famously fond of Saint Monday -- thus one might surmise that Blackburn was a town which witnessed staunch Monday observance, and, equally, that the decline of handlooms was likely to be reflected in the decline of Saint Monday there.(9) Bristol was chosen for comparison with Birmingham because its historical calendar of sociability had recently been investigated, again in Past and Present, offering a valuable cross-check on the wedding data and because the industrial (vis-a-vis the commercial) economy of Bristol was roughly comparable with that of Birmingham, the Mecca of the metalworking artisan.(10) Like the churches of all the parishes studied, the church of St Philip and St Jacob in Bristol was of pre-Reformation origins. By 1845 the parish was regarded as "exceedingly poor and populous", though its congregation included a body of "substantial tradesmen".(11)