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SOME EARLY BREACH OF PROMISE CASES. I "HERE are among the Early Chancery Proceedings, formerly in the Tower of London, a considerable number of Bills of Complaint, grounded on an alleged breach of promise, or rather breach of contract, of marriage, some of which date back as far as the middle of the fifteenth century. At that period, and indeed till the passing of the Marriage Act of 26 George II., the solem nization of matrimony, according to the laws of Holy Church, appears to have been alto gether subsidiary to the civil contracts, or espousals, which often preceded the actual marriage by a considerable period. A pre contract of this kind was, till the 32d year of Henry VIII., and again after 2 and 3 Edward VI., considered an impediment to marriage with any other person; and until the statute of 26 George II., above referred to, a suit might be brought in the Ecclesias tical Courts to compel a marriage in con sequence of such contract. If a formal betrothal of this kind, to be duly committed to writing and attested, were at the present time declared to be the only legal basis on which an action for breach of promise could rest, a great sav ing of time to the judicial bench would ensue, and the public would be spared the recital of much of the amorous nonsense with which more or less facetious counsel endeavor to influence a sympathetic jury in assessing the amount of damage, from a pe cuniary point of view, done to the outraged feelings of many a too seductive or too en terprising damsel. The law reports would, however, then be deprived of one of their most amusing features, and one on which the ordinary newspaper reader seizes with avidity. That the courts of the fifteenth and six teenth centuries were not altogether without their sensational trials of a somewhat similar kind, appears from curious records now un der review. I have before me copies of
four documents, all apparently bearing date between the years 1452 and .1515, which are peculiarly interesting as illustrative of the social life of that period. They show, in fact, that then, as now, amongst a certain class of persons, marriage was regarded prin cipally in the light of a commercial specula tion, the bargains made in some of the cases being specified with a minuteness of detail as amusing as it is unromantic. The first of these is a complaint preferred to the Car dinal Archbishop of Canterbury, Chancellor of England, between the years 1452 and 1454, by Margaret Gardyner and Alice Gardyner (presumably her daughter), against one "John Keche, of Yppeswych," who ap pears to have been in considerable demand amongst the fair sex, as, according to their own statement, the said Margaret and Alice agreed to pay him the sum of twenty-two marks on condition of his taking the said Alice to wife; but the faithless "Keche," after receiving ten marks from the said Mar garet and twelve marks from the said Alice, "meyning but craft and disceyt," went and took to wife one Joan, the daughter of Thomas Bloys, to whom he had been pre viously assured, " to the gret disceyt of the said suppliants and ageyne all good reason and conscience;" and although at divers times required by the said suppliants to re fund the twenty-two marks, he persistently refuses so to do; whereupon they pray for a writ directing him to appear before the King in his Chancery, to answer to the premises, which is granted to them accordingly. The plaintiffs in this suit appear to have regarded the matter purely from a business point of view, for they seek only to recover the money fraudulently obtained from them by the defaulting " Keche," without making any claim for compensation to the lady whose affections had been so cruelly and wantonly disappointed. In the next instance before us it is the
