Marriage by License as a status symbol?

[M_ONeill]

Hey all,

So I've discovered that my 4x great grandparents were married by license in Shropshire in 1787. This has led me into reading up on the differences between Banns/License/Special License.

I've read in a number of places that marriage by license was seen as something of a 'status symbol', but I wonder if anyone could put this idea in a little more detail for me. Exactly how much of a status symbol was it? I also read that, while not inconsequential, the license didn't cost a huge sum of money. At the same time, poor people could also have a sponsor pay for a marriage by license. This, along with people rushing to get married 'before the baby came', would make me think it was kind of a mixed bag as far as how people would have seen this kind of marriage.

Does anyone have any more info on this aspect of Marriage by License in 18th Century England? Why was it such a status symbol?

[barryd]

Or it was War Time and the serviceman/officer's leave would have ended before the Banns were called.

[M_ONeill]

Interesting point, Barry - I hadn't thought of that one! It'd be interesting to see the stats and see if the incidence of marriage by license went up during the times Britain was at war...

[stanmapstone]

A Licence was popular because it had the advantage of relative speed and secrecy, and facilitated a marriage in Lent when banns should not have been called.
According to "Daily Life in 18th-century England" a marriage licence cost £1 1s 4d  http://www.rootschat.com/links/01eno/
According to "Georgian Marriages" at http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~awoodley/regency/marry.html the cost of a common or ordinary licence was 10 shillings. The site is no longer available

Stan

[M_ONeill]

Thanks for the information Stan, it's very interesting! My 4x great grandparents were married in September, so Lent wouldn't have been an issue - but I've come across another possibility for why a license might have been needed; my 4x great grandmother was a Mary Smallman of Monkhopton near Ditton Priors. I read one source that claimed that a lot of the local Smallmans had been Catholics since at least the 16th Century. Makes me wonder about the religion of my ancestors in this part of the tree.

Am I correct in assuming that Catholics (and Non-Conformists) would also want a license rather than a Banns marriage, given that they may not have attended the Anglican church?

[Craclyn]

I have quite a few in my tree who married by licence. I cannot see that any of those would have been doing it as a status symbol.

[Guy Etchells]

According to "Georgian Marriages" at http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~awoodley/regency/marry.html the cost of a common or ordinary licence was 10 shillings. The site is no longer available

Stan

Oh ye of little faith cut and paste the link into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and choose which crawl of the site you wish to view.
https://archive.org/

The internet Archive spiders crawl most websites the do not have the one of the commands disallow or no-index, etc. that stop legitimate spiders and bots crawling them.

General tip if anyone has a list of urls that no longer work try the Internet Archive you may be surprised.
Cheers
Guy

[stanmapstone]

I forgot about the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, see
https://web.archive.org/web/20181129161110/http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~awoodley/regency/marry.html

Stn

[Maiden Stone]

I read one source that claimed that a lot of the local Smallmans had been Catholics since at least the 16th Century. Makes me wonder about the religion of my ancestors in this part of the tree.

Am I correct in assuming that Catholics (and Non-Conformists) would also want a license rather than a Banns marriage, given that they may not have attended the Anglican church?

Everybody in England was Catholic in the 16th century until the Reformation. 
My 18th century Catholic ancestors who could spare the money for the fee married by licence; the rest married by banns. They had 2 wedding ceremonies, Catholic and Anglican.