Bigamy in England and Wales was rarer and less socially acceptable than previously thought, a leading expert in the history of marriage law has said.
Professor Rebecca Probert of the University of Exeter has discovered that just 30,000 individuals were tried for bigamy in England and Wales between 1604 and 2024.
Two-thirds of all the bigamy trials ever held in England and Wales took place between just 1900 and 1959, in part due to the dramatic increases during the First and Second World Wars. The annual number of prosecutions peaked in 1943 at just under a thousand.
Professor Probert details her findings in two new books: Double Trouble: Bigamy and the Law in England and Wales, 1604-2024 and Double Lives: Stories of Bigamy in England and Wales, 1604-2024.
Professor Probert said: “Bigamy should not be dismissed as a victimless, old-fashioned and comical crime, the stuff of Victorian melodrama and Golden Age murder mysteries. Every case has its own complex mix of desire and deception and heartbreak.”
She said that some bigamists were victims of circumstances, remarrying after they were abandoned or abused by their first spouse. Others deliberately set out to “deceive and exploit” their spouses.
She said that one bigamist who she discovered, John Woodgate Kinsella, married more than a dozen women who he met through lonely hearts advertisements and defrauded them of their life savings. She said he was comparable to modern-day online romance fraudsters.
Professor Probert also said that legal sentences for bigamy were often severe.
“The idea that bigamy wasn’t harshly punished has been based on misreadings of the evidence,” she said. “One historian has claimed that the 1604 Bigamy Act treated bigamists leniently when in fact it made it punishable by hanging.
“Eighteenth-century bigamists were branded with a red-hot iron, and over a quarter of all those convicted between 1805 and 1836 were sentenced to transportation.
“Prison sentences were also much longer than has been claimed – it’s not until the 1930s that we see sentences of a month or less in the majority of cases.”
