3.1. Motives for marriage and cohabitation

Notwithstanding they are rare, disparate and selective, qualitative sources, in combination, do provide us with information on the most common motives of people to cohabit. From the late sixteenth century until well into the twentieth century, churches and governments actively persecuted, or at least discouraged, cohabitation. Couples skipping the official and unofficial rites de passage that made them full members of their communities had a lot to lose, so it seems. What were the reasons for choosing cohabitation instead of marriage? In this section, we provide a brief overview of the history of cohabitation in Western Europe, focusing on two questions. First, which factors affected the desirability of official marriage in comparison with cohabitation? Second, which factors affected the feasibility of official marriage? We assume that the higher the relative desirability of marriage and the higher its feasibility, the lower the incidence of cohabitation in a given period or region will be.

Why and when was official marriage more desirable than the alternative of cohabitation? First, marriage offered social as well as legal status to spouses as well as their children, which was, until recently, mostly denied to cohabitants. Second, marriage allowed couples to avoid state and church sanctions against cohabitation. Third, the state could offer specific material benefits to married couples and withhold them from cohabiting ones. Last, marriage might be perceived as being more stable, offering more security, and being proof of a greater commitment than cohabitation. In other words, the symbolic value of an official marriage was higher. And when was official marriage more feasible? First, when there were no legal obstacles to getting married. Such obstacles ranged from stipulations on prohibited degrees of kinship to laws against marriages of the poor. Second, marriage was more feasible when the costs of a wedding were rather low, which depended on the expectations of the community and the real wages of the couple. Third, marriage was more feasible when the official procedures were relatively simple, and, for instance, also facilitated access to marriage for foreign migrants. Last, the feasibility of marriage increased when it was not tied to the life cycle transitions of other persons, for instance to the relinquishing of headship of a household in old age (or even at death) of the parents. Below, we will discuss these factors in greater detail.

3.2. The desirability of marrying officially

Getting married was, for a long time in human history, a major rite de passage and marker of adulthood. Permanent celibates were often subjected to the derision of their peers (Chambers-Schiller, 1984; Froide, 2005; Israel, 2002; van Poppel, 1992). The issue at stake here, is, of course, what defined a proper marriage in the eyes of the community? And who exactly constituted the community? Did sub-communities exist with different norms and sanctions with respect to marriage?

After the Council of Trent (1545–1563), a properly proclaimed public ceremony performed by a priest in the presence of witnesses came to define an official and valid marriage, but in various European regions older notions of marriage survived for several centuries after Trent. Betrothals or vows of marriage, especially in a public ceremony, may have given a couple the same social standing in their community as those that went on to church to repeat their vows in front of a priest, but what about legal status? Official marriage defined the statuses of husband and wife, and of children versus their parents, in terms of obligations and rights, e.g. to one another’s property. Illegitimate children had no access to property, and therefore had lower chances of marriage. Moreover, illegitimate boys were not accepted as apprentices in the guilds, although governments such as in Denmark tried to outlaw this exclusion (Telste, 2009). The negative consequences of an illegitimate status lasted well into the twentieth century. For instance, in The Netherlands illegitimate sons could not be exempted from military service (Overdiep, 1955, p. 49).

Within Western Europe, there is a distinction between countries where the rules of Trent were followed quickly and strictly and other nations where it took more time. In England the canonic rules of Trent had never been formally backed up by legislation, leaving room for cohabiting couples. However, their common-law marriages, outlawed by Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, appear to have enjoyed no legal status (Probert, 2009, pp. 75–76). In Scotland, ‘irregular marriages’ based only on the mutual consent of couples persisted and were considered valid. It seems to have been a rare but accepted recourse for couples who did not wish to be married by the clergy, which was the only legal option until 1940 (Smout, 1981). Especially in Lutheran countries, children from betrothed couples held the same rights as children from married couples, at least for a long time (Fauve-Chamoux, 2011). An example is the case of Sweden. The church tried to incorporate the betrothal in one single ceremony, but in practice betrothals and church weddings remained parallel forms of marriage until the eighteenth century. The marriage code in the Act of 1734 made the church ritual the only lawful form of marriage, but still the (public) betrothal followed by copulation was respected in the curious legal form of ‘incomplete marriage’ (Sellin, 1922). This means that deserted partners as well as the children were treated as if the intended wedding had actually taken place, thus they were given the same rights to property inheritance as legally married partners and legitimate children (Lundh, 2003; also for Norway, Sogner, 2003). In the perception of local communities in several regions in Sweden, betrothal remained the crucial transition. In northern Sweden, the actual living together of an unmarried couple was celebrated by a village feast called skjuta på björn (shooting at the bear) (Marks, 1994).

The consequences of not marrying were different for men and women. On the one hand, not being married was riskier for women than for men. Until the eighteenth century, women made pregnant after a promise of marriage could still have their honour restored, and their child financially supported, through a paternity suit. But many countries tightened the procedures proving that promises had been exchanged. For instance, Norway accepted only public promises after 1734 (Telste, 2009, p. 177). Countries that adopted the French Civil Code banned paternity suits wholesale. In many areas, these suits were reinstated in the first decades of the twentieth century, on behalf of the children. Possibly, the lack of possibilities to enforce legal claims on the male partner might have made women more reluctant to enter into cohabitation (Leffingwell, 1892, p. 48). On the other hand, a woman might have had good reasons to choose cohabitation over marriage if she had more assets or more income than her prospective husband. Through marriage, men became the legal guardians of women, and gained the right to control their wives’ savings and income. In the Swedish so-called ‘incomplete marriage’ form (see above), the husband did not become the legal guardian of his wife and children and could not exercise the right of the master of the household (Matovic, 1986, p. 27). In England as well, women had been made legally incapable by Hardwicke’s Act, and by not marrying they could retain control over their property (Burguière & Lebrun, 1996, p. 136)

In every Western European society, sub-communities existed which had their own definitions of marriage and cohabitation. When travelling groups of pedlars or workers such as chimney sweeps consisted of men and women, sexual relations would be regulated through customs of their own. Dutch navvies working on canal digging or land reclamation were accompanied by women doing their washing and cooking. Their common-law marriages were sealed by ‘jumping the well-hook’, which became one of the terms for cohabitation in The Netherlands (Kok, 1991). Likewise, people such as Dutch knife grinders had their own practice (the ‘marriage under the oaks’ with a special knife grinder’s formulary), and a study of illegitimacy in one inland province (1912–1940) revealed that more than a third of cohabitations could be ascribed to the small group of itinerants (Overdiep, 1955, p. 35). Sogner (2003, p. 225) stresses the similarities between vagrant and ‘ordinary’ marriages, but ‘The economic, or maybe rather the cultural, incentive to set up an ordinary […] marriage was evidently lacking’.

Avoiding sanctions against cohabitation has been a powerful stimulus to seek official marriage. Countries, such as the Calvinist Netherlands, adopting the Church’s vision of a morally pure community could be very severe in their prosecution of cohabitation as a form of ‘fornication’. Dutch couples caught would have to pay a heavy fine, but they were often acquitted when they could prove that their intended marriage had been delayed and they then married quickly. However, those that persisted were banished for 10 to 12 years (Van der Heijden, 1998; 2014). In France, and other Catholic countries, cohabitation was also punished harshly, in contrast to England, as we have seen (Laslett, 1965). Cohabitation was no longer deemed a criminal offence in countries following the French Civil Code (early nineteenth century), but authorities still had many ways of disciplining cohabitants. For instance (Dutch) juvenile courts threatened out-of-home placement unless the parents married (Overdiep, 1955, p. 51). In Scandinavian countries illegitimacy and cohabitation remained punishable for a longer period. A Swedish ‘guilty’ couple had to pay a fine to the church which corresponded to about one month’s pay for a farmhand (Matovic, 1986, p. 26). In Norway, persecution of cohabiting couples was, after 1812, limited to those who had more than two children. Interestingly, cohabitation remained in the Norwegian Penal Code until 1972 (Sogner, 2003). In her contribution to this issue, ‘Cohabitation from illegal to institutionalized practice: The Case of Norway 1972–2010’, Liv Siltevik describes how Norway abolished the concubinage paragraph and moved on to become one of the world’s first nations to realize institutional equality between cohabitation and marriage.

