Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales, 1600-2012

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Rebecca Probert

   Pages 1-9

3. Bridewell, bawdy courts and bastardy in early seventeenth-century London

   • Eleanor Fox, Martin Ingram

   Pages 10-32

4. Cohabitation in context in early seventeenth-century London

   • Martin Ingram

   Pages 33-50

5. ‘All he wanted was to kill her that he might marry the Girl’: Broken marriages and cohabitation in the long eighteenth century

   • Joanne Bailey

   Pages 51-64

6. ‘They lived together as man and wife’: Plebeian cohabitation, illegitimacy, and broken relationships in London, 1700–1840

   • Samantha Williams

   Pages 65-79

7. Bastardy and divorce trials, 1780–1809

   • Julie Shaffer

   Pages 80-99

8. Cohabiting couples in the nineteenth-century coronial records of the Midlands Circuit

   • Elizabeth Hurren, Steven King

   Pages 100-125

9. The kindness of strangers revisited: Fostering, adoption and illegitimacy in England, 1860–1930

   • Ginger Frost

   Pages 125-144

10. The context of illegitimacy from the 1920s to the 1960s

    • Rebecca Probert

    Pages 145-157

11. Cohabitation and births outside marriage after 1970: A rapidly evolving phenomenon

    • John Haskey

    Pages 158-191

12. Cohabitation and marriage in Britain since the 1970s

    • Éva Beaujouan, Máire Ní Bhrolcháin

    Pages 192-213

13. Back Matter

    Pages 214-253

    PDF

Today, cohabiting relationships account for most births outside marriage. But what was the situation in earlier centuries? Bringing together leading historians, demographers and lawyers, this interdisciplinary collection draws on a wide range of sources to examine the changing context of non-marital child-bearing in England and Wales since 1600.

• Cohabitation
• illegitimacy
• bastardy
• non-marital
• adoption
• Britain
• England
• event
• Great Britain
• interdisciplinary
• seventeenth century

• School of Law, University of Warwick, UK

  Rebecca Probert

Joanne Bailey, Oxford Brookes University, UK Éva Beaujouan, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria Eleanor Fox, Independent Scholar, UK Ginger Frost, Samford University, US John Haskey, University of Oxford, UK Elizabeth Hurren, University of Leicester, UK Martin Ingram, University of Oxford, UK Steve King, University of Leicester, UK Máire Ní Bhrolcháin, University of Southampton, UK Julie Shaffer, University of Wisconsin, US Rebecca Probert, University of Warwick, UK Samantha Williams, University of Cambridge, UK

Policies and ethics