Divorce (was Legitimacy questions)

Hilary wrote: "Thanks David - though it may have come unstuck a bit with theories on Prior Ingleby (the Ingleby family itself said he divorced his wife and was treated as dead). //snip// Doug here: If I recall an earlier post of Marie's correctly, only marriages that had been annulled allowed for re-marriage. A divorce, on the other hand, didn't permit re-marriage while a spouse still lived. Now, as best I can recall, weren't persons who entered Orders, treated as "dead" in regards to civil affairs - or is that merely a mis-remembering on my part of something else? In other words, would a divorce, followed by his entry into an Order render his wife, in the eyes of the law at least, a widow? Or would an Act of Parliament have been required; as was the case with the Countess of Warwick? If so, and *if* such an Act *was* passed, perhaps there are others? And may that have been where the idea of doling out the Countess' land "as if she were dead" came from? A lot of "ifs", but *possibly* worthwhile... Doug who hopes this makes sense!

Hi Doug,

First, the word divorce was used to mean both annulment and judicial separation.

The other problem is that John Ingleby's son succeeded him, so if the marriage had been annulled it would seem to have happened without the children being bastardised.

My further problem is that the Ingleby family history simply states that John Ingleby esquire became a monk and was declared dead to his wife without providing any evidence, either of a divorce (in the sense of annulment) or of his switchover at that particular date to a clerical life. Here I am writing from memory, but there would seem to be a gap of some years between the death of John Ingleby esquire and the first identifiable records of the monastic John Ingleby.

One of the biggest dangers in biographical history for our period is that of conflating the histories of different individuals with the same name. The only safe way to proceed is to assume that you have two separate individuals except where the evidence that they are one and the same is really solid.

Marie

---In , <destama@...> wrote:

Hilary wrote: "Thanks David - though it may have come unstuck a bit with theories on Prior Ingleby (the Ingleby family itself said he divorced his wife and was treated as dead). //snip// Doug here: If I recall an earlier post of Marie's correctly, only marriages that had been annulled allowed for re-marriage. A divorce, on the other hand, didn't permit re-marriage while a spouse still lived. Now, as best I can recall, weren't persons who entered Orders, treated as "dead" in regards to civil affairs - or is that merely a mis-remembering on my part of something else? In other words, would a divorce, followed by his entry into an Order render his wife, in the eyes of the law at least, a widow? Or would an Act of Parliament have been required; as was the case with the Countess of Warwick? If so, and *if* such an Act *was* passed, perhaps there are others? And may that have been where the idea of doling out the Countess' land "as if she were dead" came from? A lot of "ifs", but *possibly* worthwhile... Doug who hopes this makes sense!