The churches had their own ways of punishing cohabiting couples, apart from informing the police (when this was still possible). For instance in Sweden, unmarried mothers had to be ‘purified’, which means she had to admit her sins to the parishioners in the church. In 1741, this was changed to a private ceremony, in which she had to face only the minister. The system was abolished in 1855 (Brändström, 1996). In Calvinist countries, such as The Netherlands, couples found guilty of fornication were banned from the Eucharist, and were excommunicated when they persisted (Roodenburg, 1990). According to Ehmer (2002, p. 319) the strict control of premarital sexuality by several religious groups (Calvinists, Catholics in Ireland and southern Europe, Muslims and Jews) had been very successful, in the sense that people had internalized the norms.

Cohabitants could also face sanctions from their community (e.g. through charivaris), their kin, and their employers. For instance, in small French industrial towns, such as Le Creusot, employers put pressure on their workers to marry (Fauve-Chamoux, 2011). On the other hand, in many European working-class communities cohabitation was not frowned upon, as long as one behaved as ordinary couples, as is shown in Ginger Frost’s contribution in this issue ‘“As If She Was My Own Child”: Cohabitation, Community, and the English Criminal Courts, 1855–1900’ (also, Abrams, 1993, p. 89). European family systems differ to the degree in which adult children depended on parental approval and support (Reher, 1998). It is likely that in regions with strong family ties the diffusion of cohabitation in the twentieth century was delayed, until the parents themselves had accepted or even experienced it (Di Giulio & Rosina, 2007).

Cohabiting couples missed many of the material benefits available to married ones. Unmarried partners could not benefit from pensions or allowances, such as provided to the dependants of soldiers. In the first half of the twentieth century, social and family policies were geared to improving the situation of families. Sometimes, the aim was to give a boost to the nation’s birth rate, sometimes to reinforce traditional, patriarchal relations (Therborn, 2004). The benefits, such as marriage loans, maternity leave and child allowances were not granted to cohabiting couples. Cohabiting couples in, for instance, The Netherlands and Scotland were not eligible for social services, such as public housing or unemployment allowances for dependants (Overdiep, 1955, p. 50; Smout, 1981, p. 227). However, some policies had the unintended consequence of stimulating consensual unions. Examples are laws removing married women from public service and ending widows’ pensions on remarriage.

Apart from having social, legal and financial advantages, official marriage had symbolic value and promised more protection, stability and endurance, if only because getting divorced was costly and difficult until the second half of the twentieth century. Especially for women who, after divorce, had no income to support themselves, this might have been an important reason to press for marriage. Frost (1997) describes how English women tried to get their relationship (with separated men) legalized, even at the risk of being persecuted for bigamy: ‘The ceremony, then, must have had an attraction beyond the mere practical, giving a sense of permanence, public proof of a partnership, and community acceptance’ (p. 295). In the 1970s when divorce rates surged and marriage lost its aura of stability and permanence, it may also have lost its comparative advantage of offering more permanence. Indeed, some social scientists see cohabitation as a ‘strategic long-term response’ to the prevalent divorce culture (Hiekel & Keizer, 2015, p. 213).

3.3. The feasibility of marrying officially

Many cohabiting couples, perhaps the majority, would have been perfectly happy to marry, were it not for insuperable obstacles preventing them from doing so. One obstacle could be the parents, who, in several countries, still had to consent to the wedding of their adult children. Also, marriages were prohibited among kin (either consanguinal or affinal) by elaborate rules on forbidden degrees. The rules were sometimes hard to comprehend and state and church authorities sometimes interpreted them differently. For instance, in seventeenth-century Netherlands, the church and the state debated whether marrying the widow of a brother of one’s late wife should be prohibited (van der Heijden, 2014). More common was the situation of widowers with young children, who were often assisted by – but could not marry – their sisters-in-law (Overdiep, 1955). In Roman Catholic countries a divorce could not be obtained, and remarriage after separation was not possible (Fauve-Chamoux, 2011). Cohabitation of couples of which one or both of the partners was still married was treated as adultery. In protestant countries, it was somewhat easier to obtain a divorce, especially after adultery was proven or admitted. However, remarriage with the person deemed guilty of adultery was still forbidden (in The Netherlands until 1970, de Smidt & Gall, 1985). Another obstacle was the disappearance of a partner, which happened frequently to sailors’ wives. It meant the woman had to wait at least five years before remarrying. The law also put obstacles in the way of mixed couples (especially Jews and Christians), couples who for religious reasons did not accept civil marriage (such as Italian Catholics during the conflict with the Vatican in the 1860s), professional military (because of the limited funds for widows’ pensions) and, in several regions of Europe, the poor. In Germany, Switzerland and Austria governments aiming to curtail the expansion of pauperism subjected marriages to strict conditions. Applicants had to prove themselves to be of impeccable moral conduct (which could mean pregnant women were not allowed to marry), they had to demonstrate sufficient means of sustaining a household, and the officials had to be convinced that there was demand for their labour (Head-König, 1993). Districts with such marriage restrictions were also the districts with the highest levels of illegitimacy. In Germany these restrictive laws were repealed in the 1860s, out of concern for the staggering illegitimacy ratios. Indeed, the ratios fell off rapidly after that (Guinnane & Ogilvie, 2014; Kraus, 1979).

