Marriage in the Legal Archives in England and South Asia

On the 6th March 2025, CEMS hosted Professor Ian Williams (Law) and Professor Nandini Chatterjee (AMES) in a discussion that highlighted the potential for legal archival materials about disputed marriages to illuminate, in vivid micro-historical detail, a range of economic, religious and judicial customs in seventeenth century England and late Mughal India respectively.

Professor Williams began by outlining the details of an extraordinary legal dispute concerning the validity of a marriage contracted in 1624 between William Shelley and Margaret Zinzan in her family home. News of their marriage was ill-received by the father of the groom, Sir John Shelley, who soon initiated Star Chamber proceedings against bride and her family. In 1627, the case was moved to the ecclesiastical courts and escalated to the Court of Arches where in 1634—a decade after the ceremony had taken place—the marriage was declared invalid. William and Margaret were free to remarry, and both did. Yet, for Margate’s father, Sir Sigismund Zinzan, it was far from closed, and in 1641 he petitioned the Long Parliament to have the ruling overturned.

Having laid out the details of the case, Professor Williams acknowledged its archival incompleteness: with few exceptions, documents survive from neither the temporal nor ecclesiastical stages of proceedings. What this absence highlights however, is the inter-relationship between the Star Chamber and church courts: it is likely that the documents were loaned to the spiritual authorities for copying or consultation and never returned. This could also explain why Sir John petitioned the Star Chamber, rather than the church courts directly (which had exclusive authority to annul marriages); reputed for their rigorous investigation, Star Chamber officials might have been tasked with ‘preparing’ documents for later spiritual adjudication.

Professor Williams also addressed the problem of ‘legal fiction’ in the archives. Turning to Sir Sigismund’s 1641 petition, he identified several examples of strategic insinuation. The document states, for instance, that all Zinzan family members had previously been ‘acquitted’—a claim obscuring the fact that members of their household staff had been charged (including the parson and one witness). These charges, and the invalidation of the marriage, point to the possible deployment of another legal fiction—this time by Sir John himself, whose petition to the Star Chamber necessitated an allegation of criminal wrongdoing. It is likely that his complaint entailed the accusation of a marriage plot or ‘practice’—that is, that the Zinzans ‘got’ William to marry Margaret, in this case by plying him with drink.

Alleging the use of intoxication for matrimonial entrapment was a common strategy in Star Chamber however, and whether William was indeed the victim of a plot is impossible to conclude. More interesting and significant to our understanding of these legal fictions, and of the case in general, is the Reformation-era broadening of the category of impediments to proper matrimonial consent. Professor Williams highlighted examples of similar cases brought by parents and guardians in distress about marriages to which their children—technically above the age of consent and not coerced by ‘force’—had agreed. There was, in other words, a growing demand for greater legal intervention against marriage plots that exploited the feeble criterion of individual consent. This was important for children unprotected by existing statutes that proscribed the removal of girls and women with property claims These statutes, which made the seizure of heiresses a capital offence (1487) and banned the removal of propertied girls by force and ‘sleight’ (1558), began to be more expansively applied to protect the improper matrimonial contracting of girls as well as boys, regardless of claims to property.

It is striking that in respect of a similar marriage plot, the victim of which had been a disabled young man, the judges proclaimed that ‘such contriving marriage, be it a male or female or of what age soever is evil in itself at the common law.’ Their description of children as the ‘special goods of their parents,’ suggests an emerging ungendered emphasis on parental consent supplanting an earlier legal model that prioritised the protection of propertied girls and women as vulnerable nodes along agnatic lines.

Professor Chatterjee spoke next and outlined the details of legal dispute in late Mughal India. She also prefaced her discussion by foregrounding historiographical limitations owing to archival sparsity, noting the absence of recorded legal judgements pre-1860s. Surviving documents before this are either jurisprudential texts or ‘deeds’—a term which Professor Chatterjee uses to refer to common documents of interpersonal transactions. Her discussion focused one such ‘deed’ from 1714 written in the Persian language, which she described as a ‘voiding of claims document,’ indicating the resolution of a prior dispute. Like many of these deeds, it is remarkably ‘chatty’ and offers a glimpse into local attitudes and customs regarding marriage.

It tells us that in a town near Dhar, a man named Hamir Chand was embroiled in a longstanding inheritance dispute with Muhammad Asad. As we might infer from the claimant’s name, the dispute was rooted in religious conflict. As the family tree below clarifies, Hamir Chand had inherited wealth from his father, Purshottam Das, who had become the heir to his uncle Chandar Bhan after the disinheritance of Suraj Bahn—the father of the now-impoverished and litigious Muhammad. As Professor Chatterjee explained, Suraj had been disinherited for of his marriage to a Muslim woman named Parwar, specified in the document as belonging to a group of ‘lūlī’ (dancers and singers offering expensive sexual encounters), and for his conversion to Islam.

From Negotiating Mughal Law: a Family of Landlords Across Three Indian Empires, p. 32.

Although it was ruled that Muhammad was not a legitimate heir, the decision was not easily reached: that the judge was conflicted is evidenced by his summoning of ‘fatwā’ (opinions) from fifteen ‘muftī’ (legal authorities)—an extreme request, the typical amount being three. In addition to illustrating the daily practice of Islamic law in Mughal India, this unusual dispute highlights the embeddedness of marriage within a legal archive more explicitly concerned in this instance with the regulation of property and inheritance.