Marriage and mobility 1754-1810 : an examination of the Anglican marriage registers of selected Shropshire parishes

Abstract

Little is known in detail of the chronology, magnitude and pattern of migration prior to 1800. This thesis examines Anglican Marriage Registers and the insight they can provide into past patterns of mobility in a county of early industrial development. After a discussion of the broad demographic context and a review of previous studies using these data,. three related themes are developed. - 1. Consideration is given to the annual variation in the numbers of marriages solemnised and to the contribution made by extraparochial alliances to this-overall pattern in places of different socio-economic structure and population size. This provides a temporal and structural setting, within which to examine mobility. 2. The locational information recorded in the registers is used to calculate marriage distances and the dimensions and orientation of marriage horizons. The spatial patterns are subsequently integrated with the temporal analysis and with the variety of additional evidence available in the marriage registers to provide a fuller context for evaluating the pattern. This provides an essentially descriptive overview of marriage patterns, but does also yield some explanatory insights. 3. The problems of interpreting these data to give precise information on migration paths are discussed and a model proposed in the light of the empirical evidence. This reveals that the marriage data may be directly related to sex-specific patterns of pre-marital mobility by a simple manipulation, of the marriage record. Throughout the study evidence is drawn from two sample populations. The first covers five hundreds and boroughs in south Shropshire, while the second sample is drawn from all rural parishes in Shropshire. Taken together, these two data sets provide a picture of marriage and mobility from, 1754-1810-which adds to existing understanding on this topic and points to factors which appear to control the pattern.