ABSTRACT
The Church (up to the end of the 1400s still the Church of Rome in England as elsewhere in Christendom) therefore developed the concept and separate remedy of nullity, in identifying marriages which had not been validly contracted, and/or consummated – as it was perceived that a Christian marriage should be in an era when legitimate heirs were a priority in order to ensure the reliable transmission of property from generation to generation, so that a childless union might be a far-reaching disaster. Such convenient annulments therefore enabled unsatisfactory marriages to be declared void from the start, thus permitting the parties to remarry since they had technically never been married before. From this practical origin was developed the English law of nullity, which is still available today, and which has enjoyed a recent renaissance owing to the require-
ments, in a multicultural society, of a modern class of applicants whose philosophies and needs dictated that they would vastly prefer that no marriage had been contracted, rather than that an existing one should be dissolved.
