The Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 in action: investigating a contemporary complaint.

66 In 1765 the Rector of Hinton Ampner, Thomas Wingfield DD, inveighed against the Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriages that had been passed in 1753, requiring all marriages to be celebrated in the parties’ local parish church after the calling of banns or the obtaining of a licence. In his response to the Bishop’s inquiries about compliance with the legislation, he expressed the wish that it should be repealed, ‘because I think it is attended with very bad consequences, having not had any one marriage for more than seven years, the time that I have been rector of this parish’.1