‘A Virgin of Great Estate’: Forced Marriage, Consent, and Property in Seventeenth-Century England

Description

This event available either at the venue or you can watch online via a webcast.

Many people now deem child, early, and forced marriages to be violations of human rights, a significant change from centuries past. Historians have studied bridal abduction by would-be husbands as a common feature of medieval societies, but rarely of the early modern. Yet, criminal court records indicate that bridal abductions continued well into the early modern period. While canon law was the primary means of regulating marriage, authorities had long criminalized some modalities of coercion in marriage formation and continued to prosecute some individuals for abduction, into the seventeenth century and beyond.

This talk focuses on efforts to deal with forced marriages in the English Revolution and then in its aftermath, years in which the political salience of marriage, consent, and contract became especially fraught.

Beginning with the high-profile abduction of the heiress Jane Puckering in 1649, the paper draws upon the records of a previously overlooked revolutionary-era commission to investigate ‘pretended marriages’ alleged to have been secured by force or fraud. It examines the legislation that emerged from efforts to remodel marriage as a more fully voluntary and ostensibly free contract for both those with substance and those without. It ends with a set of post-revolutionary criminal court cases in which abductions resulted in executions – and signs of subtle shifts in the work of ‘consent’ in sustaining patriarchal marriage and its transfers of power, possession, and rights reconceptualized as property.

Krista Kesselring is a professor of History at Dalhousie University (Canada). She has previously published works on early modern English law, crime, and politics, with monographs on the royal pardon, the Northern Rebellion of 1569, and homicide. Her most recent monograph, co-authored with Tim Stretton, is Marriage, Separation and Divorce in England, 1500-1700 (2021). She has edited or co-edited several volumes of essays, most recently with Matthew Neufeld: Reckoning with History: Essays on Uses of the Past (2024). She is also a regular contributor to the collaborative academic blog, Legal History Miscellany.

Date

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The Institute of Historical Research (IHR)
Senate House
Malet Street
London
WC1E 7HU

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