Before the twentieth century, the majority of marriages were parochially endogamous, i.e. between people from the same parish. Mills quotes typical figures of 63% to 76%. To some extent, this may be explained by a simple lack of opportunity, as few people would have travelled extensively enough to meet potential marriage partners outside their own, or immediately adjacent, parishes.
But this may be only a partial explanation. Flandrin asserts that endogamy may be a consequence of communal solidarity, a shared attitude to outsiders, giving examples from France where the bachelors in a village attempted to establish a monopoly over the marriageable girls, and would - apparently with the full approval of other villagers - discourage outsiders from paying court to the village girls, with violence if necessary. Flandrin claims the rationale for such solidarity to be twofold: every girl who married outside the village (a) made it more likely a village boy would remain a bachelor, and probably a servant, and (b) took part of the wealth of the village away as her dowry. Neither of these explanations seems fully rational, as the losses due to a girl marrying exogamously would be balanced by the gains due to a boy so marrying, yet there is no evidence that village boys were encouraged to marry outside the village. Simple distrust of strangers seems a more rational, if less charitable, explanation - although if this were the explanation, communal solidarity might be expected to be manifested in other ways in addition to endogamy.
And in fact, such appears to be the case. Shorter has shown that in many areas - he gives examples from England, France, Germany, Scandinavia and New England - villagers were expected to act within strictly defined bounds of propriety, both in their relationships within the community and those with outsiders. Transgressors would be subjected to a variety of sanctions, collectively known as charavaris, which typically involved noisy demonstrations, ridicule, and threatened, symbolic, or actual violence. The Yorkshire custom of footprints, for example, whereby an exogamous bachelor would be expected to recompense the bachelors of the village of the spinster whom he was courting (and would suffer physical attack should he not so pay), continued into the twentieth century.
As Flandrin admits, the relative explanatory power of communal solidarity as compared to lack of opportunity is not easy to judge. In an attempt to discover this, this paper examines a community, the Huguenot settlement at Thorney in Cambridgeshire, wherein a number of migrant streams have been gathered into the same neighbourhood. If endogamy follows from communal solidarity rather than the mere fact of neighbourhood, we would expect to find it continuing within the migrant streams, despite the fact of neighbourhood applying equally well to members of the other streams.
The Thorney settlement was set up from four separate migrant streams: firstly from Sandtoft in Yorkshire, and later from Canterbury, Norwich, and Guisnes near Calais. Almost the only surviving record of the Thorney Settlement is the baptismal register for the period 1654-1727. This contains 1,703 entries showing the name of the child being baptised, the names of the parents, and usually two, though in some cases four, temoins (in this context, meaning godparents). Analysis of this register together with those of Canterbury, Guisnes and Norwich, and such records still extant of the settlement at Sandtoft, have revealed a total of 3,056 individuals in the Thorney register, of whom 2,432 can be traced with a reasonable degree of certainty to their place of origin:-
| Table 1: Inhabitants of Thorney, by sex and migrant stream, 1654-1727 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stream | Males | Females | Totals | |||
| In-migrants | ||||||
| Canterbury | 143 | 10.33% | 209 | 12.50% | 352 | 11.52% |
| Guisnes | 48 | 3.47% | 60 | 3.59% | 108 | 3.53% |
| Norwich | 10 | 0.72% | 8 | 0.48% | 18 | 0.59% |
| Sandtoft | 250 | 18.06% | 278 | 16.63% | 528 | 17.28% |
| Natives | ||||||
| Thorney | 690 | 49.86% | 736 | 44.02% | 1426 | 46.66% |
| Unknown | 243 | 17.56% | 381 | 22.79% | 624 | 20.42% |
| Total | 1384 | 100.00% | 1672 | 100.00% | 3056 | 100.00% |
It will be noticed that so few individuals can be traced to the Norwich stream that results for that stream will not be statistically significant. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the Guisnes stream.
It was also necessary to discover the sex of each individual. This presented no problem in the case of individuals born in Thorney, as the register specifies them as f (fils) or ff (fille). And clearly, there is no problem in sexing parents. In the case of temoins who were born outside Thorney, and do not also appear in the register as parents, it was necessary to use the christian name as an indication of gender.
