In theory the church courts punished not only actual sexual offenders but also ‘bawds, harbourers or receivers of such persons’ – in other words, anyone who aided and abetted sexual immorality. But the moral issues involved in such cases were often complex, the detection of offenders frequently difficult; and many forms of ‘bawdry’ led to only occasional prosecutions. Local communities were chiefly concerned about the sheltering of pregnant women (especially ‘strangers’ from other parishes) lest they became a burden on the poor rates, and it was cases of this type that furnished the majority of detections. Overall, prosecutions for aiding and abetting were never very numerous throughout the period, but they did occur in appreciable numbers in late Elizabethan and Jacobean times; they declined as the incidence of bastardy diminished in the two decades preceding the civil war.

In contemporary usage, a ‘bawd’ was an individual of either sex who procured or pandered to immorality. One serious form of bawdry which occasionally came before the courts was when a man was bribed to marry a woman who was with child by a third party. Most of these rigged marriages were engineered by gentlemen or substantial yeomen who, having pursued liaisons with women of lower status than themselves, were wholly unwilling to marry them when they became pregnant and also did not want their own reputations besmirched by bastardy proceedings. They were sometimes willing to pay handsomely to secure the necessary substitute.