From the early nineteenth century, newspapers began to report on the operation of the local police and magistrate courts. The reportage of such cases uncovered the daily operations of the local court, as well as providing insight into working-class life during the period. While the reportage of the courts in the press corresponded with the expansion of the police and local court system, both phenomenon reflected an increased concern with social order and working-class life by a middle-class public. One area of working-class life that was highlighted in the press was married life, as domestic violence, desertion and bigamy appeared before the court. The courts’ response to these crimes highlighted the negotiation between middle and working-class values in the creation of social order within the communities they served.
This was particularly in evidence in the law around irregular marriage- marriage that did not conform to church or state law. Like in Scotland, irregular marriage had not been entirely prohibited in Ireland. The desire for marriage to remain a religious, rather than a civil, ceremony by all religious groups, as well as the demands of competing churches, each with their own forms of marriage, had led to a situation where the law did not define regular marriage particularly closely. It did, however, prohibit marriages in certain contexts, requiring children of property to have parental permission, and also prohibiting Catholic priests from performing marriages for people not members of their own flock. In practice, however, the state had allowed each church to self-regulate its own marriage practices. In the 1830s, however, the state began to take a greater interest in irregular marriage, particularly those performed by Catholics and Presbyterians, and it was determined that the law applying to Catholics also applied to Presbyterians, invalidating numerous religiously mixed marriages performed in Northern Ireland in the preceding decades. There was a huge amount of publicity around the question of Presbyterian marriage and particularly following the test legal suits, where two Presbyterian bigamy cases were sent to the House of Lords to allow the law to be clarified.
The realisation by large numbers of people that their marriages were no longer valid led to a rise in bigamy cases coming in front of the magistrates. While this applied across Ireland, it was particularly problematic in Belfast and Northern Ireland more broadly, due to the large Presbyterian population. In 1842, Henry Bayley, for example, was convicted of bigamy after ‘taking advantage of the alleged unsettled state of the law regarding mixed marriages’ and deserting his wife and marrying another. Unfortunately, Bayley had misunderstood the law and had been legally married in the first place. The invalidity of many marriages was not just used to allow remarriage, but to remove men from the responsibility of supporting deserted wives. From 1838, the Poor Law Boards were allowed to prosecute men who had deserted their wives and left them on the roles of the Poor Board. To initiate a prosecution, the Poor Law Board brought their complaint to the magistrates. Pat Keenan was absolved for responsibility for supporting his wife when he proved they were Protestants married by a Catholic priest. Patrick Mullen missed the finer nuances of this technique, when in refusing to support his second wife, he offered to prove his first marriage and so convict himself of bigamy!
Whether or not this was the intention, such prosecutions offered the magistracy the opportunity to regulate divorce and separation amongst the poor. In 1833, the Dublin magistrate’s negotiated a settlement of 5s a week for a woman who was obliged to leave her husband due to his violence. Yet, they were often squeamish about authorising separations that had not yet happened. In 1838, when Anne Lube charged her husband with assault, she asked not for punishment but for the magistrate’s to induce her husband to allow her something for her support. The magistrates asked her husband what he would allow his wife, and he agreed to allow her 6s, out of his guinea a week salary, and to take his son to live with him – clearly anticipating that such an agreement was a prelude to a separation. This unsettled the magistrates, who before allowing the consent which agreed to her weekly payment to be signed, noted to Mrs Lube that ‘And mind, Mrs Lube, you must live in the one house together for it is not our wish that you should separate more particularly as he may yet reform and drop his evil habits.’ Belfast magistrates appear to have been more active in negotiating separations in violent relationships, perhaps reflecting their Presbyterian heritage where marriage was not a sacrament and so divorce was less problematic. The magistrates in 1846 attempted to negotiate a separation with alimony between the Addisons, using the threat of a £5 fine and imprisonment to get Addison to agree. He would not give more than 2s6d a week, which the court thought too little. Thomas King’s lawyer asked, when he was charged with stabbing his wife repeatedly with a sword, that instead of prosecution, they could not agree a separation. In this case, which was particularly violent, the magistrate’s sent him to trial.
The introduction of the police, the police courts, as well as a press who advertised the decisions of the court, began to shape local marriage customs. This was not entirely a top-down influence, with men and women actively using the courts and asking them to interfere in their marriages. Moreover, the willingness of individuals to negotiate what they wanted from magistrates, whether a punishment for assault or a marital separation, allowed the lower classes to shape what services the magistrate’s courts provided within the community, implicating magistrates into a local system where marriage dissolution was acceptable.
Katie Barclay is a historian at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is fascinated in how people used the law and the courts to their own ends.
