Note 574 — Chapter XII · OBLIGATORY CIVIL MARRIAGE IN THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES
Reading edition
Stiles, op. cit., 65, 106. Adams, op. cit., 31, 32, 36, reaches the same conclusion. "It was," he says, "a practice growing out of the social and industrial conditions of a primitive people, of simple, coarse manners and small means," and probably did not exist in Boston, Salem, or Plymouth.