Marraige of age 1800's

[celia]

On the old Marriage certificate's for the early 1800 you often find No parents name given or deceased. Now i had allways thought that the law was you had to have the parents permission to wed if you were under 21. My husband had to go to court in the 60's  to get permission to marry because he was 18 months younger than me. So we take it for granted that if our G.G.G.Grandparents had no parents given, they were of age or over. I only found out a few months ago that my G.G.G. Grandparents were not of age when they married (according to the age on a 1841 Census) Did so many people really lie about their age. Or was it because the church just wasn't to bothered about how old these couple were. Surely people had some form of identification.

Celia

[Carmela]

Hi Celia,
Just noticed that no one had replied to your query.
The source of your problem seems to be the 1841 census. As I understand it, you are saying that you now think that your ggg grandparents were under age when they married because the ages given on the 1841
indicate that they are a few years younger than you had thought previously. Are you allowing for the rounding off of ages in that census? Ages of people from 15 upwards were rounded down to the nearest multiple of 5. Thus, someone of 19 might be listed as 15
and someone of 24 would be 20.
Hope that solves your problem. And ,yes, parental consent was required for people under 21, but parents' names did not usually appear in the church register. If the couple were married by licence, the father's name might be on the marriage licence bond. I gather that this marriage took place in the early 1800s, so there would not be any marriage cert., only an entry in the parish register and perhaps a marriage bond.
 
HTH,
Carmela

[corinne]

And yes. people did lie about their ages, and even about their marital status.  I've come across quite a few cases where a much older husband conveniently dropped his age a bit to lessen the age gap.  Also, with divorce being pretty much unavailable to the masses there was quite a lot of bigamy going on too.  My grandfather (b 1908) managed to get into the army by putting his age up a year or two, so even until quite recent times it seems you could get away with a declaration and no proof.