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

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

IV

We now compare Birmingham's experience with that of the other towns, commencing with the position regarding Monday in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it becomes clear that Saint Monday was indeed a well-established, though differentially popular, tradition in urban Britain. In this period -- which witnessed not the birth but the youth of the factory system -- the dominance of the workshop mode of production and the relative flexibility of commitment of its labour force is clearly reflected in the substantial proportion of Monday weddings in all four towns: averaging just under 40 per cent in Birmingham; fully 40 per cent in Blackburn; about one-third in Manchester; and just over one-quarter in Bristol(42) (Figures 1, 4, and 6).

[Figure 4 and 6 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Even though Bristol had the lowest proportion of Monday weddings of all four cases studied, particular regard needs to be paid to it, because of the three other towns investigated the economic profile of Bristol is closest to that of Birmingham, and because the evidence of Saint Monday marriages in Bristol accords tellingly with the "time-profile" created by Mark Harrison from newspaper reports on all the various types of crowd events which took place in Bristol between 1790 and 1835. Thus, in addition to direct comments that Monday was "generally a day of idleness", 31 per cent of all reported crowd events occurring there in Harrison's period took place on Mondays -- and two-thirds of them took place during nominal working hours.(43) It is not terribly surprising then to discover that 36 per cent of the 1811 weddings in Bristol were Monday weddings, although that appears to have been a peak year, and the normal proportion was just over a quarter (Figure 4). Harrison depicts Monday as part of a normal weekend -- "a fixed arrangement and not merely a by-product of weekend inebriation" -- for "many workers in England, even as late as 1850-.44 It is encouraging to find that the wedding data lend support to his view of the significance of Mondays (and not just up to 1850), even if in this particular Bristol parish Saint Monday was not quite so well observed as in Birmingham.

However, the most remarkable example of adherence to Monday weddings is offered by Blackburn in the early nineteenth century, especially in 1821 when Monday weddings constituted 48 per cent of the total (Figure 5). Undoubtedly the explanation is that the occupational structure of the town and parish was still at this stage dominated by handloom weaving (whose practitioners, it will be recollected, were intense devotees of Saint Monday), for factory spinning in Blackburn had only begun to make progress in the late 1810s.(45) By comparison, Manchester -- where the first Boulton and Watt steam-engine had been applied to cotton manufacture as early as 1798 -- saw Monday weddings peak at just over one-third of the total in 1801, hover at a slightly lower level until 1831, and fall gradually thereafter.(46) (Figure 6) The fact that Monday weddings in Manchester peaked at a considerably lower level than in Blackburn plausibly suggests the greater heterogeneity of the Manchester economy.