FLEET MARRIAGES. Irregular and clan destine marriages, celebrated in the Fleet Prison and vicinity toward the end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth century. The Fleet Prison naturally had its chapel where regular marriages could be contracted; and there is no reason for believing that the earliest recorded marriages in the Fleet (1613-74) were in any way irregular. But in the latter half of the sev enteenth century clandestir.e marriages became very common in England, owing to the great ex pense of the public ceremony. In many of the churches marriages were performed without li cense or banns. By an act of 1696 (17 and 18 Wm. III., c. 35 sees. 2-3) a penalty of £100 was imposed upon any clergyman who married or permitted another to marry couples otherwise than by banns or license. This act partially checked clandestine marriages in the Fleet Chapel. but it had no restraining influence upon the debtor clergymen of the prison, for whom the penalty of a fine could have no terrors. Accordingly it came to be common for those who desired to be married in secret to resort to the Fleet. Irregular clergymen and even laymen gathered in the vicinity to share in the business of performing marriage ceremonies. They opened offices in ale-houses and barber-shops, and em ployed 'pliers' or 'touts' to secure the custom of those desiring their services. A scandalous com petition arose in which these clergymen strove to outdo one another in laxity, in order to increase their business. Registers of marriages were kept
and manipulated to suit the desire of the con tracting parties. Youths were enticed into mar riage with persons of low degree; bigamous mar riages were connived at by the clergyman who thus gained an additional fee. The abuses of the system, in short, would be beyond credence were they not attested by a vast amount of evidence.
These marriages were not illegal, since before the Act 26 Geo. II., c. 33, there was no neces sity in England for any religious ceremonial in the performance of a marriage, which might be contracted by mere verbal consent. But those who had contracted a Fleet marriage had no evidence of the fact. The Fleet parsons kept reg isters, indeed, but they were so notoriously falsi fied that they were not received as evidence in courts of law (Doe I. Davies vs. Gatacre, 8 Carr and P., 578). Thus innocent parties were fre quently involved in the greatest hardships. Fi nally, conditions became so intolerable that it was necessary to sweep away the whole system. The 25 Geo. II., c. 33, declared void all marriages in England that should be solemnized otherwise than in a church or public chapel where banns had been published, unless under a special license. The Fleet marriage disappeared when this act went into force. Consult : Burn, History of Fleet Marriages; Ashton, The Fleet (London, 1889).