Family Lessons 128: Quaker Weddings

My 8x great-grandfather, Thomas Dilworth of Bradley Hall at Chipping, had eighteen children by three wives. He was evidently a man who could not live alone and enjoyed the benefits of married life. Yet see where he married his various spouses, including Ann, from whom I descend:

Marriage 1:

Sarah Pearson, born 1660 in Langthwaite, Wigton, Cumberland.

Married on 23 May 1680 in John Read's House

Marriage 2:

Mary Townson, born 1644, 'of Woodaker, Lancashire'.

Married: March 1689 in Jennet Bond's House, Chipping

Marriage 3:

Ann Corless, of Dolphinholme, Lancashire

Married: 1705 in John Bond's House

He died in 1726, so from aged twenty to sixty-six, he always had a wife, yet note that he does not marry in the parish churches, but in someone’s house. Dilworth and his various wives were Quakers, and forsook the state church with its paid clergy and expensively maintained ‘steeple houses’. Marrying in private homes was their practice, and is not something I would approve of then, or now, for it prevents the public from attending, and witnessing the event, while limiting the opportunity to object.

Jennet Bond, whose home in Chipping provided my great-grandfather with his second wedding venue, was widow to Thomas Bond. He had been converted (‘convinced’) to join the Friends by William Dewsbury. Jennet is reported saying she "never paid tithe (ie a tenth of her produce to the local parson), nor never intends to do not anything to repair of the steeplehouses, not eggs and geese, not bees".

Whatever the evangelical truth of those early Quakers, they were certainly zealous and principled. Yet their opponents claimed they engaged in wife-swapping and adulteries, because their marriages were barely recognised or unrecognised in law. Much as we might despair of the modern state of Britain, and of the bodies which claim to be its major churches, we really ought to have marriages which are recognised legally. To answer a question that someone asked me a little while back: No, it is not good enough to ‘marry’ someone informally and be faithful thereafter. Marriage is a public declaration, and should be done properly, legally and correctly.