Social class and marital distance in Oxford City

A study has been made of social class distributions and their effects on marital movement in the city of Oxford from 1837 to the present day. The data have been obtained from the marriage registers of nine ecclesiastical parishes which transect the city. There is marked social class heterogeneity according to district, but when the data are combined some striking relationships between occupation and the distributions of marital distance emerge. In general distance decreases and amounts of city endogamy increase almost linearly as one moves from Class I to Class V. There appears to be, however, no very great increase in marital distance in this century as compared with the situation in the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Some of the differences between the social classes are due to differences in marital age, but even after this has been taken into account there remains a very statistically significant relationship between class and marital movement.