Competition in the business was fierce. While the Fleet parsons sent their pullers-in forth to scour the streets, they hung their signs out in the windows under the shadow of the prison wall. Thus at one corner might be seen a window, "Weddings performed here cheap." The business was advertised in the newspapers. The marriage taverns lined Fleet Lane and Fleet Ditch. Two of them--the Bull and Garter and the King's Head--were kept by warders of the prison. The parson and the landlord divided the fee between them, after deducting a shilling for the tout who brought the customers in. If a marriage was desired to be secret it was not entered on the register of the house. Otherwise it was, for a small fee, written down in a book which each tavern kept. Thus a profligate man could victimize a confiding girl with impunity. Men and women might commit bigamy at will, since any name they chose to give, along with their fee, satisfied the parson, and they could have the "ceremony" kept unregistered, or dated back as they chose. The law held a married woman free of the responsibility of her debts, while a single woman could be arrested and locked up for them. All a woman of free life had to do to defraud her creditors was to get some man to marry her at the Fleet. Then she could not be prosecuted. As for the man, the creditors had to find him before they could proceed against him. Women of quality who had led extravagant lives did not hesitate at the same shift. There were parsons who kept husbands in hire at five shillings each. There is record of one fellow having been "married" to four women in one day. There is also a record of women, dressed as men, being hired out as mock husbands for the occasion. All classes were fish for the Fleet parson's net. Drunken sailors and soldiers were united to the gin-perfumed fairies of the market; roues fetched their silly, girlish victims in coaches to the altar reeking of stale beer and brandy; and great men of the realm utilized the functions of the clerical mountebanks to a similar result. In five months--from October, 1704, to February, 1705--2,954 marriages were recorded at the Fleet. How many went unrecorded can only be surmised. The church strove in vain to eradicate the scandal, and it required an Act of Parliament to put an end to it in 1754.