Cohabitation in context in early seventeenth-century London

Abstract

Surveying the evidence from provincial England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Rebecca Probert has concluded that numbers of cohabiting couples — in the sense of men and women who lived openly in a heterosexual relationship under one roof without having been united by a marriage ceremony, even if bigamous — were ‘vanishingly small’.² Setting aside some regional peculiarities — to be discussed later — the same applies at a somewhat earlier period. For example, a detailed study of church courts, sex and marriage in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Wiltshire, with comparative material from Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and West Sussex, concluded that, while there were circumstances in which couples might occasionally cohabit briefly before marriage, permanent concubinage was rare and tended to arouse considerable local hostility.³ The seriousness with which the matter was likewise regarded in places close to the capital is nicely captured in a case from Stratford Bow (Middlesex) in 1605: the daughter of a woman accused of housing an unmarried couple explained that ‘a ma[n] … with a woma[n] with him lodged in her … mothers howse about vj week[es] space that were accompted ma[n] & wif but so soone as they were suspected they were had before … the highe cunstable where beinge examyned they were fownd not to be ma[n] & wif & they dep[ar]ted the towne’.⁴