General Chat

Does anybody know in the late 1800's why a marriage bond would be required.

This site gives an explanation:
http://www.mlfhs.org.uk/Infobase/Begin-Registers.htm

Marriage Licences

The "usual" process of marriage involved the calling of "Banns" at the parish churches of bride & groom on three Sundays preceding the marriage. In the event of there being no objection, the marriage could then go ahead. An alternative was to obtain a licence, usually from the local bishop, which permitted the couple to marry more-or-less immediately. Since there was obvious potential for abuse, the bishop required the couple to sign an "Allegation" which confirmed that there was no known impediment to the marriage and also, for a "Bond" to be entered into whereby if the allegation proved false, the bondsmen (who might include the groom) would pay a substantial financial penalty. A "Licence" would then be issued which the couple would take to the minister and which gave him authority to marry the couple. The place of marriage will frequently be specified but this is not always the case, particularly with earlier licences. The licence was usually retained by the minister and seldom survives. The Bond & Allegation are usually to be found in the Diocesan Record Office. Those for many counties have been indexed and indexes published.

The value of these documents is that if a couple married by licence, the surviving documents can identify the church where the marriage was to take place allowing searches to be made of the appropriate registers. The documents will also often record the ages of the parties and their residence, neither of which is guaranteed to appear in the marriage register. Bondsmen were frequently related to the couple and their names may assist in further research.

I knew nothing at all about marriage bonds until I read this thread.
How d you search for such records?
Thanks

bridget

I put the words marriage bonds in a search engine :-)

PS the site posted this twice so I deleted the second one! :-)