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Introduction

Imagine yourself properly married and then one day finding you are not. That happened to a couple in Virginia. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, marriage in England was a religious rite to be performed by a priest. However, during Cromwell’s protectorate, Parliament abolished the legal force of the Prayer Book and the canons (rules) of the Anglican Church, and enacted a law on this day 24 August, 1653, allowing civil marriage contracts. For the most part, the people of Virginia, still ruled from England, paid no attention to this law. But in 1656 a man and woman in Lancaster County went to a county official of Northumberland and were married according to the Act of Parliament. Their marriage was recorded in the court order book. Nine months later a new minister, Samuel Cole of Lancaster, found it. He declared that the law of Virginia was in effect in his parish and not Acts of Parliament. The parson required the couple to consider themselves unmarried until he could announce the banns of matrimony for them on three separate Sundays and then perform a Christian ceremony. The two certificates appeared in the court order book: