Rebutting the Presumption: Rethinking the Common Law Principle of Marital Coercion in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England

While many historians refer to the legal presumption of marital coercion when discussing patterns of lenient judicial treatment of women in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English criminal trials, few have analyzed the presumption in enough detail to ascertain the impact it genuinely had. This article undertakes close legal analysis of marital coercion. It argues that the presumption was not frequently referred to in nineteenth-century Old Bailey criminal trials for receiving stolen goods because of increasing judicial strictness as to the application of the presumption. A defendant had to prove her marriage, her husband’s presence at the crime scene, and, by the nineteenth century, evidence of her husband’s actual control. The presumption may have shifted from an irrebuttable presumption to one rebuttable upon proof that any of these requirements were absent. Therefore, women’s lenient court treatment during the modern period cannot be straightforwardly attributed to frequent successful recourse to marital coercion.