Note 1360 — Chapter X · RISE OF CIVIL MARRIAGE
Reading edition
"Therefore there were in the Fleet a number of men who placed themselves at the disposal of female prisoners for marriage; as Armstrong, who, within fourteen months, married four women, and, as an entry in the register reads, received eight shillings 'for his trouble.'"—Friedberg, Eheschliessung, 342. Gally, Some Considerations upon Clandestine Marriages (London, 1750), 14-16, appears to believe that women could thus escape their debts. Cf. Norton, Die Frauen in England (Berlin, 1855), 267; and Burn, Fleet Marriages, 83.
With this should be compared the companion error that a man is not liable for his bride's debts if he takes her only in her "smock" or "shift": Burn, Parish Registers, 153, 154, note; Ashton, The Fleet, 386, 387; idem, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, 41; and further notices of "smock marriages" in Brand, Popular Antiquities, III, 205, 380; Notes and Queries, 1st series, VI, 485, 561; VII, 17, 84; Tegg, The Knot Tied, 299-301; Wood, The Wedding Day, 115, 116; and Radcliffe, The Parish Registers of St. Chad, Saddlworth, 58.
"Another error, common amongst the lower orders, is, that a man may lawfully sell his wife to another, provided he deliver her over with a halter about her neck.—And another, that a woman's marrying a man under the gallows, will save him from the execution. 'While we lay here (New York, A. D. 1784), a circumstance happened which I thought extremely singular. One day, a malefactor was to be executed on a gallows, but with a condition that if any woman, having nothing on but her shift, married the man under the gallows, his life was to be saved. This extraordinary privilege was claimed, a woman presented herself, and the marriage ceremony was performed' (Life of Oulandah Equiano, vol. ii, p. 224).—If this took place, our American cousins must have jumbled the two popular errors together."—Burn, Parish Registers, 154, note. Cf. Brand, op. cit., III, 379; also Barrington, Observations on Our Ancient Statutes, 475, who traces the error to the ancient right of the woman to "appeal" for murder of her husband.