Eighteenth-century courts needed to rely on presumptions in favour of marriage for a number of reasons, some practical and some legal, but the misleading reporting of one leading nineteenth-century case, followed by institutional changes and a stronger focus on precedent, led to the original evidential assumptions being obscured. A further blurring of the different strands of the presumption occurred in the twenty-first century, leading to confusion in recent cases. Understanding how the much-misunderstood presumptions have developed reveals why they were needed, when they became decoupled from their evidential underpinnings, and how, when and why they should operate today.
