Marriage by habit and repute, Tametsi and Ne Temere

A question occurred to me this morning about Scottish marriage forms, which set me off digging again! I knew that marriage by habit and repute continued until 2006 in Scotland as a legal means to be married, but I wondered why it had ever been accepted as a form of irregular marriage in civil law in the first place? 

It turns out that it is connected with the abolition of the rules of 'clandestinity' in the Roman Catholic Church in 1563. In Catholic times in Scotland, prior to the Reformation, marriage by habit and repute was an acceptable form of marriage, the issue of its clandestinity not being an impediment to its validity. The doctrine that eventually removed clandestinity as an acceptable (if not frowned upon) condition of a marriage was known as the Tametsi decree, a ruling of the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent. As a consequence, a modernised form of marriage ceremony emerged, requiring parental consent, witnesses and the participation of the priest for a marriage to be valid under Canon Law. 

In Scotland, the Roman Catholic Church's rule had ended three years earlier, as a consequence of the Reformation of 1560. Thus the Council of Trent's Tametsi decree was not binding in the newly emerging Presbyterian form of the country. Marriage by habit and repute therefore continued as an acceptable form of marriage (but still frowned upon by the Kirk!) for another four and half centuries, before its eventual abolition by the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006. 

In Catholic countries, including Ireland, Tametsi continued until 1908, at which point it was superceded by the Ne Temere decree, which added further conditions such as the need for registration (and which itself continued until the advent of Matrimonia Mixta in 1970). 

Ne Temere is often popularly cited as being the reason why the children of mixed marriages (i.e. one party not being Catholic) were required to be raised in the Roman Catholic faith, but this requirement in fact dated back to the 18th century. However, as a consequence of the decree, dispensation was required from the officiating priest for a non-Catholic to marry a Catholic, and as a condition of that, the requirement to baptise any children in the Catholic faith was heavily enforced.

You can read a bit more about the basics of Tametsi at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tametsi#Canonical_form_of_marriage and on Ne Temere at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Temere. 

An interesting paper by the University of Swansea's Raymond M. Lee, entitled Intermarriage, Conflict, and Social Control in Ireland: The Decree "Ne Temere" was published in the Economic and Social Review in 1985, and can be read online at http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/handle/2262/68771/v17n11985_2.pdf.

Chris

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