We still have relatively few hard facts about Hester Pulter, especially relative to her male contemporaries, about whom more records tend to survive. Even something as fundamental as the year of her birth has been debated, as has the year of her marriage. Pulter herself may be said to have created some of the confusion around when she wed—or perhaps the blame lies instead with readers too eager to treat her poems as factual life-writings, when what they offer instead is more complex.

In Aletheia’s Pearl32, the speaker laments that she has “lived a sad and weary life, / Thirteen a maid, and thirty three a wife.” The line has been taken as evidence that Pulter married at the age of thirteen—which, in her edition, Alice Eardley notes was “a particularly young age, even by the standards of the early seventeenth century” (p. 14). More recently, Kerry Plunkett discovered Pulter’s marriage record in the online genealogical database FamilySearch: this record shows that Pulter married at the age of fifteen—that is, if we accept the argument that Pulter was born in 1605. Alice Eardley summarizes the debate around evidence for Pulter’s date of birth, and makes a compelling argument for the year being 1605, in “Lady Hester Pulter’s Date of Birth,” Notes and Queries, 57.4 (2010): 498–501.

Still more recently, to check the facts proffered by FamilySearch, we have examined in person the marriage record that survives in the parish register for the borough of Westbury. There, in Latin, is the following entry:

Parish Records of Westbury, Registers, 1556-1653, 1427/3. Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire and Swindon Archives.

This Latin text, “Arthurus Pulter et Hester Ley matrimiomi copulati sunt January quarto,” means, in English, “Arthur Pulter and Hester Ley were joined in marriage on the fourth of January.”

The headers at the top of the same page confirm the year in which the marriage took place as 1620:

Parish Records of Westbury, Registers, 1556-1653, 1427/3. Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire and Swindon Archives.

The record is mistranscribed in the genealogical databases Ancestry and FamilySearch, where “Pulter” appears as “Pulta”:

Image provided courtesy of Kerry Plunkett.

The error is understandable, given the elision of the “e” and “r” in “Pulter:

Parish Records of Westbury, Registers, 1556-1653, 1427/3. Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives.

The marriage record is found in this volume:

Parish Records of Westbury, Registers, 1556-1653, 1427/3. Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives.

The parish register—a large bound manuscript volume, comprising nearly a century’s records of local baptisms, marriages, and burials—is preserved in the Wiltshire and Swindon Archives in the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham, not far from Westbury, where Pulter’s father held a manor and served four times as member of Parliament, and where he and her mother were eventually buried.

By moving from Pulter’s poem, to a transcription in an online database, and finally to the original document in which Hester Ley’s marriage to Arthur Pulter was recorded in 1620, we have confirmed as a matter of fact the precise date and place of her marriage.