Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987

by Lawrence Stone

Lawrence Stone is one of the world's foremost historians. In such widely acclaimed volumes as The Crisis of the Aristocracy , The Family, Sex and Marriage in England and The Open Society , he has shown himself to be a provocative and engaging writer as well as a master chronicler of English family life. Now, with Road to Divorce , Stone examines the complex ways in which English men and women have used, twisted, and defied the law to deal with marital breakdown.
Despite the infamous divorce of Henry VIII in 1529, Britons before the 20th century were predominantly, in Stone's words, "a non-divorcing and non-separating society." In fact, before divorce was legalized in 1857, England was the only Protestant country with virtually no avenue for divorce on the grounds of adultery, desertion, or cruelty. Yet marriages did fail, and in Road to Divorce , Stone examines a goldmine of court records--in which witnesses speak freely about love, sex, adultery, and marriage--memoirs, correspondence, and popular imaginative works to reveal how lawyers and the laity coped with marital discord. Equally important, in tracing the history of divorce, Stone has discovered a way to recapture the slow, irregular, and tentative evolution of moral values concerning relations between the sexes as well as the consequent shift from concepts of patriarchy to those of sexual equality. He thus offers a privileged, indeed almost unique, insight into the interaction of
the public spheres of morality, religion, and the law.
Written by the foremost historian of family life, Road to Divorce provides the first full study of a topic rich in historical interest and contemporary importance, one that offers astonishingly frank and intimate insights into our ancestors' changing views about what makes and breaks a marriage.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Marriage

488 pages, Hardcover

First published December 6, 1990

About the author

Lawrence Stone was an English historian of early modern Britain. He is noted for his work on the English Civil War and marriage. Stone was a major advocate of using the methods of the social sciences to study history.

Reviews

[Darlene Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

I became interested in this book when a romance writer sited it in her end notes. She'd used it for historical information regarding divorce in the olden days. As a funny aside, her husband was a little nervous to see this book sitting on her desk. It can be a little dry at times, as historical tomes can be, but stick around for the good stuff. Several real-life divorces are discussed. If you had enough money it was possible to obtain a divorce in jolly old England. Only the husband could apply, the wife wasn't allowed to file. Adultery was the number one reason but several others are mentioned. In one case the husband had all his children declared bastards, he said he doubted they were his. It's a strange ride through the past with shades of our present still visible. It's amazing how long it took the law to catch up with societal changes. In some cases we may still be behind the times.

[Johanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Divorce in England has had a chequered history: it was available in Anglo-Saxon times, less available in early Norman times and then increasingly unavailable until the Reformation. In European Protestant countries the Reformation made divorce more accessible but in England there was stalemate; it was the only Protestant country without divorce. Until 1857 unhappily married husbands and wives had virtually no means of obtaining a divorce under either canon law or civil law. Stone’s work covers the period 1530 to 1987; it looks at divorce and necessarily marriage across this period. During the period covered by this book divorce or annulment went from being a rare action, largely confined to the moneyed classes, to a commonplace event that ended approximately one in three marriages. It is a substantial book, first published in 1990 and it is still one of the National Archives recommended books on divorce.

Although Stone sets out to explain why things changed, what he actually does is to show how things changed, which is the answer to a different question. His overuse of generalisations undermines the reader’s confidence in his assertion and conclusions. The use of legal cases as his basis ensures or that the book is not representative of any sector of society other than the upper middle classes and even then has a considerable bias towards the male perspective. The book lacks sufficient reference to cultural artefacts that might have given us an idea of the mindsets of the litigants or any idea of the social and economic changes that occurred alongside these changes. His outdated views on women and his use of evidence drawn principally from court sources ensure that we cannot be getting the full story. Stone’s use of statistical evidence is also sporadic, although he provides tables of figures relating to numbers of cases before the courts he doesn’t put any figure into the broader context of population, numbers of marriages or even social class. The detail that he does provide however is fascinating and illuminating and overall he provides a solid background to the issue of divorce from Tudor times to the late 20th century.

[R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe I'm just weird, but this is a subject I'm interested in, so I quite enjoyed it.