For poor people, the costs of a wedding could be prohibitive, especially when a lavish feast was expected. In the Swedish countryside, weddings could sometimes attract as many as several hundred guests. Thus, couples might have to save a long time for the wedding (Lundh, 2003; Matovic, 1986). In addition, church and state officials had to be paid for their services. Governments of, for instance, France and The Netherlands, reacted to the nineteenth-century rise of proletarian cohabitation by creating the option of free marriages (Burguière & Lebrun, 1996; Kok, 1991). However, for some workers, already the costs of renting a suit and of forgoing a day’s wage could be a reason not to marry (Kok, 1991, pp. 54–55). In Scotland, ‘irregular marriages’ became more popular after 1870, as they offered more privacy, were cheaper, and could be arranged quicker, which all suited the needs of a mobile workforce (Smout, 1981, p. 226). Economic necessity, for instance of pooling the rent, might have been a motive to start the cohabitation in the first place (Matovic, 1986, p. 398). The very high levels of illegitimacy in the first half of the nineteenth century in cities such as Stockholm, Prague and Paris have been attributed to low standards of living. When real incomes started to rise, especially after 1875, illegitimacy rates began to drop, indicating that the cultural value of marriage had not diminished, and was even spreading among the lower classes (Ehmer, 2002, p. 320).

Other barriers were of a purely bureaucratic kind. Before a marriage could be secured, the French Civil Code stipulated that documents were shown proving one was of legal age, not still married, that parents had consented to the wedding, that one was not in the military, etc. All in all, the number of different documents to be amassed could amount to more than 20. Meeting these requirements was especially problematic for foreign migrants, who had to enter into prolonged communication with bureaucrats in their native communities. The already mentioned society of Saint-François Régis was very helpful in dealing with problems of this kind.

Finally, farming couples in the stem family regions in Scandinavia or the Alps frequently waited for marriage until they came into landownership, as successor to a farm (e.g. in Norway, see Sogner, 2003). Marks (1994) noticed that when, in the 1930s government regulations facilitated agricultural credits, illegitimacy declined rapidly in Northern Sweden. In Austria, the designated heir and his future bride lived on the parents’ farm, awaiting succession and marriage. Illegitimate births were accepted and often even welcomed (Kytir & Münz, 1986).

4.1. Marrying officially versus motives for cohabitation

Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, in terms of at least one aspect, the history of cohabitation in Eastern Europe differed from the West European examples. It appears that in the past in East European countries, cohabitation was rarely or never justified as a prelude to marriage. Cohabitation in East European communities was often caused by bigamy, as usually one or both of the men and women in cohabitation were already married. In many cases cohabitation in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century and earlier can be treated as an informal and alternative way of resolving legal problems where it was impossible to officially enter into marriage or to dissolve a marriage.

The history of cohabitation and bigamy in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) can be traced back to the fifteenth century (by then, the GDL was the largest state in Europe. Until 1772 it included Lithuania, Belarus and a larger part of Ukraine). In the GDL it mostly stemmed from the legal confusion between custom law, the canon law of the Orthodox Church and the secular legal code outlined in the Statute of Lithuania. According to the Polish historian Juliush Bardach, this legal confusion allowed Orthodox believers in the GDL to marry on the grounds of custom law. In such cases marriages took place in a home environment, not in a church, and not in the presence of a priest. Wanting to dissolve such a union, it sufficed to declare one’s desire in public. In this way, marriages formed according to customary law opened the way to cohabitation as marriage and divorce essentially did not require legal validity (Bardach, 1970). In the seventeenth century, among the Orthodox population of Vilnius city there were also cases of cohabitation/bigamy where marriages or divorces were carried out according to customary law (Frick, 2013, pp. 229–248).

