Bigamy

Though people are still sometimes prosecuted for repeatedly marrying immigrants to rescue them from the attentions of the Home Office, while forgetting to get divorced between times, one uncovenanted result of the now common practice of living together without matrimony is the decline of that celebrated Victorian institution: bigamy.

In the seventeenth century, when bigamy prosecutions numbered only a dozen or so a year in England, both men and women were occasionally sentenced to hang for the offence, though most of those convicted were able to prove they could read and, claiming benefit of clergy, escaped with being branded on the thumb, or, as they phrased it in those days, ‘burnt in the hand'. In an unusually large proportion of cases however - 16 out of 22 in Kent between 1617 and 1684 for example - the jury acquitted, perhaps because of inept prosecutors' failure to produce conclusive proof of a previous marriage, or to secure the attendance in court of previous spouses. From 1706 even illiterates could claim benefit of clergy, and branding on the thumb was replaced by a gaol sentence by the end of the eighteenth century.

Elizabeth Chudleigh, so-called Duchess of Kingston, escaped even branding on the hand when in 1776...