Gretna Green

The first Baron Erskine, that erratic Lord Chancellor, went through a ceremony of marriage at Gretna, and in the following year sought a court ruling that such marriages were not valid. He was unsuccessful. Erskine paid a fee of twenty pounds to be married. One or two grateful aristocrats were reputed to have paid fees as high as a hundred guineas. Others handed over bills which were subsequently dishonoured. The less affluent paid only a guinea or two, or simply bought the 'priest' a drain of whisky.

The 'priests' in Gretna's early days were local fishermen, weavers or old soldiers. The anvil tradition came in with Joseph Paisley, who solemnized-after a fashion-many hundreds of runaway marriages in the latter part of the eighteenth century, handing over his goodwill in 1810 or thereabouts to Robert Elliott. Both Paisley and Elliott thoughtfully maintained a 'nuptial chamber' for the convenience of the couples they married, 'it being the custom for parties dreading immediate pursuit to retire there soon after the performance of the ceremony in order that the consummation of the marriage might be added as an additional bar to their separation or any endeavour to set it aside'. On more than one occasion incensed fathers broke into the nuptial chamber (which adjoined the wedding-room), and, if Elliott's memoirs are true, an angry baronet shot his daughter's abductor dead. .

 In the nineteenth century Gretna began to be patronized by amorists from a lower station in life-and then the trouble started. In 1856 Lord Brougham, who lived in the Border country, quoted to his fellow peers the views of nineteen Berwickshire clergymen on the subject of irregular marriages - ‘it was impossible to describe what degree bigamy, seduction and bastardy were encouraged in the district'. In the House of Commons Sir James Graham summed up the typical Gretna Green marriage in these words: 'If it turned out that the woman had money, the man said that the marriage was valid; if she had not, when his passion was satisfied he treated it as invalid and she was abandoned.' Some men had 'married' four times over.

Suitably impressed, Parliament passed an Act which stipulated that one party of an irregular marriage should have spent the preceding twenty-one days in Scotland. But the money-grabbers and the cradle-snatchers, the feather-brained and the improvident continued to patronize the Border marriage shops. Though the 'romance' of Gretna Green was sadly tarnished, there was always a new generation of impatient lovers who refused to be convinced of the fact.

There were other aspects of courtship to horrify Victorian moralists. In country areas of Britain, notably in Wales and Scotland, the practice of bundling continued unabashed. In 1847 the Government sent a Mr Johnson into North Wales to report on schools. He seems to have interpreted his instructions freely and had much to say on the morals of the Welsh. This is what the Reverend William Jones, Vicar of Nevin, told him:

In England farmers' daughters are respectable; in Wales they are in the constant habit of being courted in bed. In the case of domestic servants the vice is universal. I have had the greatest difficulty in keeping my own servants from practising it. It became necessary to secure their chamber windows with bars to prevent them from admitting men. I am told by my parishioners that unless I allow the practice, I shall very soon have no servants at all and that it will be impossible to get any.

And this in an age when 'the servant problem' supposedly did not exist.
Another shocked cleric, the Reverend J. W. Trevor, chaplain to the Bishop of Bangor, said that 'fornication was not regarded as vice, scarcely as a frailty, by the common people in Wales. It is considered as a matter of course, as the regular conventional process towards marriage. It is avowed, defended and laughed at without scruple or shame or concealment by both sexes alike'. In Anglesey householders 'absolutely encourage the practice; they hire their servants agreeing to their stipulation for freedom of access for the purpose at stated times, or it may be, when they please'.

The rural Welsh, however, were no worse and possibly a shade better than the rural Scots, to judge from evidence given before the Royal Commission on the Laws of Marriage-, 1868. It appeared that the number of illegitimate births in Scotland exceeded the maximum rate of even the least moral counties in England. The Commission found that 'to mere carnal intercourse, if preceded by a written promise of future marriage by a promise, afterwards confessed on oath, the effect of marriage is practically given'.

It was the evidence of Dr John Mitchell Strachan, who had thirty-eight years' professional experience in Stirlingshire, which most perturbed the Commission. He said that nine out of ten women, on marriage, already had children by the bridegroom, or were pregnant. That, Dr Strachan believed, was the average state among the working classes all over Scotland. 'I believe it is very common for women to allow themselves to be seduced in the hope of being married. They go on until they are in the family way, and then if the young man is well behaved and the woman at all respectable the friends probably interfere and the marriage is hurried on.'
A good deal of courting in bed, thought Dr Strachan, was not courtship in the real sense, but flirtation.

Young men and young women meet together at night when everyone else is in bed; there is no engagement to be married, but it is more like courtship with the hope of perhaps becoming sweethearts. This at late hours leads to familiarities, and that leads to fornication and I believe the woman is led more easily to fall in the hope thereby of securing a husband.

Lord Chelmsford asked for more information about 'these midnight meetings', saying, 'It is a very extraordinary state of '"society'.
Dr Strachan explained that no other forms of courtship were traditionally acceptable. Fathers and mothers would not allow young men to visit in the day-time.

The young man comes, makes a noise at the window; the young woman goes out, they go to some outhouse; or perhaps the young man is admitted to the young woman's bedroom when all are in bed and there is an hour or two of what is called courtship but which would more properly be called flirtation, because it is not necessary that there should be any engagement to marry in these cases.

Mr Justice O'Hagan asked whether the girl's father would interfere if he knew what was going on. Dr Strachan replied:

He would lie comfortably in his bed, knowing that his daughter was in an outhouse or barn with a young man for perhaps two hours, shutting his eyes to it in the same way that a person in the higher ranks would shut his eyes to his daughter going out for a walk with a young man.

