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

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

This study has used Church of [England weddings, despite the existence of civil marriage from 1837, because the vast majority of weddings continued to be held in Anglican churches. In Blackburn in 1841 the ratio of weddings in the Church of England to Roman Catholic and other weddings was 94:3:3; in Birmingham and Manchester in the summer quarter of 1864 non-Anglican weddings constituted one-fifth and one-seventh of the whole respectively.(12) Moreover, unlike civil weddings, church weddings were held on every day of the week. In each of the other parishes chosen there was a distinct bulge in the number of weddings in the mid-nineteenth century as their populations followed the national expansionary trend, followed by striking falls, caused by the subdivision of parishes which represented the Church of England's response to this expansion, as well as by local population change for economic reasons.(13) The numbers marrying each year made sampling a necessity, and it seemed sensible to choose the census years, and 1791, their late eighteenth-century equivalent, as the points for the "snapshots" to be taken. There is a danger of atypicality in such an approach, of course, but the emergence of consistent trends seems to justify it.

Even apart from the overall increase in population, an immense number of weddings took place in Manchester, and, to a much lesser extent, in Blackburn, because their ancient parishes were huge, including many outlying townships, and because their clergy insisted on monopolizing the performance of marriage ceremonies. Manchester's collegiate parish church (which became a cathedral in 1847) claimed ecclesiastical dues for ceremonies performed throughout the whole parish, doubling the fees charged if people wished to be married in outlying chapels of ease.(14) Its long-held position led to the development of a popular sentiment among Manchester people that they were not "properly wed unless the ceremony took place in `Th' Owd Church'".(15) Thus Manchester regularly saw thousands of weddings per annum, until the collegiate church monopoly became extinct in 1876 with the death of the last holder of the sinecure of parish clerk.(16) Similarly, the vicar of Blackburn, Dr J. W. Whittaker, who dominated church life in the area from 1821 to the 1850s, usually insisted that marriages in the whole of Blackburn parish should be solemnized at his benefice of St Mary's.(17) Thus the wedding data up to and including 1851 derive from the whole of the ancient parish, whereas that for 1861 relates to a newly narrowly circumscribed parish of the same name within the town itself. From 1871 this is supplemented by weddings from the parishes of St Matthew's and St Peter's, created from the original (and adjacent to the residual) parish of St Mary's, and from surrounding years, in order to counter the problem of the decline in wedding numbers at St Mary's. The occasional use of adjacent years also helps to overcome the objection to "snapshot" analysis, and it is a technique I have used for the other towns, particularly to check results which apparently bucked established trends. It may also be objected that data from parishes which were virtually entirely urban (Birmingham and Bristol) are compared with data from parishes which incorporated large rural areas (Blackburn and Manchester). However, since this essay is essentially concerned with the influence of different types of industrial economy, and since the rural hinterland of the factory towns was largely given over to similar industrial developments (often concentrated in townships), then the inclusion of data from outside the main area of urban concentration need not be considered problematical. Again the regularity of the overall trends is encouraging.