In 1753 a new English law prescribed a formal ceremony of marriage that required brides and grooms to sign their names in a marriage register. The Marriage Act 1753, commonly referred to as Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act,  was intended to regularise so-called ‘Scotch Marriages’. Happily for future researchers, it had the unintended consequence of bringing into being comprehensive and readily available data on adult literacy.

Someone’s signature on a register is a loose indication of their level of literacy. Though in itself a signature does not show that the signer had any general capacity to read and write, it does indicate that the person had achieved at least elementary reading and writing skills, and aggregated data on this can be used to expose patterns and trends in a population’s levels of adult literacy.

In 1861 the Registrar General for Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England asserted: “If a man can write his own name, it may be presumed that he can read it when written by another; still more that he will recognize that and other familiar words when he sees them in print; and it is even probable that he will spell his way through a paragraph in the newspaper.”

It has been suggested that person’s capacity to sign their name on a marriage register is an indicator of abiding literacy, for the signature was normally made more than ten years after the signer left school. Not all remembered what they had been taught: in the 1860s the Rector of Hornsea in Yorkshire complained that “they for the most part soon forget what they have learned at school and when they come to be married can’t write their own names”.

Marriage records of Whitmore parish from 1813 to 1900 are readily available.  Those of marriages before 1813 have been combined with other records, making them more difficult to review.

I have tabulated the records from 1813 to 1900 to discover the proportion of brides and grooms who signed their names and the proportion who, unable to sign, made their mark an ‘X’ on the register.

I reviewed two hundred marriage records. In the 1810s 85% of grooms signed their name and just under 50% of brides. In the 1830s two-thirds of both grooms and brides signed their names. By the 1860s 95% of grooms and 90% of brides signed their name. By the end of the nineteenth century all grooms and brides signed their name.

Number of marriages recorded in the parish registers for Whitmore
Proportions in the parish of Whitmore where brides and grooms signed their name or made their mark
Percentage of brides and grooms who signed their name in the marriage register in the parish of Whitmore

While it was more likely that when only one signed it was the groom, there were instances of the bride signing and the groom making his mark.

1871 marriage of Ralph Picken (1846-1924) and Sarah Mullineux (1848-1910);
the groom made his mark and the bride signed her name

The figures for Whitmore can be compared with statistics for the whole of England. In 1840 two-thirds of all grooms and half of all brides were able to sign their names at marriage. In the 1830s in Whitmore two-thirds of both grooms and brides could sign their name and in the following decade nearly all grooms and three-quarters of brides signed their name. By the end of the century the figure was 97% signed their name in England and Wales whereas in Whitmore all those who married in the 1890s signed their name.

It appears from these numbers that the average literacy of those who married in Whitmore was higher than the average for England and Wales. The data also suggests that the higher rate in Whitmore was achieved in advance of the passing of the 1870 Education Act, legislation that established the principle of a statutory responsibility for schooling, and helped achieve the rapid rise in UK literacy rates seen in the latter decades of the 19th century.

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