Marriage settlement (England)

A marriage settlement was a legally enforceable agreement made between the families of a bride and bridegroom intending marriage, specifying family assets from both parties that would be available to the couple during their marriage, commonly also reserving contingent portions of the marital assets to be available to the wife for her personal expenses, to support her in widowhood, and to provide for her offspring. While such arrangements have developed in many cultures of property law, commonly labelled as dowry and dower, they took very specific forms in England and Wales in the Early Modern period (1650 to 1850) due to the multiplicity of bodies of property law applying in England in this period, and also to the peculiarities of one of those bodies of law, the common law of England. Equivalent legal instruments are found in this period in other territories with legal jurisprudence deriving from English Common Law, such as colonial New England and the British West Indies.

The three major forms of marriage settlement in this period are commonly termed settlement by bond, strict settlement and separate estate. The latter two forms were generally found only amongst families with substantial landed property or inherited wealth, being created as trusts of land or other assets. The family's lawyers, as trustees, would be established as the legal owners of these assets, such that the bride and bridegroom would be beneficial owners during their lifetimes, which after their deaths, would descend to one or more of the children of the union, or otherwise as devised by will.

'Marriage settlements' are to be distinguished from 'bride prices' - payments from the family of the bridegroom to that of the bride (or sometimes vice versa), as too from prenuptual agreements made in anticipation of the contingency of a marriage being terminated by divorce or marital separation. In the Early Modern period, marriage settlements were ubiquitous amongst propertied families in England, and very common too across all other social classes, such that that a bride's marriage portion in her settlement was considered to comprise a major element of her share in the inheritance due from her paternal family. Consequently, forms of marriage settlement also commonly acted as forms for overall inheritance shares, and vice versa.

While it remains common in England for the families of a married couple to contribute to their financial assets as a 'bottom drawer' or 'trousseau', the specific legal instruments that developed for marriage settlements in England fell out of use from 1850 onwards due to:

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