{"id":832,"date":"2024-12-07T19:31:49","date_gmt":"2024-12-07T19:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/ppgsed24\/?post_type=chapter&p=832"},"modified":"2024-12-07T22:07:05","modified_gmt":"2024-12-07T22:07:05","slug":"in-this-she-must-judge-for-herself-gretna-green-and-womens-choice-sellman","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/ppgsed24\/chapter\/in-this-she-must-judge-for-herself-gretna-green-and-womens-choice-sellman\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIn this she must judge for herself\u201d: Gretna Green and Women\u2019s Choice \/ Sellman"},"content":{"raw":"We are living through a politically tense time \u2013 questioning the extent to which the government should be able to control people\u2019s lives is a huge issue \u2013 and it is important to remember that people in the past had similar experiences. After the passage of the Marriage Act of 1753, lovers began eloping to Gretna Green just across the border in Scotland, then returning to England where the marriage was still lawful. This small town became an accidental space of protest where couples, and especially women, were able to exercise their agency, going against the wishes of family, friends, and the law.\r\n\r\nBy the time more moderate marriage laws passed in the nineteenth century, Gretna Green had become enshrined in England and the wider world\u2019s culture. It is found in numerous popular culture works we consume today, including Pride and Prejudice<\/em> and Downton Abbey.<\/em>\r\n\r\nSeparate from its historical and pop culture significance, Gretna Green became a topic of discussion once again in 2022, when Scotland\u2019s parliament was blocked by the UK from legislating a Gender Recognition Reform Bill that would have made it easier to change gender in Scotland, potentially creating a \u201ctransgender Gretna Green\u201d as trans people from England, Wales, and Northern Ireland traveled to Scotland.\r\n

Table of Contents<\/h2>\r\n
    \r\n \t
  1. Historiography<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. The Catalyst: The Marriage Act of 1753<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Marriage: the \u201cManufactory for making Children\u201d<\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Eloping to Gretna Green: \u201cshe thus decidedly shewed her preference\u201d<\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Gretna Green on Stage<\/li>\r\n \t
  6. Gretna Green in Our Time<\/li>\r\n \t
  7. Popular Culture: Pride and Prejudice<\/em> and Downton Abbey<\/em><\/li>\r\n \t
  8. \u201cTransgender Gretna Green\u201d<\/li>\r\n \t
  9. The Future<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

    Creator Bibliography<\/h2>\r\nAidan Sellman is an undergraduate student at Cleveland State University in her senior year. She is studying history and is interested in late medieval and early to late modern history in Europe and North America. After graduating she plans to get her Master's of Library and Information Science degree to work in an archive or special collection (and possibly pursue a history MA).\r\n

    Historiography<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nThere is little scholarship that directly addresses the history of Gretna Green as a place to conduct clandestine marriages, so I have used a variety of secondary sources to supplement my primary source research.\r\n\r\nEve Tavor Bannet\u2019s <\/strong>article The Marriage Act of 1753: \u201cA Most Cruel Law for the Fair Sex\u201d<\/em> explores the reasoning for and implications of the Marriage Act of 1753. Bannet writes that the Act\u2019s importance has been ignored by historians because they accepted the reasoning for the Act put forth by the man who presented it: that the Act was only meant to prevent wealthy heirs, and especially heiresses, under the age of majority from marrying without consent. Bannet argues that this is incorrect; the Act affected everyone, rich and poor, and ample evidence of this is found in the writings of women from this time. Bannet is a professor at the University of Oklahoma and specializes in the eighteenth century, British and American literature, and gender history.\r\n\r\nLeonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall\u2019s<\/strong> book Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 <\/em>had a massive impact on the field of gender and women\u2019s history, being one of the first books of its type published. Davidoff and Hall explore the development of England\u2019s middle class by focusing on the city of Birmingham and the rural counties of Essex and Suffolk. It argues that women had an essential contribution to family businesses and the development of England\u2019s capitalist economy. Davidoff was a historian of sociology, specializing in social history, gender studies, and women\u2019s history. Hall specializes in gender history, colonial history and British history and is emerita professor of British social and cultural history and chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London.\r\n\r\nKimberly Schutte\u2019s <\/strong>chapter \u201cElopement and Defiant Matches: Marrying Outside the Bounds of Propriety\u201d from her book Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485-2000: An Open Elite? <\/em>examines the clandestine marriages of aristocratic women using primary sources. It focuses on elite women\u2019s agency in making marriage decisions for themselves within an oppressive society which disapproved of this behavior. Schutte is a professor at the University of Kansas and specializes in early modern European history and gender.\r\n\r\nLisa O\u2019Connell\u2019s<\/strong> chapter \u201cLiterary Marriage Plots: Burney, Austen and Gretna Green\u201d in her book The Origins of the English Marriage Plot <\/em>explains how Gretna Green influenced literature of the era, creating the \u201cmarriage plot\u201d trope found in works by Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and others. O\u2019Connell is an associate professor at the University of Queensland and specializes in eighteenth-century British literature.\r\n

