Marriage Separation And Divorce In England 1500 1700

England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did divorce by private act of parliament become available for a select few men and only in 1857 did the Divorce Act and its creation of judicial divorces extend the possibility more broadly. Aspects of the history of divorce are well known from studies which typically privilege the records of the church courts that claimed a monopoly on marriage. But why did England alone of all Protestant jurisdictions not allow divorce with remarriage in the era of the Reformation, and how did people in failed marriages cope with this absence? One part of the answer to the first question, Kesselring and Stretton argue, and a factor that shaped people's responses to the second, lay in another distinctive aspect of English law: its common-law formulation of coverture, the umbrella term for married women's legal status and property rights. The bonds of marriage stayed tightly tied in post-Reformation England in part because marriage was as much about wealth as it was about salvation or sexuality, and English society had deeply invested in a system that subordinated a wife's identity and property to those of the man she married. To understand this dimension of divorce's history, this study looks beyond the church courts to the records of other judicial bodies, the secular courts of common law and equity, to bring fresh perspective to a history that remains relevant today.

Divorce, as we think of it today, is usually considered to be a modern invention. This book challenges that viewpoint, documenting the many and varied uses of divorce in the medieval period and highlighting the fact that couples regularly divorced on the grounds of spousal incompatibility.

In Road to Divorce, Lawrence Stone explored the different ways in which marriage took place, and analysed the confusion and uncertainty surrounding the legality of the institution in its various forms before the Marriage Act of 1753. He now shows in absorbing detail, through a series of case-studies, how courting and marrying couples tended to manoeuvre around the ambiguities of the law, and how they sometimes became entangled in a web of moral and legal contradiction leading to personal catastrophe. There are stories about unwise courtship, prenuptial pregnancies, forced marriages by parents or parish officials, bigamy, clandestine marriages often performed in haste in peculiarly squalid circumstances and repented at leisure. These fascinating studies reveal in intimate, often ribald, detail how men and women adjusted their sexual conduct, moral attitudes, and matrimonial plans to suit an ambiguous legal situation. Professor Stone has traced the ways in which, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, demands by individuals for love and affection were starting to take precedence over family interests and parental dictation in the search for a spouse; the studies he has drawn from court records for Uncertain Unions enable us to see this great moral transition being played out in the lives of men and women, often in their own words. These are vivid, human histories, presented in revealing detail, by a leading historian of the family.

Lawrence Stone's trilogy on marriage in early modern England has been widely praised. The New York Times Book Review hailed the first volume, Road to Divorce as "sure-footed and fascinating commentary" and chose it as a Notable Book of 1990. Christopher Hibbert in the Independent found that the "absorbing and often extraordinary" stories in volume two, Uncertain Unions "throw a clear, bright light not only upon the making and breaking of marriages in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, but also on social customs and the intimacies of private lives." Now, in Broken Lives, the third and final book, Stone sets out to examine the various ways people ended marriages and the lengths to which they would go to do so. Drawing from a massive archive of court cases, Stone presents stories that paint a revealing portrait of divorce in the period before 1857. Divorce could only be obtained by Act of Parliament, and often at great expense and with much difficulty. As Stone writes, however extreme the circumstances, the legal breaking of a marriage on the grounds of cruelty was not easy to obtain in seventeenth-century England. For instance, in Boteler v. Boteler, Anne Boteler, wife of Sir Oliver Boteler, had overwhelming evidence of her husband's abuse (which included death threats and physical attacks on Anne and her children). Yet even though Sir Oliver's own relatives testified against him, it took Anne three years to obtain a legal separation. Of course, in some instances, the wife had the upperhand. In Lovedon v. Lovedon, we see an instance in which a wife could repeatedly appeal her husband's suit for divorce at his expense. By law, Edward Lovedon was obliged to pay all of his wife Anne's bills until they were officially divorced. And in Beaufort v. Beaufort we learn that women would often successfully countersue their husbands for divorce on the grounds of impotence--in those days, it was more than likely that a man would fail the public test he underwent to prove his virility. Other cases reveal intriguing and often spiteful aspects of marital breakdown: servants blackmailing their adulterous masters and mistresses; and husbands suing their wives' lovers for property damage (i.e. to the wives' bodies). One of the world's leading authorities on the history of the family, Lawrence Stone has mapped the arduous routes which people took to break marriages--from private separation agreements to Parliamentary ruling. And as he does so, he provides a fascinating glimpse into daily life and marital conduct, and allows us to eavesdrop on the testimony and conversations of men and women of all sorts and conditions--from the serving girl to the served--in the changing social world of early modern England.

Addresses Early Modern representations of chastity and adultery, as well as matrimony and its dissolution in both the private and public realms, including the most well known marital dissolution, that of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

The book explores the rise of civil divorce in Victorian England, the subsequent operation of a fault system of divorce based solely on the ground of adultery, and the eventual piecemeal repeal of the Victorian-era divorce law during the Interwar years. The legal history of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 is at the heart of the book. The Act had a transformative impact on English law and society by introducing a secular judicial system of civil divorce. This swept aside the old system of divorce that was only obtainable from the House of Lords and inadvertently led to the creation of the modern family justice system. The book argues that only through understanding the legal doctrine in its wider cultural, political, religious, and social context is it possible to fully analyse and assess the changes brought about by the Act. The major developments included the end of any pretence of the indissolubility of marriage, the statutory enshrinement of a double standard based on gender in the grounds for divorce, and the growth of divorce across all spectrums of English society. The Act was a product of political and legal compromise between conservative forces resisting the legal introduction of civil divorce and the reformers, who demanded married women receive equal access to the grounds of divorce. Changing attitudes towards divorce that began in the Edwardian period led to a gradual rejection of Victorian moral values and the repeal of the Act after 80 years of existence in the Interwar years. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers with an interest in legal history, family law, and Victorian studies.

Addresses Early Modern representations of chastity and adultery, as well as matrimony and its dissolution in both the private and public realms, including the most well known marital dissolution, that of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

Kitchin, S.B. A History of Divorce. London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1912. xvi, 293 pp. Reprinted 2002 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 2001041400. ISBN 1-58477-190-9. Cloth. $75. * A history of divorce from the early Roman era to the present. "It covers in a brief, readable way the law during the Roman period, in the Eastern Church and Eastern Europe, in the canon law and Western Europe, from the Reformation to the French Revolution, in England, the United States and the British Colonies.": Marke, A Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University (1953) 758.