Then the register was divided into seven decades, and for each decade tables were drawn up showing (a) the migrant stream of husbands against that of wives, and (b) the migrant stream of temoins against those of parents. From these tables, the level of endogamous marriage and endogamous temoinage was measured. It might be expected that these levels would decrease with time, as inhabitants began to think of themselves as inhabitants of Thorney rather than migrants from their respective streams. However, such was not the case, the rates staying remarkably constant over the period of study. It was thus possible to extract several measures of endogamy that can be taken as representative of the whole period:-
| Table 2: Various measures of Endogamy in Thorney, 1654-1727 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| In-migrants | Natives | |||||
| Measure | Canterbury | Guises | Norwich | Sandtoft | Thorney | Unknown |
| Endogamous grooms | 43/171 | 0/40 | 0/16 | 111/321 | 5/50 | 78/249 |
| 25.15% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 34.58% | 10.00% | 31.33% | |
| Endogamous brides | 43/187 | 0/54 | 0/6 | 111/271 | 5/41 | 78/288 |
| 22.99% | 0.00% | 0.00% | 40.96% | 12.20% | 27.08% | |
| Endogagous temoins to endogamous marriages | 60/156 | 0/0 | 0/0 | 264/470 | 1/18 | 100/220 |
| 38.46% | - | - | 56.17% | 5.56% | 45.45% | |
| Fathers choosing endogamous temoins | 132/558 | 21/168 | 3/54 | 364/868 | 28/198 | 254/740 |
| 23.66% | 12.50% | 5.56% | 41.94% | 14.14% | 34.32% | |
| Mothers choosing endogamous temoins | 180/588 | 30/202 | 5/18 | 342/790 | 20/188 | 304/810 |
| 30.61% | 14.85% | 27.78% | 43.85% | 10.64% | 37.53% | |
Entries show:
Line one: number of endogamous events / total number of events
Line two: percentage endogamy.
Table 1 may be thought of as a table of endogamous availablity, in that the possibility of a man from the Canterbury stream marrying endogamously depends on the availability of a wife from the Canterbury stream. Comparing Tables 1 and 2 allows us to see whether endogamy within the Thorney settlement was higher than would be expected were it a consequence of the mere fact of neighbourhood. Since, for example, Table 1 shows that 12.50% at the women at Thorney were from the Canterbury migrant stream, then were the men from Canturbury to have chosen their wives with no reference to migrant stream, we would see 12.50% endogamous marriage, amongst Canterbury grooms. Table 2 shows, however, that the actual figure was 25.15%, strongly suggesting that some Canturbury males took account of migrant streams when selecting their wives.
The above argument is not strictly correct. Ideally, the figures for male endogamy should be compared, not with the 12.50% which is Canterbury's contribution to the total female population of Thorney, but with Canterbury's contribution to the number of marriageable woman available at the time the marriage took place. That is, we should compensate for those women unavailable as marriage partners because of being too young, or too closely related to the groom, for marriage; and for those already married. However, making such compensations would require detailed analysis of the baptisms, marriages, and deaths in Canterbury, Guines, Norwich, Sandtoft amd Thorney, in order to complete a family reconstruction exercise on the Thorney settlement. Such an exercise would be beyond the scope of this project, and impossible in its entirety due to the lack of marriage and death records from Thorney, and the large lacunæ in records of Sandtoft.
If we take Table 1 to be the best figures obtainable with the sources available, then we are led to several conclusions. Marital endogamy, for both brides and grooms, was approximately double the availability figures for the Canterbury and Sandtoft streams. However, there was no endogamous marriage in the Guisnes or Norwich streams. Marital endogamy was generally low amongst individuals born in Thorney. Endogamous temoinage was also low amongst that born in Thorney. But in most other case endogamous temoinage was much higher than the figures for availability, especially in endogamous marriages.
From these conclusions there appear to have been enclaves of migrants from Canterbury and Sandtoft who preferred to marry within the enclave, and choose temoins therefrom. The migrant streams from Guisnes and Norwich were not sufficiently numerous to make endogamous marriage a viable option, but the tendancy to endogamous temoinage suggest that Guisnes and Norwich would also have formed enclaves had they been able to do so. The existence of such endogamous enclaves within the Thorney settlement, despite the fact of neighbourhood applying equally well to the other migrant streams, strongly suggests that there, at least, endogamy was a consequence of communal solidarity
It is not clear, however, that we may generalise from this, and suggest it may be taken as evidence that endogamy in general follows from communal soildarity rather than the mere fact of neighbourhood. Is it possible, for example, that Huguenots had more reason than most to "keep themselves to themselves"? Ideally, we should answer this by examining a non-Huguenot migrant community and comparing the results, but in the meantime we can, I think, speculate.
