Travel to Gloucestershire for wedding in 1651?

[Bristol20]

Am looking for confirmation either way: fellow Americans tracking the origins of the Quaker Browne/Brown family which emigrated to the colonies and helped create the Nottingham settlement for William Penn may have grabbed a document which doesn't belong to our family. 

Specifically, there's an online marriage record for a Richard Browne who married a woman named Mary Masters in Gloucestershire on 14 Aug 1651.  I didn't know whether to automatically accept this as fact if only because of the travel required at the time.  Would this have been usual practice? 

Richard's wife was named Mary and his name was spelled with an "e" on the end and his known children were born after that date, but it might just be convenient to find an ancient, foreign, record online.  Thoughts?

[hurworth]

You may struggle to find the records you're after, as many from that era will not have survived.  A name like Richard Browne isn't all that unusual - I'm looking for one myself from much later who witnessed the marriage of my husband's gtgtgt-grandparents in London in 1833.

For people with some wealth then it was possible that they married someone from further away - that occurred in one line of my family.  I was surprised to find an ancestor of mine witnessing a baptism in Edinburgh in the 1650s when the trip from his home to Edinburgh would take about three hours by car on modern roads - but then I realised that at that time he was an MP so perhaps the Scottish parliament was sitting at the time and he was there anyway.

I have this man on my watchlist at FamilySearch and watch all the nigh impossible edits that occur  - https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/MKQM-JGR    It's probably a similar situation.

[PrawnCocktail]

I have one the other way round in 1716/7 - Job Goodman of Bradden married Hannah Collett of Slaughter, Gloucestershire in Middleton Cheney. Bride's residence confirmed by both PR and marriage license, and bride's baptism found in Upper Slaughter.

[lobbzz]

I'm not sure if you mean Mr Browne travelled from the States back to England for the wedding, or if you mean he travelled from one part of England to another. Travel by even relatively poor people in England at this time was much more common than we think nowadays. Unlike many european countries at the time, most people were able to travel freely if they needed to because internal travel documents were not necessary, unlike the smaller countries in europe where a lot of people were still affectively serfs of the manor.. In any case this wedding takes places at the end of the English Civil War which obviously caused a lot of social upheaval.
If in the case you meant did he sail back to England, again this is not impossible as once the colonies tobacco trade was established traffic between the 2 increased a lot, the journey could be done in 6 weeks to 2 months if the weather was good.

Am looking for confirmation either way: fellow Americans tracking the origins of the Quaker Browne/Brown family which emigrated to the colonies and helped create the Nottingham settlement for William Penn may have grabbed a document which doesn't belong to our family. 

Specifically, there's an online marriage record for a Richard Browne who married a woman named Mary Masters in Gloucestershire on 14 Aug 1651.  I didn't know whether to automatically accept this as fact if only because of the travel required at the time.  Would this have been usual practice? 

Richard's wife was named Mary and his name was spelled with an "e" on the end and his known children were born after that date, but it might just be convenient to find an ancient, foreign, record online.  Thoughts?

[BumbleB]

hurworth mentioned "people with some wealth" and I wonder if this was the case here.

The marriage entry states "Mr Richard Browne and Mrs Mary Masters".  The 1652 marriage entry does not indicate any title, nor the 1653 entry, nor the earlier marriage entry in 1648.

[GrahamSimons]

Richard's wife was named Mary and his name was spelled with an "e" on the end .  Thoughts?

I wouldn't put any weight on 'e' or no 'e'. Having transcribed the records from my own parish of about that period, spelling was, to say the least, wobbly. You could find the same individual spelled in different ways in two consecutive entries only days apart. Your only bit of good news here is that there aren't many ways to spell 'Brown' phonetically!

[rosie99]

You don't mention where the children that you think may belong to this couple are being born/baptised

[Bristol20]

Thank you for the feedback.  No, sorry, did not mean to imply that Richard traveled to the colonies.  His two sons did. 

The children were born in Northamptonshire and recorded in the Wellingborough Meeting Minutes.  I wasn't sure if part of the equation might be that Richard was willing to travel for a wedding to another non-conformist.  Since he lived in an area where there was a degree of non-conformity across the community, I wasn't sure whether to read any implication into this or not. 

And thank you very much for explaining the "Mrs" in the marriage record.  I was going to ask what that squiggle meant.  I didn't know there were multiple records.  Not to segue too much, what does that imply? 

[BumbleB]

"Multiple records" - I was looking at the parish records, and found that marriages in that parish recorded in 1648, 1652 and 1653 made no mention of any title - each was "forename and surname" for groom and "forename and surname" for bride.  Whereas the 1651 marriage had the additional information of "Mr" and "Mrs" - so might this have been a more special marriage?