ABSTRACT
Given all the time omas Dunckerley actually spent ashore as an o cer in the Royal Navy it seems a bit arti cial to talk about his settling on land as something novel. He had managed to have a relatively stable home and associational life during much of his naval career, though some of the details are not entirely clear to us. Dunckerley appears to have had a chequered marital history. Despite his predilection for married life, he su ered a spate of very bad luck. When Dunckerley married Ann Martin within the Rules of the Fleet Prison in December 1743, both bride and groom were listed as having been married before.1 Ann herself presumably died shortly therea er, because omas married again in June 1745, this time at a tavern within the Rules of the Fleet Prison.2 Fleet marriages were performed within the boundaries, or ‘Rules’, of the Fleet Prison.3 Unlike modern prisons, the boundaries of the Fleet and many other such contemporary institutions were permeable, with people coming and going, and claiming their own peculiar habits of self-governance. e Fleet Prison was demolished in 1846 and immediately became a fascination for nineteenth-century scholars, who produced a series of books on the prison and its inmates. ere has been no authoritative recent history of the prison; however, thorough studies of debt and debtors like Finn’s Th e Character of Credit give a vivid picture of life within the prison.4 Fortunately, Dunckerley was not in prison for debt, but just visiting for a convenient wedding. Both of Dunckerley’s Fleet marriages were considered clandestine under English law. Calling a marriage ‘clandestine’ could mean any number of things in the eighteenth century. Generally, a marriage was de ned as clandestine if it was not held in the home parish of either the bride or groom, or was not preceded by either reading of the banns or procuring a marriage licence. According to the Report of the Royal Commission on the Laws of Marriage (1868), up to a third of marriages performed in Great Britain before the Marriage Act of 1753 were clandestine; many of these were conducted in the Fleet Prison or other similarly liminal venues.5 Because of a quirk in enforcement, socalled Fleet parsons could out marriage regulations with some impunity, and they did.6 us within the Rules of the Fleet, most bets were o , and under cover of relative anonymity, all sorts of marriages could be contracted for a fee.
