Rebecca Probert’s article ‘“A Banbury Story”: cohabitation and marriage among the Victorian poor in ‘notorious Neithrop’, published in Cake and Cockhorse, has won the British Association for Local History’s Publication Award for 2014. The award will be presented at the BALH Local History Day on 7 June 2014.

Article Abstract

The parish of Neithrop, now a suburb of Banbury, was known in the nineteenth century as a place ‘inhabited by the poor and persons of bad character’ and, according to the demographer Peter Laslett, was an area ‘notorious’ for non-marital arrangements. Drawn to investigate further by the tragic story of Susan Owen, allegedly murdered by the man she was living, ‘Badger’ Willson, and by the suggestion that five out of a row of eight houses were inhabited by cohabiting couples, I discovered a very different picture. Not only did it turn out that neither of these specific claims was true, but the high rate of marriage among Neithrop couples also cast doubt on the widespread assumption that cohabitation was common among the Victorian poor.

An open access copy of A Banbury Story is available via the Warwick Law School SSRN eLibrary.

For more details on the BALH Local History Day click here.