Footnotes on Friday

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Guerilla warfare in the Peninsular War

My heroine in An Unpitied Sacrifice was part of the Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s invasion. This resistance was not only in the hands of regular forces. Ordinary Spanish people also fought against the invaders. These guerilleros, as they called themselves (from which we get the name guerrilla), constantly harassed the French army. One Prussian officer fighting for the French said: “Wherever we arrived, they disappeared, whenever we left, they arrived — they were everywhere and nowhere, they had no tangible center which could be attacked.”

For the most part, until the last stages of the war, the French were undefeated on the open battlefield, but their tactics and plans were less successful against irregular troops who could disappear into the population with ease and who knew the country like the back of their hand.

They were given official authorisation and support by the Spanish command, who in 1808 decreed the formation of guerrilla troops, and in 1809 gave them the right to keep any money, supplies and equipment they were able to take from the French.

In one notable case in 1811, a force of between 3000, and 4,500 men ambushed a French convoy, defeating 1,600 troops and taking 150 wagons of supplies and 1,050 Spanish and Portugese prisoners. The convoy was valued at 4 million reales.

In 1812, the reported number of guerilleros was 38, 520, divided into 22 bands. Counter measures proved largely ineffective, as they have against guerrilla warfare ever since.

It might have taken the allied armies to finally push the French out of Spain in 1813, but many historians argue that the Spanish irregular forces made it possible.

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Marriage laws in Regency England

Most readers of Regency romance have a fair handle on what it was like to be a resident of Regency England, but some of what we think we know is the exception rather than the rule, and some is just plain wrong.

Here’s a brief outline of what I found when I checked into the rules around marriage.

When a man and woman married, the two became one.

We know about the economics of marriage. According to the law of the time, when a woman and a man married, the two were considered to be one person, and that person was the man.

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law:  that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a feme-covert . . . and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.  (Blackstone, 1765)

What had belonged to the wife now belonged to the husband instead. Only in exceptional circumstances could a married woman own property in her own right. Even then, her husband had the power to control it, if he chose to exercise it.

On the other hand, the husband was legally responsible for the support of the wife. For a gentlewoman without an income or anyone to support her, marriage was the only respectable avenue to gain such support.

Marrying cousins, yes; marrying sisters-in-law, maybe

The list of relations who cannot marry was in the Book of Common Prayer that I carried to my Anglican church every Sunday when I was a child. It was in the Marriage Act of 1540, and remained in place right into the twentieth century.

Cousins, even first cousins, could marry. Brothers and sisters could not, of course. If they did so, the marriage was void. That is, it was considered to have never existed.

Technically, marriage to a brother-in-law or sister-in-law was also forbidden. However, if the marriage took place, it was not void, but voidable. That is, if someone complained about it, the church courts might annul the marriage. This led to some interesting court cases, and in 1835, a new Marriage Act validated such marriages that had already taken place, but made all future ones void.

Stopping clandestine marriages

The Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753 established rules about parental consent, and guidelines for banns, licenses, and church celebration. Its proper name was An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage. The goal was to stop private marriages, where no one knew what was going on but the couple, the celebrant, and at least one witness.

The problems the Act was intended to solve included marriage of minors, bigamous marriages, and incestuous marriages.

Lord Hardwicke’s Act made it illegal for a minor (someone under the age of 21) to marry without his or her guardian’s permission.

It also gave three ways that any couple could be married in England:

  1. They could marry in church after the publication of banns. Banns were read in the church where the couple plan to marry for three successive Sundays, and gave people who knew the couple a chance to state objections.
  2. They could marry in church after the couple secured a common license. Archbishops, bishops, and some archdeacons could issue common licenses, which removed the requirement for banns. Someone had to apply, making an allegation under oath that there were no impediments to the marriage, and giving information about the bride and groom to be recorded on the license. The couple had to marry in the church named on the license. Either the bride or the groom was meant to be a resident of the parish for at least four weeks.
  3. They could marry by special license. You wouldn’t know it from our books, but these were very rare. Only the Archbishop of Canterbury could sign them, and they allowed the named couple to marry anywhere, not just in a church.

If none of those suited, the couple could flee England to a place where the Hardwicke law did not apply. Hence, the Gretna Green elopements, though anywhere in Scotland was just as good, or on the Channel Islands, come to that.

Or, as my couple did in To Claim the Broken-Hearted, they can take up residence in a village where they are unknown, and wait for the banns to be read with no objecting guardians to say no. If their guardians don’t catch up with them before the wedding, and if no one else objects, then their marriage is regarded as valid.

