Maiden Stone and Hallmark THANK YOU. First it was suggested to me that if the marriage bonds were read out in the C of I Mansfieldtown Parish, then the RC priests having seen the bonds, could have just entered the marriage info in their records, although not an official RC marriage? Again I am from Canada so this I have no authority or knowledge on this topic. Not sure when children were born, since the marriage info is where the parents are 60 years of age.
Catholic marriage law required banns to be read aloud at 3 Sunday Masses. If a couple wanted to marry without the required number of banns, usually because they needed to marry in a hurry, then they had to ask for a dispensation from banns. It would have been noted in the marriage register "Disp." and the priest would have charged an admin. fee. R.C. and CoI had different rules about who was allowed to marry whom; e.g. Catholics weren't supposed to marry their 1st cousins (except with a dispensation from the Vatican) but members of an Anglican church could; Catholic godchildren and godparents couldn't marry each other.
The wedding in the Catholic church on this occasion was a religious ceremony and had no legal standing because one spouse was a member of the Church of Ireland. The legal ceremony was the marriage in the Church of Ireland on the same day. Without the CoI ceremony, Rose would have had no legal rights as a wife.
There was a famous court case about a Catholic woman from England who married an aristocratic Irish Protestant in a Catholic church in Ireland. They met abroad during the Crimean war (1850s). They had a "handfasting" ceremony in Scotland (a kind of common-law marriage) before they went to Ireland. Some time after the marriage, the husband rejected his wife and became engaged to an heiress. That was how the wife discovered that she wasn't married according to Irish law. She pursued the man she believed was her husband through courts of 3 countries. Her situation wasn't unique but few abandoned wives were able to take legal action as she had.
A marriage in a Church of Ireland was recognised as canonically valid by the Catholic church at this time. A Catholic couple in England marrying in a Church of England was also accepted by R.C. clergy as this was a legal ceremony. A marriage in a Catholic church in England wasn't legally valid unless a registrar was present. It wasn't until 1909 that Catholic canon law required a Catholic to marry in the presence of a Catholic priest.
A Catholic priest who conducted a marriage between a Catholic and a member of the Established Church (Church of Ireland in Ireland and Church of England in England) was breaking the law during the period when the penal laws against Catholics were in force. Penal laws were gradually eased in both countries between late 18th and early 19th centuries. A Catholic priest was arrested in Ireland around 1830 because he had conducted a marriage in which one spouse was R.C. and one CoI. Some priests refused to conduct a mixed marriage as late as 1860 in case they were accused of flouting the law. (See evidence to Royal Commission on marriage reform). It's possible that the 2 priests who witnessed the wedding of Brabazon Shiels were reluctant to have their names recorded.
After civil registrations of births, marriages and deaths was introduced in England in 1837 most Catholic priests didn't hand in their completed registers to civil authorities, one reason being that the registers contained "illegal" marriages. It's possible that Brabazon and Rose had a secret, illegal wedding in a Catholic church decades before their 2 weddings in 1850. In that case their child would have been regarded by the priest as legitimate at his baptism in 1814.
