1700s - GETTING MARRIED
Now here’s a subject you could say lots about, but for the moment I’ll just confine myself to one small corner of it which has, I know mystified lots of you who have been doing your family history, looked at marriages in the 1700s, and found your ancestors got married in a college chapel instead of the village church. And asked why?
COLLEGE WEDDINGS
Well there’s always a reason for everything, and this was all about the finances of our church. The way parish churches were financed requires a bit of explaining, so first I’ll digress into that.
THE GLEBE
Churches were mostly built, in the Middle Ages, by a rich man with connections to the village – the Lord of the Manor perhaps, or a rich priest. Partly for God’s glory, but also for worldlier reasons. Medieval men and women had their eyes firmly fixed on the afterlife, and whether their destination would be heaven or hell. Building a church could be seen as one of the “good works” which were vital to you if you were to go to Paradise after death. Particularly important to the rich. After all, Christ said “it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”. That message was one that, generally, was unpalatable, and so people chose the more desirable route of keeping their wealth and justifying it by good works.
Once built, a large church - and most were large - was expensive to maintain. Usually land had been given to provide an income for repairs and the priest, and this was called the glebe. In 1506 Great Shelford's glebe was given by the Bishop of Ely to Jesus College, Cambridge, which he had founded. The college was to train priests, and so a religious foundation. Hence there appeared no conflict of interest in transferring the money.
TITHES
The other source of income for the church was the tithes. This was a traditional payment, by the parishioners, to the church, for its support. It represented 1/10th of the produce of the village in terms of grain, beasts etc. In 1506, the tithes too went to Jesus College. The result of these two grants was to leave Shelford church and its priest somewhat poorer.
THE VICAR
The post of vicar at Great Shelford was now rather poorly paid. Jesus College paid him a stipend, but no allowance had been made for inflation, and by the 1700s the sum had dwindled in value. As a result there was not much competition for the post. Consequently a series of young Cambridge college fellows, probably the ones who were hard up, did the duties of parish priest to give them a bit of extra income. They would have lived in college, and come out to Shelford only when they had to.
One of our 20th century vicars, Rev. Richard Hale considered the matter of these weddings. He concluded that it was, quite simply, less effort for these college men to conduct weddings in their college chapels rather than come all the way out to Shelford.
There’s quite a list of these weddings.
The first four are from 1696 to 1700, at Jesus College. Sure enough, the vicars at the time were fellows of Jesus. Most weddings, however, still apparently took place in the village (or at least so we assume since the marriage register doesn’t say otherwise).
In 1722 John Reeve and Mary Campion were married in Jesus College chapel by licence. I’m not sure why, because the vicar was from Sidney Sussex. Perhaps he wasn’t available.
In 1728 John Street and Ann Adam were married in Trinity Hall chapel; Thomas Osbourne and Alice Grane were married in Sidney College chapel (Sidney Sussex).
Thereafter there’s a run of weddings in Sidney Sussex: John Angell and Martha Butler in 1729; Edward Kates and Sarah Maris in 1730; John Maris and Elizabeth Tunwell, and Walter Young and Caroline Church in 1734. This, presumably, because John Taylor of Sidney Sussex was acting as incumbent.
From 1738-1740 there are 5 weddings in Queens’ College. The vicar was Pierce Dixon of Queens’.
From 1741 to 1753 the college weddings are in Catherine Hall (St Catherine’s College). There are 30 of them. That is most, but not all, of the weddings in the parish register, which leaves me wondering why some were at Shelford and some not. Presumably it was just a case of whether the vicar could be bothered to come to Shelford or not. At this time the vicar was John Kippey of St Catherine’s.
After that, the college weddings seem to come to an end. I should mention that this didn’t just happen in Great Shelford. It was so in Little Shelford and Whittlesford, and possibly in other parishes I haven’t looked at.
Did the villagers mind? Hard to say. Weddings at this time weren’t necessarily the big deal they are now. It depended on class. For the poor it was liable to be a very low key affair, where you simply wore your best clothes (your Sunday dress or Sunday suit) and there were relatively few people at the church. If you had a do afterwards, it would have been a village knees-up with plenty of drink. For these people it would be important to marry in the village where your family and friends were, and also more of an undertaking to travel into Cambridge. For the richer sort, weddings were more formal (and often, where property was in question, about making a “good marriage”), and more money was spent. These are often the people who married by licence, for which you had to pay, and which marks them out as well-off. Maybe there was a bit of added cachet, for them, in getting married in a college chapel, although I’m not sure about that. The colleges in the 18th century were male preserves, they didn’t have much academic standing, and the undergraduates had a bit of reputation for drinking and other bad behaviour. So not quite the atmosphere we imagine for a college wedding today.
Anyway, whatever the villagers actually felt about it, that is the reason why, for 30 or so years, so many weddings took place in college chapels.