Scottish Court of Session Decisions

Subject_1 DECISIONS of the LORDS OF COUNCIL AND SESSION, collected by JAMES BURNETT, LORD MONBODDO.

Mary Blair
v.
-

Date: 12 February 1766

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This was a question about proving a marriage by the acknowledgment of the husband. The fact was, that a man and a woman had been long in the way of cohabiting together privately, but not at all as man and wife. One night, as they were together, two women, not of any rank, listened at the door, and deponed that they heard him say, that he would never deny her as his wife.

Lord Gardenston said that there were four ways in this country of making a marriage: the first was by the religious ceremony, the second was by a promise and subsequent copula, the third by living publicly as man and wife, and the fourth was by acknowledgment of a woman as a man’s wife. As to the last method, he thought it must be solemn and public, and not at all equivocal or ambiguous, and not transitory or occasionally, but deliberate; whereas what the man said in this case, supposing it proved by unexceptionable witnesses, which he did not think it was, was not, properly speaking, an acknowledgment, as it was not spoken before witnesses, and it was very plain, from some circumstances that followed after, that the man would not have said it if he had thought any body had been hearing him. And all the Court were of this opinion, dissent. tantum Pitfour.