Vicar General and Faculty Office Marriage Licences

The following information comes largely from an article in Genealogists' Magazine, December 2000, by Nicholas Spence, August 2000

A pilot study analysing 25 years of Vicar General Allegations (1726 - 1750) revealed some interesting information (but it is not known how representative the results are. Three quarters of the applicants lived in the City of London or in neighbouring parishes, both north and south of the Thames - that is, the Greater London of the day. A further 20% lived in the adjacent Home Counties and only 5% lived further afield. About a quarter of the applicants were either widows or widowers, but only a comparatively small number (1% of the males and 8% of the females) admitted to being under 21. Nearly half (42%) of the applicants lived in the same parish as each other and only 15% lived in different dioceses.

VG and FO Marriage Licenses as % of estimated total English marriages

In the 1740s just under 2000 licences a year were issued by the Vicar-General and Faculty Offices, and it has been estimated that there were about 40,000 marriages a year in England at this time. Thus almost 5% of all English marriages at that time were by VG or FO licence, a figure which would increase markedly if one were to calculate it on the basis of Londoners alone. It is quite clear from the sheer volume of licences that the applicants did not all come from the top social class.

Speed and confidentiality were probably the main reasons people resorted to what was generally the more expensive option of marriage by Licence. A comparatively large number of widows and widowers as well as Clergy chose to marry by licence. A further reason, before 1754, was the desire of many people to be married in a place which was not normally licensed for weddings, such as a chapel of one of the Inns of Court, or a church in whose parish neither party lived. Together, these reasons may explain why nearly a quarter of the Allegations in the pilot study named St Benet Paul's Wharf as the church for the marriage, as this small city church was the nearest one to the Vicar-General and Faculty Offices.

When reading the Allegations some words of caution are advised: Not everything contained in an Allegation is necessarily true. For instance, many minors may have declared themselves to be of full age, the church(es) for which the licence was issued may not in the event have been used for the marriage, and, indeed, the mere fact that a licence was issued does not necessarily mean that the parties ever got married at all.