Ending a marriage

Divorce was difficult to obtain, expensive, and seldom allowed remarriage. The first step was to apply to the Ecclesiastical Court. Marriages could not be annulled unless they were void at the time of the marriage. But the Court could rule that the couple be permitted to separate (a divorce a menso et thoro, a separation from bed and board). They no longer lived together, and the husband was no longer responsible for providing a home for the wife (although he was still responsible for her debts.

A man could be granted such a ruling when adultery was proven against a wife. A woman had to also prove that the adultery was aggravated by life-threatening cruelty, bigamy, or incest.

If she obtained such a ruling, the woman had no right to access to her children.

A husband could also sue his wife’s lover under civil law for ‘wounding another man’s property’ and for depriving him of her services as household manager. Women had no such right.

The next step, if one of the parties wanted to remarry, was to take a private bill to Parliament for ‘relief’. The proceeding were expensive, long, messy, and public.

“Between 1670 and 1857, 379 Parliamentary divorces were requested and 324 were granted. Of those 379 requests, eight were by wives, and only four of those were granted.” (Wright, 2004)

 

https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol36no1/bailey/

https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2017/01/divorce-regency-style.html

https://www.kristenkoster.com/a-regency-divorce-primer/

https://home.heinonline.org/blog/2021/08/a-decent-proposal-marriage-in-regency-england/

https://sharonlathanauthor.com/regency-marriage-the-legalities/

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Tourism, Georgian style

I’m working on three different books at the moment, and all of my protagonists are travelling. As always, this means some work calculating differences and the speed of different types of conveyance. I thought I’d look for a video on that for you, but selected this one instead. It’s a bit of fun, and full of information. The visuals are gorgeous, too.

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Highwaymen, smugglers and other dangers

The next Bluestocking Belles’ collection, Love’s Perilous Road, serves up a heaping helping of romance, with a side order of highwaymen, garnished with a few smugglers, a ghost, a gang of Fennians and more than one spy.

Were there highwaymen in Sussex in this period? Sure were, and smugglers, too, though the popularity of Brighton meant that they’d moved along the coast. Don’t miss it!

And meanwhile, here’s a video on the ins and out of being a highwayman.

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Oubliettes – places for being forgotten

An oubliette, as mentioned in my latest novel, The Night Dancers, is a bottle dungeon—that is, a hole in the ground, with no exit or entry except through the hole at the top. The name is French, and comes from the word oublier, to forget. It is a particularly nasty place to imprison people. The man who finished up in the oubliette deserved it.

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Little tame creatures


“How did they allow them to keep rats as pets?” asked my editor at the end of my epilogue, when my nine-year-old boy cousins were racing indoors after a fortnight away, to check on their pet rats. “Were they even domesticated at this time?”

Well, yes. They were. And nine-year-old boys love rats as pets at least in part because it upsets the maids and bothers the adult female cousins. Not my boys’ mothers, of course, who are made of sterner stuff.

Rats as domestic pets might have been familiar in Europe as early as the seventeenth century, and this was certainly  the case in Japan. We have excellent documentation for domesticated rats in England in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the ancestor of many of today’s pets might have been raised by Jimmy Shaw or Jack Black. (This might not have been his legal name, but it is the name under which he was interviewed by Henry Mayhew. The interview the two men was published in a book titled London Labour and the London Poor.)

Jack and Jimmy were ratcatchers. He suppled live rats to the rat pits, a popular blood sport that didn’t end until 1912. Another lucrative income source for him was breeding from rats that had different coloured coats. He told Mayhew ‘I have ’em fawn and white, black and white, black white and red. People come from all parts of London to see them rats. They got very tame and you could do anythink with them.’  He sold them as pets or curiosities, mainly to young ladies. Jimmy Shaw was even more interested in the odd rats. If today’s pets are not descended from those kept by one of these two men, they no doubt originated in a similar way.

Laboratory rats appear to have been used in research from at least 1828, and probably were also saved from the rat pits or bred from such animals. The Albino rat often used in laboratories or as pets is also known to have been around for a while. There was apparently a wild colony of Albino rats in Bath in 1828.

 

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A brief history of umbrellas

Umbrellas were used in China as early as 3,500 BC, and waterproofed with a combination of wax and lacquer by 3,000 BC. They came to Europe through ancient trade routes, but were considered appropriate only for women. In England, they were still considered a female accessory as late as 1790, but a man called Jonas Hanway ignored popular ideas of suitability, and used an umbrella for decades. By the early 19th century, men and women both used umbrellas. The folding umbrella, though, would not appear until the 1850s. Which are some of the things I discovered when I went down the research rabbit hole while writing A Gift to the Heart (coming in November 2025).