    The Catalyst: The Marriage Act of 1753<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nThe Marriage Act of 1753, also known as the Clandestine Marriages Bill and Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act, was enshrined in English and Welsh law on March 25, 1754. It placed restrictions on couples that the Catholic Church and then the Church of England had been trying to enforce for centuries. Under the new Act, several steps had to be taken for a marriage to be legitimate: banns announcing the intended match had to be read in Church three Sundays in a row; a marriage license had to be acquired; the marriage itself needed to be performed in a Church of England by an authorized clergyman; witnesses were required; the marriage had to be recorded in a marriage register; and permission from parents or guardians was required if either the bride or groom were under twenty-one years, the age of majority. Only Quakers and Jews were exempt.[1]<\/a>\r\n\r\nFor centuries, women and men had been able to conduct a marriage by simply agreeing that they were now married, without witnesses, church, or permission. There were a few ways to do this, as Bannet explains: \u201cif expressed in words of the present tense\u2026the couple\u2019s promise to live together as man and wife created a binding marriage\u201d which did not require consummation or witnesses. Alternatively, \u201cif the couple\u2019s promises were expressed in words of the future tense\u2026the marriage became binding as soon as consummation occurred.\u201d[2]<\/a> This often caused issues. For example, a woman and a man might agree that they were married, had sex resulting in a pregnancy, and the man then denied that any marriage had taken place. A person could potentially marry dozens of people without anyone knowing, committing bigamy. Despite the relatively few instances of this, it caused the Catholic and then the Protestant Church constant worry.\r\n\r\nIn spite of these problems, the average person valued their ability to marry without interference, believing that marriage was a \u201cFAITH by which the Man and Woman bind themselves<\/em> to each other to live as man and Wife.\u201d[3]<\/a> Those against the passage of the Marriage Act argued that the House of Commons was changing marriage, giving it \u201ca different signification from what it had before.\u201d[4]<\/a> Couples who had privately married and never been publicly married in church were now considered to be living in sin and their children illegitimate. A woman who had sex and fell pregnant after promises of marriage could no longer find legal support.[5]<\/a> The Marriage Act also made marriage a public business. Not only did the couple\u2019s guardians have to be involved if they were underage, but whatever the age of the couple, the reading of the banns alerted the entire community to the impending marriage, making them involved whether they wished to be or not, and giving them plenty of notice to voice their opposition to the match.\r\n\r\nThere was an image in the popular imagination of a young woman being seduced and marrying a lower-class man who, under English common law, would possess all of her inherited money. This was true for the upper as well as the middle classes: \u201cthe desire to protect vulnerable property was integral to middle-class practice,\u201d write Davidoff and Hall, \u201cat the same time as the concept of female dependency was being elevated in political and social thought.\u201d[6]<\/a> The House of Commons argued that the Marriage Act was simply a way to prevent minors who stood to inherit their family\u2019s wealth and property from marrying beneath their social station, when in actuality the Act was changing the fundamental nature of marriage as all parts of society, rich and poor, understood it.\r\n

    Marriage: the \u201cManufactory for making Children\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nThe true intent behind the Marriage Act, founded on ideas in the new field of political economy, was to increase Great Britain\u2019s population \u2013 but only the population that contributed to the wealth of the nation. Their labor benefited the wealthy, including the men in the Houses of Parliament. Arguing for the passage of the Act, the Earl of Hillsborough said that \u201cthe happiness and prosperity of a country does not depend on having a great number of children born, but on having always a great number well brought up and inured from their infancy to labour and industry.\u201d[7]<\/a> This was not necessarily wrong, but the average person was likely more concerned with having autonomy in their personal life and religious beliefs, not marrying to produce workers for the country.. As Hall and Davidoff write, \u201cthe crucial role of marriage in business affairs permeates the lives of the middle class in this period.\u201d[8]<\/a> The same was true of all classes, to varying degrees. Marriage was one of the most important economic decisions a person would make in their lifetime, particularly for women, who were expected to rely on their husbands\u2019 financial abilities, and so having restrictions such as the Marriage Act suddenly placed on them must have been distressing.\r\n\r\nAnother of the key beliefs that drove the Marriage Act\u2019s passing was the idea that children born from private marriages were less useful, either because their parents were destitute and not able to raise their children properly, or because a person seduced into marrying below their station would have children of a lower class than they otherwise would have. The government hoped that the Act would reduce premarital sex in women and men, for similar reasons: \u201cthe mother without the aid of the father is not at all sufficient\u201d because of \u201cthe natural origin of the superior disgrace which attends a breach of chastity in women rather than in men.\u201d[9]<\/a> In a time before public welfare, Bannet writes, it was down to individual parishes and private charities to care for impoverished individuals and families. The children of single mothers \u201cmust necessarily fall for support on society or starve\u201d and would not be useful to society.[10]<\/a> With the passage of the act, the men in government hoped marriage would now be the \u201cManufactory for making Children\u201d who increased the wealth of the nation rather than, supposedly, detracting from it.[11]<\/a>\r\n

    Eloping to Gretna Green: \u201cshe thus decidedly shewed her preference\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nThough the Marriage Act had been enforced since 1754, it took until the turnpike network was extended to Gretna Green in 1770 for it to become easily accessible to England. Now, couples could \u201creach Gretna Green by coach within three days from London.\u201d[12]<\/a> In 1792, the Hereford Journal<\/em> reported that seventeen-year-old Miss Midgley, the sister of Lady Grantley and the sister-in-law of Lord Grantley, an heiress with \u201cnot less than forty thousand pounds,\u201d had eloped to Gretna Green, Scotland. After her brother-in-law had been considering making her a ward of the Court of Chancery, \u201cshe thus decidedly shewed her preference\u201d by marrying Mr. B, \u201can American Gentleman,\u201d in 1792.[13]<\/a> \u201cIt is easy to dismiss the Gretna wedding,\u201d O\u2019Connell writes, \u201cforgetting that it was a vehicle for powerful, often transgressive, social energies. It bypassed marriage markets, flouted courtship norms and reimagined the social meanings of marriage itself.\u201d Instead of quietly agreeing to the new conditions of marriage imposed by the Marriage Act, couples found a physical way to circumvent them by traveling to Scotland to be married, where the Marriage Act did not apply, and the old rules were still in place.\r\n\r\n