the marriage surety bonds of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries

[rudywoofs (Pam)]

Occasionally, in looking at the records of ancestors, the "marriage bond" between the groom and a bride's representative is found.

 

What exactly is a marriage bond?  And what happens if the two people named in the marriage bond don’t get married? Is there some kind of court action or record that happens then?

 

And underlying these questions is an understandable, but mistaken, notion as to just what a marriage bond was.

It seems as though a marriage bond should be evidence of an intention to marry — a reflection of an official “engagement.” A man who had proposed to a woman went to the courthouse with a bondsman, and posted a bond indicating his intention to marry the woman.

 

Right?

... not exactly.

Sure it’s true that you wouldn’t have gone and signed a marriage bond if you didn’t intend to get married, but simply “reflecting an engagement” or “indicating an intention to marry” is about as far from the real purpose of a marriage bond as it’s possible to get.

 

Remember that, for the longest time, the way folks got married was that marriage banns were read from the pulpit or posted at the door of the local church. Usually, banns were read on three consecutive Sundays or posted for three weeks.

 

For example, in North Carolina, as of 1715, couples had to have “the Banns of Matrimony published Three times by the Clerks at the usual place of celebrating Divine Service.”  In neighboring Virginia, a 1705 statute required “thrice publication of the banns according as the rubric in the common prayer book prescribes.”

 

That notice that two people were going to marry had one purpose and one purpose only: to make sure folks knew there was a wedding in the offing so that they had a chance to come forward and object if there was some legal reason why the marriage couldn’t take place.  In general, that meant one (or both) of the couple was too young, one (or both) of them was already married, or the law prohibited the marriage because they were too closely related.

 

When folks married without banns, however, particularly when they married some distance away from where they were known, there wasn’t the same opportunity in advance to have folks “speak up or forever hold their peace.”  The bond then stepped into the breach.

 

What that bond actually was, then, was a form of guarantee that there wasn’t any legal bar to the marriage. Enforcing the guarantee was a pledge by the groom and a bondsman — usually a relative — to pay a sum of money, usually to the Governor of the State (or colony if earlier, or to the Crown if in Canada), if and only if it actually turned out that there was some reason the marriage wasn’t legal.

 

 

 

 

The bond shown above is from Wilkes County, North Carolina, in 1816, was a promise by the groom Boston Shew and his brother Simon to pay the Governor of North Carolina five hundred pounds, but it provided that it was “Void on condition that there be no just cause to Obstruct Boston Shew — Intermarriage with Elizabeth Brewer.”

 

The use of marriage bonds was common, particularly in southern and mid-Atlantic states, well into the 19th century, when most jurisdictions started relying on what the couple said in a written application for a marriage license.

 

 

 

SOURCES
Note: Information in this post was originally included in a January 2012 blog post, The ties that bond, and from The Legal Genealogist's Blog.

 

[Tom Wetmore]

That is very interesting. It does put a different spin on the modern perception of what was meant in any pre-twentieth century writing about the bonds of matrimony.