Very few young women, it appeared, exacted a written promise from their lovers before permitting liberties. 'The woman who has coolness enough to insist upon a written promise before falling is, I think, little deserving of sympathy,' Said Dr Strachan.

The Commission seemed anxious to be assured that the last spark of conscience was not yet extinguished among the Scots. Dr Strachan was asked: 'Is there any process in the Church of your district for rebuking them after marriage?' Happily Dr Strachan was able to reply: 'Yes, it is always done.'
'Do they like to be rebuked?'-'Yes, it cleans them and restores them thoroughly in the Church; a large proportion of them come to be rebuked.'
The Kirk session had not lost its ancient power. .

The Commission urged a clean-up of the Scots marriage law. Many of the members and witnesses were unhappy about a celebrated judgment by Lord Stowell, a judgment described by Mr James Anderson, QC, as 'more distinguished for the grace of its diction than for the truth or propriety of its sentiment'. Of irregular marriages in Scotland, Lord Stowell had said:

The woman carries her virgin honours to the private nuptial bed, with as much purity of mind and of person, with as little violation of delicacy, and with as little loss of reputation as if the matter was graced with all the sanctities of religion. It is in vain to talk of criminality and of grossness and of gross ideas. In such a case there are no other ideas excited than such as belong to matrimonial intercourse. It is the bed undefiled according to the notions of the country; it is the actual ceremony as well as the substance of the marriage; it is the conversion of the lover into the husband, transit in matrimonium, if it was not matrimonium before.

Mr Anderson felt that 'this pleasing picture' was not drawn from real life, and the Commission apparently agreed.
The Commission also heard much about the prejudice felt by many courting couples against the public announcement of banns. Those who had been living in sin understandably shrank from the titters which they knew would greet the announcement from the pulpit; in such circumstances the calling of banns was 'often an inconvenience and unseemly interruption to divine service'. Some couples had the banns called in populous places where they did not reside; one reason, according to the Bishop of Oxford, being a desire on the young man's part to avoid standing drinks to all his acquaintances, or to dodge an unseemly visitation of 'rough music'.

At this period, working-class courtship in the cities of England was scarcely of a standard to be held up to bucolic Celts. Such visitors as Francis Wey in mid-century commented on the unreticent behaviour of the populace in English parks-' ...subject which was to shock French travellers for decades to come and still excites them today. Henry Mayhew in his Underworld (1853) sounds a blast, similar to that of Hazlitt, against the corruption of working girls' minds by trashy literature. Inflamed by reading of the amours of 'noble lords, trious dukes and even princes of the blood', these young women are ready to surrender their virtue, on demand, to the first counter-jumper, clerk or 'failing those, a ruffianly potboy'. According to Mayhew, 'the not yet completely depraved portion of the sexes such as sempstresses, milliners, servant tjgp'ls, etc.', poured much money into the purses of keepers of accommodation houses, where they consummated their unholy pipimours-not always for reward, but often for their own gratification. Mayhew's considered estimate was that one in three of all female operatives in London was unchaste. He listed the more immoral classes as milliners, laundresses, dressmakers, bonnet-makers, furriers, shoe binders, slop workers, tailors' employees, pastry-cooks, ballet girls and assistants in cigar shops. If all this was true, the main reason no doubt was that workers in these trades were grotesquely underpaid.

Maid-servants, thought Mayhew, had little hope of marrying, unless they were employed in a good family. In small establishments their lot was to be seduced by the sons of the house, by the policeman on the beat or by soldiers in the parks. They were 'far from being a virtuous class' and spent their money on pornography.

Employers of servants stipulated 'no followers', a traditional insolence which is not yet entirely extinct. Evidently a maid was not expected to marry; entering service was akin to entering a nunnery. Happily the 'no followers' rule was impossible to enforce. This is clear from another work published (and doubtless concocted) by the Brothers Mayhew, entitled ; The Greatest Plague of Life, by One Who Has Been Almost Worried to Death. The purported lady author had the misfortune to live in Albany Street, London, near the Life Guards' barracks, and spent all her time ejecting 'followers' from the kitchen quarters. It was the custom of these terrifyingly handsome giants to call down the area steps, 'Any affection or cold meat this morning, cook?' On one occasion the mistress, standing in the window, was mistaken for the maid by a Guardsman who kissed his hand to her, pointed down the area steps and then made signs of cutting up and eating a pie. Most of the mistress's time was spent answering single knocks and telling soldiers that Mr Smith did not live there. Another time she found her maid signalling to an admirer with the aid of messages chalked on her best tea tray. The constancy of Guardsmen to their sweethearts, this mistress agreed, was commendable, always provided the larder was good.

I do not know if any of my courteous readers have ever been in Albany Street when the bugle is sounding for the fellows to return to their barracks, but upon my word the scene is really heart-breaking to householders, for there is not an area down the whole street but from which you will see a Life Guardsman, with his mouth full, ascending the steps and hurrying off to his quarters for the night.

Devastatingly handsome as these Guardsmen were, it is difficult to credit statements that nursemaids used to bribe soldiers in the Queen's scarlet to walk out with them-'two shillings for a Guardsman, two shillings and sixpence for a Highlander', according to one source, and 'sixpence for a plain walk but a shilling with conversation', according to another. The explanation is probably to be found in the fact that some householders paid Guardsmen to walk out with nursemaids in order to protect them from molestation and their charges from kidnapping (a fee of half a crown would have represented a substantial portion of a nursemaid's emoluments). That British soldiers ever had to be paid to talk to a pretty girl seems staggeringly unlikely. A good many of these paid partnerships in the parks no doubt ripened into matrimony.