Whom shall I marry? 514 answers from south-west , 1644- 1703, by Wendy Barnes

Between 1644 and 1703, 257 marriages were celebrated in the four churches of the Bradleys and Thurlows. Where did the spouses come from?

The answer is less than 10 miles away for all but 12 of the 514 people involved.

See www.parishregister.co.uk for basic information on registers. K.D.M. Snell, ‘Parish Registration and the Study of Labour Mobility’, Local Population Studies , 33, 29 (1984), pp. 29-43. 1960 Ordnance Survey map (Sheet 148, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, https://maps.nls.uk/index.html). The source of information about marriages is the parish registers. Parish registers exist for and from 1561 and for from 1636. ’s registers do not begin until 1703 but the Bishops’ Transcripts for the parish are remarkably complete. The registers have been transcribed for, at least, a 30-year period either side of 1674, providing some Little Bradley Church, photo by author 1,688 usable entries between 1644 to 1704.

Registers were supposed to include the parish of origin for both bride and groom. But not until 1812 were blank printed registers provided with two columns headed “parish of origin”. Until then there does not seem to be a high degree of consistency in practice.

There is an unsettling tendency for parishes of origin to be recorded only sporadically and not in any recognisable pattern – in these four parishes at this time, at least.

There is an inevitable problem – a marriage involves two people but can only take place in one church. The usual – but not inevitable – practice was for the marriage to take place in the parish of the bride. The reason why may lie in the topography. The total distance between the most northerly Great Bradley Church and Great Thurlow, the southernmost, is about two miles.

The churches are a little distant now from the modern village centres, their position determined by that of the hall of the Norman lord. The routes between them were walking ones. Even today it is possible to walk between Great Bradley and Great Thurlow Churches entirely along footpaths. The exception is Little Bradley church which is close to both the original Saxon and the current Hall.

These were not wealthy churches and so did not provide generous support for their incumbents. Frequently, to ensure an adequate stipend, two of the parishes (the pairs involved varied) were held plurally by one incumbent.

This would surely make it easier for a joint incumbent of, say, Great and Little Thurlow, to accept a marriage in, say, Little Thurlow Church of two Great Thurlow residents as not being ‘out of the parish’ when it came to entering up the register.

1960 Ordnance Survey map (Sheet 148, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, https://maps.nls.uk/index.html). This seems to raise a question mark over the convenient assumption that people were generally accustomed to celebrating their life events in their local church.

Indeed, they may well have been so accustomed but their local church need not have been the church of the parish in which they officially ‘resided’. It is a factor which has to be addressed in small-scale studies like this one. When sufficient territory is involved it has to be hoped that the occurrences will balance each other out – that is the nature of statistics. But we are dealing here with numbers and distances which make that less likely.

The 257 marriages in the churches between 1644 and 1703 can be sub-divided into three groups:

The ‘furriners’: 62 marriages were between partners neither of whom were from the Bradleys and Thurlows but from elsewhere and specified as so in the register; The homebodies: The 15 where both partners were stated in the registers to be from one or other of the Bradleys or Thurlows; The locals: 180 registry entries had only one partner either specified or assumed to be from the Bradleys and Thurlows.

‘furriner’ = foreigner in the Suffolk dialect i.e. anyone who doesn’t come from ‘hereabouts’. In the 1970s I rented accommodation from a German lady who escaped the Nazis and had then lived in her Suffolk home for 30+ years. I was regularly asked to take “t’other furriner’s” shopping home to her. The homebodies There were 15 marriages where both partners were stated in the registers to be from one of the Bradleys or Thurlows. These are the simplest cases. These young people all probably grew up within two or three miles of each other; their families knew each other in terms of personality, financial circumstances and connections – all that needed to be known before a contract of this nature could be agreed.

In such a small area, it is possible to actually check Photos courtesy of Simon Knott, whether all of these 30 people were actually ‘official residents’ The Suffolk Churches website of the parishes cited in the registers. If they were, one would expect their surnames to be found in other records – and overwhemingly they were. There were only two marriages where the surnames of the four people appeared nowhere else. Both cases were in Little Bradley. One possible explanation is that they were all servants (a term then used for both workers in the house and on the land) in the three ‘big’ houses in Little Bradley, on short term contracts, essentially transients. The locals Of the 90 non-Bradley/Thurlow partners, all but 12 lived within 5 miles.

The 12 partners, although from outside the 5-mile circle, are still from places relatively close at hand, Burwell, , Pentlow in Suffolk or a little way into Cambridgeshire or Essex. Most of the specific places with which these further afield marriages link the four parishes have not otherwise turned up in the records. The exception is Bury St Edmunds which, as a local market centre, does feature in the records. This corner of south- seems far less adventurous than, for example, south-west Nottinghamshire where there seem to be around 50% marrying “away”. (A. Mitson, ‘The Significance of Kinship Networks’ in Phythian-Adams, Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580-1850 (Leicester, 1993), p. 58.)

Checking other records in the parishes isolates 20 marriages of the 180 where at least one of the partners falls into the group whose surname is restricted to the parish of registration and a further fifteen where the mention of the name in other parishes is marginal. One marriage involved two people whose surname was restricted to the parish of registration so all twenty-one such individuals are involved in the analysis.

To these can be added the 15 marriages where the celebrant or his clerk recorded the parishes of both residents to give a sample of fifty marriages which, in all probability, united a resident from one of the four parishes with a resident from another. This allows us to look at 50 marriages within the four parishes but across the internal parish boundaries. Marriages across parish boundaries within the locality, 1644-1703

Brides from:

Gt Th Lt Th Gt Br Lt Br n. grooms

Grooms from:

Great Thurlow 63% 38% 16 Little Thurlow 19% 50% 19% 13% 16 Great Bradley 9% 9% 82% 11 Little Bradley 14% 86% 7

Brides n. 14 10 18 8 50 The figures show that, on the whole, the majority of these men and women chose their partners from their own village. This contrasts sharply with Mitson’s study of south-west Nottinghamshire parishes where only six of the eleven studied had ‘more than a quarter of their inhabitants marrying within their own parish’. (A. Mitson ‘The Significance of Kinship Networks’ in Phythian-Adams, Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580-1850 (Leicester, 1993), p. 59.) Great Bradley, the locality’s largest parish, like Mitson’s Attenborough in Nottinghamshire, on the border of the area, has exactly double (82%) the Attenborough percentage of such marriages.

It is as well to remember that figures can ‘tell us a great deal about the behaviour of the group but they do little to illuminate the choices of the individual...we must go beyond the aggregated statistics if we wish to understand.’ (D. Levine, ‘“For their own reasons”: individual marriage decisions and family life’, Journal of Family History, 7 (1982) pp. 255-64. )

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of folk, the records seldom make it possible to determine the reasons for individual decisions.