Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales, 1600–2012

Today, Cohabiting Relationships Account For Most Births Outside Marriage. But What Was The Situation In Earlier Centuries? Bringing Together Leading Historians, Demographers And Lawyers, This Interdisciplinary Collection Draws On A Wide Range Of Sources To Examine The Changing Context Of Non-marital Child-bearing In England And Wales Since 1600. Edited By Rebecca Probert. Today in the UK almost half of all children are born outside marriage, with cohabiting relationships accounting for the majority of such births. But what was the situation in earlier centuries? Bringing together leading historians, demographers and lawyers, this interdisciplinary collection examines the changing context of non-marital child-bearing in England and Wales since 1600. Drawing on private Acts of Parliament, ecclesiastical court records, reported cases, sessions files, coronial records, Poor law records, petitions to the London Foundling Hospital, the registers of the London Bridewell, the records of charitable institutions, surveys and modern demographic data, it not only shows the relative rarity of cohabitation in earlier periods but also discovers the nature of individual relationships. It also explores how differences in the extent of both non-marital child-bearing and cohabitation emerge depending on definition, source material, interpretation, and location, building up a more nuanced picture of past practices Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction....Pages 1-9 Bridewell, bawdy courts and bastardy in early seventeenth-century London....Pages 10-32 Cohabitation in context in early seventeenth-century London....Pages 33-50 ‘All he wanted was to kill her that he might marry the Girl’: Broken marriages and cohabitation in the long eighteenth century....Pages 51-64 ‘They lived together as man and wife’: Plebeian cohabitation, illegitimacy, and broken relationships in London, 1700–1840....Pages 65-79 Bastardy and divorce trials, 1780–1809....Pages 80-99 Cohabiting couples in the nineteenth-century coronial records of the Midlands Circuit....Pages 100-125 The kindness of strangers revisited: Fostering, adoption and illegitimacy in England, 1860–1930....Pages 125-144 The context of illegitimacy from the 1920s to the 1960s....Pages 145-157 Cohabitation and births outside marriage after 1970: A rapidly evolving phenomenon....Pages 158-191 Cohabitation and marriage in Britain since the 1970s....Pages 192-213 Back Matter....Pages 214-253 is Reader in History at Oxford Brookes, where she teaches social and cultural history. She specialises in the history of the family, household, marriage, masculinities, law, consumption and gender. Her books include