"No unsuitable match": Defining rank in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Scotland

Journal of Social History

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 665-682

  Leneman, Leah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0039602320     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2000.0028     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. McGowan v. Fisher, Scottish Record Office (SRO) CC8/6/65.
2. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People - England 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 65-6. Despite the title of the book, Langford frequently draws on Scottish examples.
3. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter - Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), p.36.
4. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 62, 78; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes - Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987), pp. 23, 229.
5. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 62, 78; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes - Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987), pp. 23, 229.
6. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 450.
7. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p.75.
8. Buchanan v. Macnab, SRO CC8/5/18. Ironically, as will be seen later in the paper, this was a case in which relative status was stridently argued.
9. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p.113.
10. For a full discussion of this see Patrick Fraser, Treatise on the Law of Scotland as applicable to The Personal and Domestic Relations (Edinburgh, 1846) Vol.I, pp. 124-97.
11. See Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, Girls in Trouble - Sexuality and Social Control in Rural Scotland 1660-1780 (Edinburgh, 1998), c.4, and Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison, Sin in the City - Sexuality and Social Control in Urban Scotland 1660-1780 (Edinburgh, 1998), c.8.
12. See Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, Girls in Trouble - Sexuality and Social Control in Rural Scotland 1660-1780 (Edinburgh, 1998), c.4, and Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison, Sin in the City - Sexuality and Social Control in Urban Scotland 1660-1780 (Edinburgh, 1998), c.8.
13. See Leah Leneman, "The Scottish Case that led to Hardwicke's Marriage Act," Law and History Review (Vol 17, No. 1, Spring 1999): 161-9.
14. T.C. Smout, "Scottish Marriage, Regular and Irregular 1500-1940," in R.B. Outhwaite ed. Marriage and Society - Studies in the Social History of Marriage ((London, 1981), p. 218.
15. For couples informing kirk sessions (parish church courts) in Glasgow, their marriages being recorded as dating from the confession, see Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison, "Clandestine Marriage in the Scottish Cities 1660-1780," Journal of Social History Vol. 26, No.4 (1993): 859. After church control largely broke down, couples might go to a Justice of the Peace and get themselves fined for contravening the laws against irregular marriage, thereby obtaining written evidence of the marriage. This was particularly the case in the west of Scotland, where it was known as a 'Rutherglen marriage'.
16. No papers have survived amongst the commissary court records for some cases which were appealed to higher courts, because lawyers borrowed and did not return them. Fortunately, printed summaries of those cases are available in the Session Papers at the Signet Library. I am grateful to Rab Houston for informing me of this source.
17. See Leah Leneman, "Seduction in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland," Scottish Historical Review (Vol LXXVIII, I: No. 205: April 1999): 39-59.
18. Signet Library Session Papers (hereafter SL SP) 592; 3 (1774).
19. The reason for the appeal to the Court of Session was the defender's allegation of 'unchastity' on her part; the argument was over whether he should be allowed to prove this or whether she should first be allowed to prove her marriage, after which he could bring the proof in a divorce action. The Court of Session came down on her side.
20. SL SP 182; 36 (1785) Elizabeth Richardson came from Cumberland; their relationship would not have been a legal marriage under English law.
21. SRO CC8/5/20.
22. SRO CC8/5/24.
23. SRO CC8/5/17. Married women's maiden names were - and still are - used in Scottish legal documents.
24. Using surnames only after the first mention of the names makes it difficult for the reader to remember which is the man and which the woman, while using the man's surname and woman's first name gives the man a spurious superiority; first names are therefore used throughout.
25. SRO CC8/5/4.
26. R.A. Houston and I.D. Whyte, eds., Scottish Society 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1989), Introduction, p. 9.
27. SRO CC8/6/24.
28. SRO CC8/5/15. It was perfectly competent for a woman to raise an of declarator of marriage against the kin of a man who denied that she was his lawful widow, and there are a number of such cases in the records.
29. SRO CC8/5/18.
30. SRO CC8/6/65.
31. SRO CC8/5/29/3.
32. Before the case could proceed further Jean gave John's agent a discharge "of the present process and of all claims and demands which she had or has against him." Presumably he paid her off handsomely.
33. SRO CC8/5/32.
34. He went on: "neither handsome nor beautiful, without education and of the most vulgar manners - about six or seven years older than himself, who in place of having anything attractive about her, was a perfect antidote to any one of the tender feelings." The fact remained that he had run off with her and fathered her child.
35. SRO CC8/6/120.
36. SRO CC8/6/117.
37. SRO CC8/6/145.
38. Source references will not be repeated for cases introduced in the previous section.
39. G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), pp. 135, 137.
40. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 109, 114.
41. SL SP F 29; 1 (1787).
42. The gist of the ballad is that after they are married she will not perform any menial tasks for him, for she has been raised to his degree: "I tell't ye well ere we were wed,/ You were far too high for me, O,/ But noo I'm wed and in your bed,/ I'm just as good as thee O." And the final verse is truly subversive: "When I am deed and you are deed,/ And both o's in ane grave O,/ They would need to see wi' very clear een,/ To tell your mould frae mine O." The ballad can be found in the Child Collection. I owe this source to Rosalind Mitchison.
43. SRO CC8/5/26.
44. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 21; Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 67. A recent attack on Davidoff and Hall's 'untested assumption' of 'an oppositional culture of commerce versus land' can be found in Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History," Historiographical Journal (Vol. 36, No. 2 1993): 395.
45. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 21; Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 67. A recent attack on Davidoff and Hall's 'untested assumption' of 'an oppositional culture of commerce versus land' can be found in Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History," Historiographical Journal (Vol. 36, No. 2 1993): 395.
46. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 21; Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 67. A recent attack on Davidoff and Hall's 'untested assumption' of 'an oppositional culture of commerce versus land' can be found in Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History," Historiographical Journal (Vol. 36, No. 2 1993): 395.
47. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 113.
48. Ibid., pp. 118-9.
49. William Chambers, The Book of Scotland, (Edinburgh, 1830), p. 218. I owe this reference to Tristram Clarke.
50. One historian has noted how some Scottish women enjoyed conversation in mixed company over tea and supper in the mid-eighteenth century, a practice which died out by the end of the century, when after dinner the women would retire from the dining room. The irony was that "women who read little of the world were freer to discuss it earlier, while women who read and were educated competently had no audience outside themselves in 1790." Deborah A. Symonds, Weep Not for Me - Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, PA, 1997), p.220.