Consanguineous marriages

[stewamax]

I was watching a documentary on the incidence of serious generic disorders within first-cousin marriages in Pakistani communities, notably those in Bradford.

Given that until the mid-eighteenth century, the UK was essentially a country of small rural villages and that travel was restricted (roads were diabolical), it made me wonder how much of the huge child mortality was due to genetic inheritance caused by endogamous marriages.

Pre-Reformation, it much have been extraordinarily difficult for someone in a small village to marry someone who was not a first or second cousin, but this would not be allowed by the Church of Rome – so the priest would be unable to marry them without a dispensation or Nelsonian eye. (Second-cousin marriages have only been allowed since 1917).

Further, there should be more exogamy and thus less inheritance of genetic ‘faults’ at the coast – especially at the channel ports. Whether this would also be true within the upper classes is moot, since greater opportunities to travel might be counteracted by the tendency to marry within a narrow social group.

Just a thought!

[Rhyd6]

Didn't someone say that the invention of the bicycle help erase a lot of genetic conditions caused by close family marriages as it enabled young men to go further afield in search of a bride?
Another point that seems to have been overlooked is that most households who had a lot of daughters sent them away to work as maids in homes of the wealthy, usually in cities like Liverpool, Chester Manchester etc. This certainly happened in my grandmother's family, she was one of 23 children, 9 of whom were daughters.

R6
.

[staffordian]

Another point that seems to have been overlooked is that most households who had a lot of daughters sent them away to work as maids in homes of the wealthy, usually in cities like Liverpool, Chester Manchester etc. This certainly happened in my grandmother's family, she was one of 23 children, 9 of whom were daughters.

R6
.

It happened in mine too, and one of my GG grandfathers resulted from a liason between the servant and a son of the house owner

[stewamax]

I was thinking of slightly earlier times, but in the late 19th century the bike that stirred men to look outside their village for a partner, the army that encouraged young men to find wives abroad or in UK garrison towns, the navy that led men to have ‘temporary marriages’ while on shore leave, and the railway that enabled girls to go in service further afield all certainly helped to spread genes.

But in previous centuries, there was no organised public transport: the (expensive) mail coaches started running in the 1780s and stagecoaches in 1825 on largely unmetalled roads that were initially so bad that travel was purgatory; diarist Celia Fiennes’s experiences of travel on horseback on the late 17th century roads would make anyone elect to remain at home.

But I still don’t know how, in the 17th century and earlier, so many marriages in small rural villages could take place with the support of the clergy. And it wasn’t that the priest was in ignorance of who was related to whom since, unlike the wealthier and better educated rectors and vicars of later years, they were often from the village.