All Saints' Church Records
Marriage Registers
All Saint's Church became licensed for the solemnisation of matrimony in 1863 and the first ceremony, conducted by the Rev. Henry Gray, took place on February 12th of that year, when Charles Hurst, a brickmaker, of Horley, son of Henry Hurst, also a brickmaker, married Hannah Smith, daughter of Benjamin Smith, a wheelwright, of Crawley Down. Almost 900 marriages were solemnised between 1863 and 1988.
The average number of weddings per year did not increase during the First World War. Of 19 weddings performed between 1914 and 1918, 6 involved men on active service. During the Second World War, the average rate of marriages did increase, particularly in 1943 and 1944. Of the 40 marriages conducted between 1939 and 1945, 30 involved men on active service, including 7 Canadian soldiers who married women from Crawley Down. Four of the brides married during this time were also serving in the forces.
 The information asked for in the marriage register remains unchanged in all the volumes used at All Saints'. It provides the date of the marriage, name, surname, age and "condition" (e.g., bachelor, spinster) of the bride and groom, rank or profession of both bride and groom and their fathers' names, surnames, and ranks or occupations. In regard to age, the couple may be described as "of full years", a practice that became much less common after 1900. Similarly, it was the practice in early records, bearing in mind that there were not too many houses in the Parish, and fewer roads, simply to state in the "residence" column the name of the district where the persons dwelt, such as Worth, Copthorne or Crawley Down, and attempts to trace family links have to rely on references to fathers' names rather than addresses.
Manual labour predominates in the list of occupations recorded early in the marriage registers, including a reference to the occupation of "Whitesmith", but the emphasis changes slowly through the years with an increase in service-oriented work, such as coachmen, grooms, bailiffs, servants, and jobs associated with the railway until, in the early years of this century, clerical, shop and business activities begin to appear as well as a few of the professions. After the Second World War the numbers of skilled and white-collar jobs increased significantly and the records of the 70s and 80s reveal, as expected, the rise of technology and travel-related employment.
The registers make no mention of female occupations until wedding number 158 on May 10th, 1879, when Catherine Pearce, aged 20, described as "a servant", married Harry Holman, a bricklayer from Turners Hill. References to female occupations remain uncommon for a number of years, but on August 28th, 1895, Henry Follett of East Grinstead married Emma Brackpool of Crawley Down, "a school mistress". It is possible that the inclusion or otherwise of information about female occupations may have been at the discretion of the Minister, because when the Rev. Alfred Dunstan arrived in 1935 female occupations begin to be recorded routinely; these included domestics, clerks, shop assistants and children's nurses. The latest complete marriage register, finished in 1988, includes among the occupations of the brides: management accountant, air hostess, laboratory technician, tour operator, farmer, business proprietor, teachers and nurses.
The requirement for bride and groom and two witnesses to sign the register, or to make their mark, provides an insight into the growth of literacy in the village. In 1863 the records show that more women than men were able to write, or at least write their names, and the proportion continued to grow for a while even after allowing for the effect of the establishment of the village school to work through. The probable explanation for this is that boys were held back from school in order to earn their living. Illiteracy does decline, however, after 1868 and from 1885 onward, no more than one or two people each year "made their mark". Only one "mark" appears in 1902 and then no more until 1921 when the last "mark" is recorded. Some of the very early signatures suggest great efforts to master the signing of the register. The hand is shaky, the letters large and uneven, but the determination to "sign the book" on the marriage day is evident more than a century later.
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