The English Marriage: Tales of Love, Money and Adultery

by Maureen Waller

The story of the English marriage is unique and eccentric. Long after the rest of Europe and neighboring Scotland had reformed their marriage laws, England clung to the chaotic and contradictory laws of the medieval Church, making it all too easy to enter into a marriage but virtually impossible to end an unhappy one. If England was a "paradise for wives" it could only have been through the feistiness of the women. Married women were placed in the same legal category as lunatics. While Englishmen prided themselves on their devotion to liberty, their wives were no freer than slaves. It was a husband’s jealously guarded right to beat his wife, as long as the stick was no bigger than his thumb. With a cast of hundreds, from loyal and devoted wives in troubled times to those who featured in notorious trials for adultery, from abusive husbands whose excesses were only gradually curbed by the law to the modern phenomenon of the toxic wife, acclaimed historian Maureen Waller draws on intimate letters, diaries, court documents, and advice books to trace the evolution of the English marriage. It is social history at its most revealing, astonishing, and entertaining.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Historical

420 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2009

About the author

Maureen Waller was educated at University College London, where she studied medieval and modern history. She received a master's degree at Queen Mary College, London, in British and European history 1660--1714. After a brief stint at the National Portrait Gallery, she went on to work as an editor at several prestigious London publishing houses. Her first book was the highly acclaimed 1700: Scenes from London Life. She currently lives in London with her husband, who is a journalist and author.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many today are sceptical about the role of marriage in a secular society, consider it devalued and degraded by our open and permissive culture, or think that the modern ease of divorce means people give up on relationships too easily. Many people think the sacredness of marriage has been lost somewhere in all the excess and hype of ever bigger weddings and stag-dos and the acrimony and mercenary nature of many divorces. But to a certain extent, perhaps modern marriage is actually shifting back closer to what it used to be, before the Victorian concept of the romantic, companionate marriage set unrealistic expectations and ideals.

For much of English history at least, as Maureen Waller recounts, marriage was almost always about money. It was about alliances between great families, exchanges of land, or daughters with dowries or expectations of inheritances, about workmates and helpmeets. Love had very little to do with it. Women were all but bought and sold in the marriage market, (indeed, wife-sales in which men would auction off their wives were a rare but known phenomenon) and whilst theoretically no-one could be married against his or her will, in reality most women had very little choice in the matter. The history of marriage for women has not been a happy one, and a 'marriage of equals' was no such thing. Let's not forget, it was only in the last century that women attained the right to vote; only in the last 150 years that women were recognised as having any legal existence at all outside of their marriage.

This book is less a history of the concept of marriage in English society, and more a history of wives in England in the last five centuries. These pages are a sad recounting of women passed from father to husband with little choice, women beaten and battered and abused, women murdered and imprisoned against their will, women forced to marry against their inclination, the double sexual standard whereby adultery in a man was accepted but was considered treasonous in women, men stealing their wives' fortunes with ease, mothers denied access to their children. It's a sad and sorry tale, with a few rare bright spots of long, happy and successful marriages to buck the prevailing trend of sexual inequality and downright abuse. Reading it, one can only thank whatever deity or impersonal universal force one believes in for the fortune of being born in the era of women's liberation, however incomplete that revolution may still be.

[Lucy J Jeynes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this on my wedding anniversary. It sets out the legal and social position of English women within marriage from the Middle Ages onwards, illustrated with pieces of correspondence and evidence from court cases. If you think this sounds dry, you'd be quite wrong. Lots of adultery, violence, murder, abduction, rape, a dash of incest and under-age sex...

I felt it tailed off at the end, and the epilogue was really disappointing. A bit like some marriages, I guess :-)

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heavy on the anecdote, light on the analysis. Which is not too bad for an interesting bedtime read

[Freya · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is really interesting in theory, but in reality I lost the will halfway through...

[Gabriella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both entertaining and informative. A good piece of social history