Cohabitation in Eastern Europe is particularly closely related to the history of marriage. For example, according to the 1836 Law on Marriage as well as the Civil Code of Tsarist Russia, marriage and divorce matters were handled by the Church, while property issues of the separated couple were deliberated in the civil courts. So in the Tsarist Russian Empire, Catholic marriages and separations were regulated according to the Council of Trent norms. According to the canon code of the Catholic Church, dissolution of a legally binding marriage was impossible and only the death of one of the spouses could terminate the marriage sacrament. The only form of complete judicial divorce that was sanctioned by the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church was the acknowledgement of a legally invalid marriage as void, that is, recognizing its annulment. In the everyday life of Catholics, this meant that canon law testified to the very limited opportunities for separation and divorce (annulment of marriage) up until 1917 when civil registration was introduced in Soviet Russia (Leinarte, 2012a). In 1863–1904 in the Kovno governorate, which was the largest Catholic part of tsarist Russia, only 89 requests for annulment of marriage were registered, and out of these, 77 court rulings handed down a negative verdict. At the time, the Kovno governorate had a population of around a million inhabitants.

In cases of failed family life, cohabitation in tsarist Russia was practically unavoidable. It is interesting that in Tsarist Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, cohabitation was accepted and justifiable even though the surnames of men and women in cohabitation were different, and their children would be registered as illegitimate. Even in their appeals made to the ecclesiastical court for separation or the annulment of an earlier legally valid marriage, the plaintiffs would usually indicate that they had now ‘formed a new marriage’, despite being fully aware that the sacrament of marriage had not been granted and that they were indeed living in illegal cohabitation (Leinarte, 2012). In the nineteenth century, priests themselves would justify unavoidable cohabitation or bigamy to some extent. In presenting the ecclesiastical court information about cohabitating couples in their parish, clergymen would often come across as confused: ‘I have the honour to inform the consistory about the illegal life of the lesser noble Herbertas Gedgaudas, who married the already married peasant Domicelė Daubarienė’ (MarcinkeviČienė [Leinarte], 1999, p. 171).

Catholics in Tsarist Russia were also forced into cohabitation in cases where a spouse had disappeared. Men and women who were abandoned by their other halves and who wanted to form new legal families faced enormous bureaucratic hurdles, because they had to prove that their missing husbands (or wives) had died or could not be located throughout the entire Russian Empire. Searches for missing spouses were conducted in a centralized way, a task which demanded great outlays of time, effort and financial means. As a consequence, the abandoned husbands and wives usually entered into cohabitation arrangements, just because work had to be done on the farm.

In late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century tsarist Russia, belonging to different religious communities often led to cohabitation. The different religions and confessions had different regulations for marriage and divorce. Jews recognized only one form of divorce – a complete legal divorce; this did not demand a complicated divorce case, and depended entirely on the personal will of the couple. From the moment when a husband would give his wife a divorce act in the presence of a rabbi and witnesses and declare: ‘You are hereby divorced from me and available to any other man’, the formalities of a Jewish divorce would be completed. From that moment on, both the wife and the husband could enter into new, legally valid marriages. But that does not mean that Jewish divorces were a flippant matter, as strict regulations applied to the property relationships of the separating couples. Having this freedom of choice in their personal lives, Jews could make conscious decisions and avoid cohabitation. Naturally enough, in Tsarist Russia official legal divorce amongst Jews was a common phenomenon. Based on the data of the 1897 census, in the Kovno governorate, there were 434 divorced individuals amongst the Jewish population, and 846 both separated and divorced amongst the Lithuanian and Polish speaking population (Catholics and Protestants) combined. It can be assumed that Jews entered into cohabitation on fewer occasions than did Catholics. The Evangelical Lutheran, Reformist and Old Believer churches recognized several reasons for divorce; however, obtaining a divorce was nevertheless a difficult procedure. The statistics for illegitimate newborns are inadequate to determine cohabitation numbers because there is no way of finding out how many were born into cohabitating families and how many were born to single mothers. Nevertheless, the number of Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran illegitimate newborns is relatively larger than the same figure for Jews. When comparing the data on illegitimate children born to the contemporary main faiths in Lithuania, the numbers are as shown in Table 1.