Marriage in Ireland 1660-1925: lifting the veil on Irish couples

Marriage in Ireland 1660 - 1925

Author: Maria Luddy and Mary O’Dowd

ISBN-13: 978-1108731904

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Guideline Price: £24.99

"Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage,
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one without the other."

Thus Sammy Cahn’s sardonic version of arguably the most powerful institution in the world, made popular in the 1950s by Frank Sinatra who clearly believed in marriage since he did it so often.

While love and marriage can be vitally connected, this was not always the case, and indeed is not today in various parts of the world. Marriage is connected to myriad aspects of society, including formation of the most numerous types of families, a basis for the rearing of children, a focus for long-term companionship, a space for sanctioned sexual activity, linkages between and within families, consolidation of that familiar power, and of course, the acquisition and merging of assets. It can also be a space for the oppression and subjugation of some women, a dangerous environment for some children, and a costly experience, both emotionally and financially, for all parties if it fails.

And there can be, and often is, love.

Marriage in Ireland 1660-1925, by two of Ireland’s most eminent historians of women and gender, is a valuable contribution to our understanding of this complicated institution over a period of 265 years, and it greatly expands our understanding of its development, structure, legal framework, variations in practise, and as far as possible, the reaction of participants.

The authors are not particularly interested in aristocratic marriage, already examined by historians, but in middle- and lower-class marriage, of which there has never before been an extended study. They caution against drawing too many hard and fast conclusions on the basis of the sources available to them – the destruction of our records in 1922 leaves a huge gap – but ingeniously manage to make the best of what is left to construct a narrative full of useful statistics and stories.

The book’s chapters deal with definitions of marriage, pathways to marriage, the experience of marriage, including adultery and bigamy, and the failure of marriage, including marital violence, divorce and desertion. The reason for the emphasis on negative aspects of marriage is that discord and dispute generate documents, whereas peace and contentment do not cause people to go to court. There is simply much more evidence for unhappy than happy marriages.

‘Couple beggars’

There is a very useful chapter on what constituted a valid marriage over the period, a question made very difficult to answer in Ireland largely because of three main competing religions: Church of Ireland Protestantism, Catholicism and Presbyterianism, ministers of which denominations were allowed to marry some, all or none from the others, and often charged heavy fees for their services. In an early Irish solution to an Irish problem, “couple beggars”, unattached clergy from any of the religions, would marry most people for a reasonable sum of money until the mid-19th century when proper registration of marriage begins, and ceremonies move from private houses into churches and chapels.

The authors examine how young people might meet future partners, usually through family connections, church, or direct matchmaking by families. As women became more independent and entered the workplace, opportunities to meet partners expanded. Gifts given by suitors are interesting: in the 1890s, one enterprising young man sends his beloved boxes of apples, which must have endeared him to her family as well as herself. Valentine cards are much older than I thought, dating from the 1850s. Gemstone engagement rings come in in the 1880s. One suitor kept 13 locks of hair, each taken from the women he courted over a nine-year period. He finally got lucky.

Gossip

The 19th-century equivalents of salacious personal gossip in the tabloids and rancid corners of social media were breach of promise court cases, which were reported in detail in the newspapers and attended by large curious crowds. These cases supplied information on the most intimate transactions between courting couples. Their heyday was the 18th-19th centuries. They mostly involved women suing men whom, they said, had promised to marry them and then reneged. If the plaintiff could prove that such a promise had been made, or if the defendant’s behaviour towards her indicated such an understanding, she stood to get serious damages from the court, which in turn could provide a dowry for the successful litigant to marry someone else. A risky but potentially rewarding route to marriage, just not to the original suitor.

Abductions were a more serious route to marriage; young men risked abducting young women better off than themselves, sometimes raping them, in the hope that marriage would result due to damage to the woman’s reputation. Sometimes the abductions were collusive – a way for a young couple to evade their parents’ constraints on marriage. There was, however, a real risk of prosecution (which is how we know about the cases in the book, there were probably many more abductions that never came to court), leading to imprisonment, transportation, or even execution.

The chapter on marital relations explores, as far as is possible, what married life was like for most people over the period. Again, because most people did not leave memoirs or journals behind them to tell us how they felt, oblique strategies, such as looking at wills to determine how men made provision for their wives, are employed to good if slightly morbid effect. Further chapters on adultery and extra-marital sex, bigamy, marital violence, desertion and divorce all cast valuable and original light on aspects of marital breakdown, or in the case of bigamy, multiplication, and the research underlying these explorations is a credit to both the authors and their research assistants, Katie Barclay and John Bergin. The quantity of original archival research in this volume is remarkable in itself.

There is a shadow book which cannot be written about Irish marriage from conventional historical sources, with chapter headings like romance, wedding ceremonies, domestic settings, sexual pleasure, children and their effects, long-term companionship and loss of spouse. For that book, we would have to turn to novels, drama and poetry: is there a more stunning evocation of a good marriage than in Eavan Boland’s poem Quarantine: “What there is between a man and a woman/And in what darkness it can best be proved.”?

Marriage in Ireland is a huge piece of research and analysis which will provide material for further serious work for many years. Our social history is greatly enriched by its existence.