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In June 1663 the young and beautiful Mary Carleton stood trial for bigamy at the Old Bailey. She was prosecuted by her husband John, furious at discovering that she was not the wealthy German princess he thought he had wed, and hoping to be rid of her by proving she was a lowly woman from Canterbury and already married to a shoemaker. Mary's good looks and spirited defence made her a sensation, and Samuel Pepys (who had visited her in prison) was among many delighted to see her acquitted.1 But if this was the most celebrated bigamy trial of the period, it was by no means the rarity that her modern biographer supposed, and its themes of deception, opportunism, greed, and malice recur in many other, less familiar cases.
Historians, with the notable exception of Lawrence Stone, have traditionally paid more attention to marriage-formation in early modern England than to its dissolution. We know that some unions ended in judicial separation (divorce a mensa et thoro) through the ecclesiastical courts. Some were annulled, when (for example) it could be proved that there had been a prior contract. Far more collapsed when one partner deserted, and many ended in limbo, with a man going to sea, to the wars, or to seek work, and simply failing to return. The law held that marriage was for life, and judicial separation did not allow the parties to remarry, though a deserted spouse could marry again if nothing had been heard of the absentee partner for seven years, after which he or she was legally assumed to be dead.2 In practice, however, it is clear that a significant number of individuals ventured to remarry in ignorance or defiance of the law. Lawrence Stone once remarked in passing that there were probably thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bigamous marriages in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.3 These were figures plucked from the air, and Stone chose to explore two spectacular eighteenth-century cases in depth, rather than to address the general phenomenon.4 Yet he had a point; bigamy was no rarity. This article draws on over 350 cases from the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from spiritual and criminal court...