This eccentric custom, known as “marriage in a smock,” in England, under which a widow was married with nothing on but a “shift,” or “smock,” upon the theory that her second husband would thereby escape liability for the debts contracted by her former husband, was also followed in the Colonies. This notion that a bride who lacked modesty, as well as money could throw off her debts with her dress, by going to church in her smock or under garment and thus let her creditors “shift” for themselves, finds many examples in the English cases during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On October 17, 1714, Anne Sellwood, of Chilters, All Saints, Wiltshire and John Bridmore, were united in the holy bonds of matrimony and against the record in the parish register occurs the memorandum: “The aforesaid Anne Sellwood was married in her shift, without any clothes or head-gear on.”[90] In 1766 a Whitehaven bride also sought to attain the same end, by going to church, as became any decent woman, undressing herself to her sole under-garment for the ceremony and donning her clothes again as soon as the knot was tied.[91] And it is recorded that somewhere between the years 1838 and 1844, a Lincolnshire curate officiated at a wedding where the bride stood before him, enveloped only in a sheet.[92] While such attempts evidence a perhaps dishonest effort to evade the law of debtor and creditor, these “smock-marriages” nevertheless evince a most laudable inclination on the part of such bold brides to save the purse of their intended husbands, so while modern husbands would not appreciate the entire return to this now obsolete custom, they would not object to the effort of brides, while decently clad, in emulation of the spirit evinced by these ancient dames of the “shift marriage” period, of using their best efforts to spare the pocket-books of the men of their choice. Alice Morse Earle, in her interesting volume, “Customs in old New England,” refers to a “smock-marriage” at Westerly, Rhode Island.[93] The traveler Kalm also describes such a marriage in Pennsylvania, in 1748, where the bridegroom, with the proper spirit of chivalry, in order to save the appearance of his bride and also his credit, met the bride in her scant drapery, half way between her house and his own, well provided with warm garments which he dressed her in, after formally announcing, in the presence of the assembled guests, that the wedding clothes which he placed upon her belonged to him and were only loaned to the bride, especially for the occasion.