Illegitimacy

Edward Higgs

Data on natality was captured by the civil system for registering births, marriages and deaths set up in England and Wales under the provisions of the 1836 Marriage and Registration Acts (6 & 7 Will. IV, cc. 85 and 86). These established the modern system of civil registration to replace the parochial registration of baptisms, marriages and burials that had been established in the early sixteenth century. The whole of England and Wales was divided into registration districts based on the Poor Law Unions and registrars appointed to them. These local officers were to issue certificates of birth, marriage and death. They also sent copies of the certificates to the General Register Office (GRO), which created indexes of these and made them available to the public in a central site at Somerset House in London. A Registrar General for England and Wales was appointed to head the GRO and to supervise the local registration system (Higgs, 2004, 1–90). A similar system was set up in Scotland in 1855.

The English birth certificate carried several pieces of information, including: when and where the child was born; its name; its sex; the name of the father; the married and maiden name of the mother; the occupation of the father; and the date of registration. The birth certificate in Scotland was even more elaborate. In addition to details about the child (date, place and time of birth, full name, sex), the parents' names (including maiden surname of mother), father's occupation, name of informant and relationship to child, an 1855 birth certificate also contained information on siblings, the ages and birthplaces of both parents, their usual residence and the date and place of their marriage. Such detail proved difficult to sustain and entries were simplified from 1856. Information on siblings was removed, as were the ages and birthplaces of parents and the date and place of parents' marriage. However from 1861 the date and place of the parents' marriage was reinstated on Scottish birth certificates.

These data could be used within the GROs in London and Edinburgh to create various tables, and to study various trends relating to natality in Annual and Decennial reports of the Registrar General. Illegitimacy was one of the subjects that was covered in the Reports, not only because of its use as a measure of 'morality', but also because illegitimate children had a higher rate of mortality than other children. However, at first the coverage of illegitimacy in the Reports for England and Wales was quite limited, the first detailed discussion being in the Sixth annual report of the Registrar General for 1842 (xx-xxiv). In the period before 1850, all that was given was the illegitimacy ratio (the ration of illegitimate to legitimate births) for most years. The illegitimacy ratio is difficult to use, however, because it is affected by factors other than the 'propensity' to illegitimacy, such as changes in the age distribution of women; the proportion married; changes in the fertility of married women who contribute most to births; and so on. From 1850, however, illegitimacy rates can be obtained from the Registrar General's tables, in terms of the rate per 1000 of the whole population, or the rates for 1000 unmarried women aged 15–44. (Laslett, 13–15). Data on illegitimacy in the Reports was given both nationally, and by various smaller administrative units such as registration divisions, counties, districts and sub-districts. In Scotland, where illegitimacy rates were higher (Glass, 185), discussion of illegitimacy was more extensive from the start, and information was variously supplied down to the level of towns (First detailed annual report of Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Scotland, xiii-xviii).

There are, however, fundamental problems with respect to these data, especially in the early years of registration in England and Wales. There was nothing on the English birth certificate relating to the legitimacy or otherwise of a birth. Illegitimacy was only detected if the name and surname of the father was not given at birth registration, or if the father's surname was different to that of the mother. The mother was not asked whether or when she was married (Glass, 185). This meant that the mother of an illegitimate child might claim whom she pleased as the father, only the fear of perjury acting as a deterrent. However, the 1874 Births and Marriages Registration Act (37 & 38 Vict., c.88) tightened up the registration of illegitimate births by allowing the insertion of the father's name only where the father attended before the local registrar with the mother, and gave information jointly with her. The situation was rather more straightforward in Scotland because the parents had to indicate their date and place of marriage on the birth certificate.

Therefore, illegitimacy was probably underestimated in the early Reports, but the exact levels of underestimation are difficult to calculate. According to figures produced by Glass, there were officially 18.3 illegitimate live births per 1000 married women aged 15–44 years in the decade 1851 to 1860. But the 'minimally corrected' rate was in fact 19.1 for the same years. The disparity between the two rates had vanished by the 1880s (Glass, 185). There certainly appears to have been a sudden increase in the number of illegitimate births registered after 1875, presumably when the provisions of the 1874 Births and Marriages Registration Act came into force (Woods, 52–3). The recording of illegitimacy in Scotland seems to have been fairly complete from the inception of registration.

REFERENCES

First detailed annual report of the Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Scotland, BPP 1861 XVIII (2814).[View this document: First detailed annual report of registrar-general of births, deaths and marriages, Scotland]

D. V. Glass, Numbering the people. The eighteenth-century population controversy and the development of census and vital statistics in Britain (London, 1973).

Peter Laslett, 'Introduction: comparing illegitimacy over time and between cultures', in Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and Richard M. Smith, eds, Bastardy and its comparative history(London, 1980), 1–64.

Sixth annual report of the Registrar General (1842), BPP 1844 XIX (540). [View this document: Sixth annual report of the registrar-general]

Robert Woods, The demography of Victorian England and Wales (Cambridge, 2000).