That the Huguenots received hard treatment is beyond question and this may have engendered some distrust of strangers. In their continental homes they suffered great religious persecution, and whilst the official stand of king and parliament was that foreign protestants were welcome to England, in practice they were rarely made welcome by the natives of the areas in which they settled. In Canterbury and Norwich they were accused of taking natives' jobs and their numbers limited. In Sandtoft they were involved in disputes over land ownership. The Vermuyden drainage schemes on which they were employed were violently opposed by the natives.
However, these were all disputes between Huguenots and non-Huguenots, not the divisions between two groups of Huguenots suggested by the endogamy results. As a group, as Peet has it
... there was one common bond of union - they [the Thorney settlers] were all sufferers for conscience' sake, strangers in a strange land speaking a foreign tongue.
It is possible that Peet over-estimates the bond of a shared language, since part of the Thorney settlement, as at Sandtoft, was originally Dutch, and would have found the French in which the church services were conducted as foreign a language as English, but in general his point seems good.
Overall, whilst there seems good reason for Huguenots as a group to keep themselves apart from non-Huguenots - and indeed they did so, it being most unusual for a Huguenot to marry outside the faith - there seems no especial reason why groups of Huguenots should not wish to mix. Therefore, I am inclined to believe that we have reasonable evidence to suggest that endogamy may indeed be considered a consequence of communal solidarity.
It is clear that further research needs to be done, The need to compare results with those from a non-Huguenot settlement has already been noted. However, finding such a community as well suited to such tests as was the Thorney settlement might present problems. A community is needed in which a reasonable proportion of the population can be assigned to one of a small number of migrant streams, whereas most migrant communities attracted migrants from many different places. The mass chain-migration needed to give rise to Thorney-like settlements seems not to have been an English phenomenon.
It would be interesting to test the validity of Peet's implication that a shared foreign language acts to bond groups together. At first sight the claim is trivially true, in that one is unlikely to bond closely to someone to whom one cannot speak. But in the case of foreign immigrants, who would perforce have to learn English to communicate with the natives, one might expend the bonding power of a foreign language to be only temporary. The issue might be tested by investigating whether the Dutch- and French-speakers formed separate enclaves within the Sandtoft community. There was certainly some dispute as to the language in which their church services should be conducted, and although the original intention was to have a church at which services were given in English and Dutch, when the church was eventually built in 1641, the services were given in French and Dutch. But the dispute seems to have been more between the upper hierarchs of the Church of England rather than amongst the Sandtoft congregation. Whether this dispute corresponds to some rift in the Sandtoft community remains to be seen.
But this is for the future. Summarising the conclusions of this research, it has been seen that the various migrant streams forming the Thorney settlement tended to form separate enclaves, members preferring to choose spouses and temoins from their own stream. This lends weight to Flandrin's assertion that such endogamy is a consequence of communal solidarity.
Calendar of State Papers Domestic
Charles I, Vol CCCX, 1
J L Flandrin, translated by R Southern
Families in Former Times: Kinship, household and sexuality
Cambridge University Press, 1979
D Mills
Aspects of marriage: an example of applied historical studies
Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1980
H Peet
Register of the French Church,Thorney
Huguenot Society of London, Vol 17 QS
E Shorter
The making of the modern family
London, Collins, 1975
R Hovenden
Register of the Walloon Church in Canterbury, Parts 1-3
Huguenot Society of London, Vol 5 QS
H G B Le Moine
Huguenots in the Isle of Axholme
Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, Vol 2, 1887, pp 265-81
W Minet & W L Weller
Register of the Protestant Church at Guisnes, 1668-1685
Huguenot Society of London, Vol 3 QS
W J C Moens
The Walloons and their Church at Norwich, their History and Register 1565-1832
Huguenot Society of London, Vol 1 QS
G H Overend
The First Thirty Years of the French Settlement in Axholme, 1626-1656
Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, Vol 2, 1887, pp 281-331
G Stovin
Part of the register of the French Protestant's Church at Sandtoft
Yorkshire Archæological and Topographical Journal, Vol 7, 1882, pp 230-38
| top |
|
|
|
|
|