“The bridegroom, that is to say, the husband that is to be, and the bride, who is the wife that is to be, conducted by their parents and accompanied by two bridesmen and two bridesmaids go early in the morning with a license in their pocket and call up Mr. curate and his clerk, tell them their business; are married with a low voice, and the doors shut; tip the minister a guinea and the clerk a crown; steal softly out, one one way, and t’other another, either on foot or in coaches; go different ways to some tavern at a distance from their own lodgings, or to the house of some trusty friend, there have a good dinner and return home at night as quietly as lambs. If the drums and fiddles have notice of it, they will be sure to be with them by day break, making a horrible racket, till they have got ‘the pence;’ and, which is worst of all, the whole murder will come out.”
Although the law prescribed that marriages should be only performed by licenses or the giving out of banns, there were many churches and chapels towards the end of the seventeenth century which claimed to be “peculiar” and exempt from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. But the rector of one of these, St. James, Duke’s Place, was proceeded against under the ecclesiastical law and suspended from duty for three years on a charge of having married persons without banns or license. Other churches claimed to be “peculiar” such as the chapel of Holy Trinity, Minories, on the ground that it was a crown living and entitled to the same privileges as Westminster Abbey or the Deanery of Windsor; so did the chapels of the Tower and the Savoy as royal chapels. The number of chapels where irregular marriages took place was about ninety, and it became necessary to check them by obliging incumbents to keep registers under a penalty of one hundred pounds, and the same amount was levied on them for every irregular marriage. This penalty was extended to the gaolers or keepers of prisons who permitted marriages to be performed within the walls, which had now become a very common practice in the metropolis. These Fleet parsons were not clergymen, but mere laymen who assumed the garb of cassock, gown and bands. These sham marriages were solemnised in a room in the Fleet, called the “Lord Mayor’s chapel,” where the prison parson received the couples bent on matrimony. The officiating parson was Mr. John Mottram who transacted an enormous amount of business, and performed in one year alone as many as two thousand two hundred marriages. He was convicted of unlawful practices and fined £200 but he was not deterred from repeating them, or giving false dates to their certificates to suit the desire and convenience of the contracting parties. Pennant in his account of London (1793) tells us that as he walked the streets near the Fleet prison he was invited to walk in and be married. The sign over the door portrayed a male and female hand joined with the words, “Marriages performed within.” A tout or “plyer” as he was called, stood there soliciting the passers-by and swearing that his employer would do the job cheaper than any one else. Sometimes the parson himself, temporarily at large, was to be seen walking before his shop: “A squalid, profligate figure, clad in a tattered plaid night-gown, with a fiery face, ready to couple you for a dram of gin or a roll of tobacco.”