As I have rote befor, I had a home of my owen to take her to, as sone as she was ready to come, and after a bit she did come, and shared it with me for about four years or more.
Old maps fail to reveal where the pound to which Fred refers was once situated.
Just at the back of the Cottage was a round wall called the Old Pound, were years befor they used to put strayen cattle. That was done away with a long time ago, but the pound came in useful as it aforded us good cover to get home many a night wen we had been out on the Job.
Unless the baby was very premature, Anna must have already been in the early stages of pregnancy when Fred went to serve his prison sentence in November 1882. The couple were married on Monday, 14 May 1883, only just within the three months required by law following the reading of the banns. Both were just 21. According to parish records, the banns were read on 25 February, 4 March and 11 March 1883.
The requirement for banns to be read came about to regularise weddings and do away with common-law marriages. It was enacted in Hardwickes Marriage Act of 1754. Prior to this, the situation had been in disarray with clandestine marriages and young people being married inappropriately or without their parents’ consent. The new law stated that a marriage could only be solemnised in a parish church or public chapel after three readings of the banns, or by licence from the Bishop of the Diocese.
The 1754 Act forbade people under the age of 21 from marrying before they came of age without parental consent. As the law only covered England and Wales, it began the habit of minors wishing to marry without consent to flee across the Scottish border to marry in Gretna Green.
Banns giving the names of the couple are read to the congregation by the clergyman in the parishes where the bride and groom live, and if that is different, in the parish in which they are to marry. They must be read on three Sundays within the three months running up to the marriage, but are usually read on three consecutive weeks. This provides an opportunity for anyone to put forward any legal reasons why a couple may not marry.
Fred and Anna were well enough educated to sign the register, Anna with a practised hand and Fred with fine flourishes, so why did they wait until only two weeks before the baby’s birth? Was it because of parental objections and they needed to wait until they were both 21? Anna’s own mother was hardly in a position to criticise, having given birth to an illegitimate child five years earlier, but Granny Steeles might have been a different matter. It would seem she took all her grandchildren under her wing from time to time, but the fact that Anna, Henry and Edward were living with her while her daughter was living in another home in the village with little Florence suggests she was disapproving of her daughter’s behaviour, for it seems she was always left with grandchildren to support. Perhaps Mary Ann felt that as she herself had managed to raise an illegitimate child alone, that might be a better option for her daughter than marriage to Fred.
The marriage certificate shows that both the witnesses came from Anna’s side: a cousin and a lodger, who lived with Anna and her brothers at Granny Steele’s. It also stated that Fred resided in Norwich, which is odd and unexplained.
At the time, premarital sex was commonplace and rural Norfolk had the fourth highest illegitimacy rate in the country (10.8 per 1,000), but with as many as 25 per cent of brides being pregnant at the time of marriage, it is more likely the family objected to Fred rather than the horror felt in middle-class Victorian society of a ‘base born’ child. It is thought that some girls hoped to catch their man by becoming pregnant but alternatively, it is argued that men wanted to be sure their partner was fruitful before they married.
Did Anna want to marry Fred, or was she persuaded to do so? Was Fred coerced into marrying her or was he afraid of the Bastardy Laws? Whatever the circumstances, the marriage can hardly have been the stuff of dreams.
The 1876 Magisterial Formulist shows that there was plenty of legislation to catch fathers of illegitimate children, twenty-five pages in all, containing thirty-five different charges under section 6 of the Bastardy Laws Amendment Act 1873. Women could go to the local court and ask for support during pregnancy, and after the child was born. The Workhouse could chase a man for support if the new mother was staying there. There were laws enabling distress warrants to be issued and laws to make the father pay funeral and other incidental costs if the child died. Also, laws to bring him to court if the orders were disobeyed, and finally a Warrant of commitment to prison, if all else failed.
There are two different charges outlined in the Magisterial Formulist, one to be enacted if the father fails to support the mother and child, and one if he owes upkeep to the Union Workhouse, which has been keeping them. The wording is similar and full of the majesty of the Law:
. . . by two justices of the peace acting for the said division (and having jurisdiction for the said Union) ~~~~~~ was adjudged to be the putative father of a bastard child, born of the body of ~~~~~~~, a single woman, was brought before us to show why the same should not be paid, that no sufficient distress can be laid upon his goods and chattels ....... Convey the said ~~~~~~~ to the common goal there to remain without bail or mainprise for the term of ~~~~~ unless such sum and costs, together with the costs and charges of attending the commitment and conveying of the said ~~~~~~ to the common goal, and of the persons employed to convey him thither, amounting to the further sum of ~~~~~ to be paid and satisfied.
In 1849, George Batchelor was ordered to pay Depwade Union 2/9d a week for seven years to support his daughter, plus arrears of £1 4s 6d.
Lots of women were simply deserted – the men just skipped town and were untraceable.
Fred wrote:
The days went on till the time come for her confinement, wen to my great sorrow she died. Young as I was then it was the hardest blow I have ever had to bear in all my life, the more so because it came so sudden, and there was no reason I knew it should all end like that, and no warning. She did not want to go and I had lost a dear pall as well as a loven wife, and she left me with a new born baby – for the child, a boy, lived.
For those who have read I Walked by Night and so enjoyed the romance Fred describes between himself and Anna, it will come as a revelation that Anna did not die in childbirth or have a boy.
Fred talks with such love and warmth of their courtship and marriage. Here is a little of what he wrote:
After about three years things fell out so that it became Imperitive that we got married . . . I have no need to tell why. She was one of the best pals that a man ever had, and the best wife any man could want. Do not think dear Reader that I am telling a love story, but it is true that I loved her more than anything else on this earth and she loved me the same. It was not only me that loved her neither, for it always seam she had a way with her with all live things, and pets and birds.
Edith Ann was born on 25 May 1883 in Marham. It is unclear whether Anna went home to her family to have the baby or whether she and Fred were living in Marham at the time. Fred was working as an agricultural worker, so it fell to Anna to stop Doctor Steele from Downham Market to proudly register her baby daughter. At the time, the doctor was also the local Registrar and he carried the registers with him in a leather satchel as he rode about visiting the sick, so that people in the remote villages were spared the ten-mile journey to Downham Market to register their child, as had been compulsory since 1837.
Lord Chancellor Thomas Cromwell introduced the first formal system of registering the population in the reign of Henry VIII. Every clergyman in 1538 was ordered to keep a book in which to record details of all baptisms, marriages and burials at which they officiated. In 1597, in the reign of Elizabeth I, each parish was ordered to purchase a special book in which to record
