Not all the “marriage houses,” as they were called, were taverns. They were often distinguished by some touching device: as a pair of clasping hands with the legend “Marriages Performed Within.” A feature of the system was the _plyer_ or _barker_, who, dressed in ragged and rusty black, touted for Parson or publican, or it might be for self, vaunting himself the while clerk and register to the Fleet. “These ministers of wickedness” (thus, in 1735, a correspondent of _The Grub Street Journal_) “ply about Ludgate Hill, pulling and forcing the people to some peddling alehouse or a brandy-shop to be married, even on a Sunday stopping them as they go to church, and almost tearing their clothes off their backs.” If you drove Fleetwards with matrimony in your eye, why, then you were fair game:-- Scarce had the coach discharg’d its trusty fare, But gaping crowds surround th’ amorous pair. The busy plyers make a mighty stir, And whisp’ring, cry, “D’ye want the Parson, Sir?” Yet the great bulk of Fleet marriages were in their own way orderly and respectable. Poor people found them shortest and cheapest. Now and again there are glimpses of rich or high-born couples: as, in 1744, the Hon. H. Fox with Georgina Caroline, eldest daughter of Charles, second Duke of Richmond, of which union Charles James was issue. One odd species was a parish wedding: the churchwardens thought it an ingenious device to bribe some blind or halting youth, the burden of a neighbouring parish, to marry a female pauper chargeable to them; for, being a wife she immediately acquired her husband’s settlement, and they were rid of her. In one case they gave forty shillings and paid the expense of a Fleet marriage; the rag, tag, and bobtail attended in great numbers and a mighty racket was the result. According to the law then and long after, a woman by marrying transferred the burden of her debts to her husband. So some desperate spinsters hied them Fleetwards to dish their creditors; plyer or Parson soon fished up a man; and though, under different _aliases_, he were already wived like the Turk, what mattered it? The wife had her “lines,” and how to prove the thing a sham? Husbands, again, had a reasonable horror of their wives’ antenuptial obligations. An old superstition, widely prevalent in England, was that if you took nothing by your bride you escaped liability. Obviously, then, the thing to do was to marry her in what Winifred Jenkins calls “her birthday soot,” or thereabouts. So “the woman ran across Ludgate Hill in a shift,” for thus was her state of destitution made patent to all beholders.