ABSTRACT
Sex before the wedding was nothing new in Colyton, or indeed in the country at large, well into Queen Victoria’s reign, it had reached a higher level than at any period since the mid-sixteenth century. Economic considerations, then, probably played little part in influencing the behaviour of the majority of Colyton’s men and women in relation to sex before marriage. However, there was one respect in which the men who engaged in sex before marriage may be distinguished from those who did not, and that was their age. In Colyton, from 1550 onwards the proportion of children conceived before marriage, set against all first-born children, never fell below 22 percent in any one fifty-year period, and between 1800 and 1849 it rose to 44 percent. Numerically, the couples marrying in Colyton between 1851 and 1881 were almost evenly divided between those who waited for a pregnancy to occur before legalizing their relationship, and those who avoided conception until after marriage.
