‘All he wanted was to kill her that he might marry the Girl’: Broken marriages and cohabitation in the long eighteenth century

Defining cohabitation in the past is not easy. Essentially, there was no legitimate alternative to wedlock until modern times and thus the law did not need to establish the parameters of such a relationship. In order to address the phenomenon of a couple who were not married to each other while living together in a sexual relationship, historians have therefore applied their own terms. Rebecca Probert’s recent study defines cohabitation as ‘non-marital co-residential relationships, whether lifelong or temporary and whether the couple in question actually held themselves out as married or not’. Probert analyses the numbers of such arrangements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Firstly she shows that although the church courts punished extra-marital sex, few of the prosecutions involved couples who lived with a sexual partner who was a self-styled spouse. Secondly, she uses illegitimacy figures to show that the majority of unmarried women who bore children did not reside with a man. Thirdly, her case studies of formal marriage in several parishes establish that almost all those listed as cohabiting couples were legally married. She concludes that couples who cohabited were ‘vanishingly rare,’ perhaps a fraction of 1 per cent of the population.