Given all the time Thomas Dunckerley actually spent ashore as an officer in the Royal Navy it seems a bit artificial to talk about his settling on land as something novel. He had managed to have a relatively stable home and associational life during much of his naval career, though some of the details are not entirely clear to us. Dunckerley appears to have had a chequered marital history. Despite his predilection for married life, he suffered a spate of very bad luck. When Dunckerley married Ann Martin within the Rules of the Fleet Prison in December 1743, both bride and groom were listed as having been married before. Ann herself presumably died shortly thereafter, because Thomas married again in June 1745, this time at a tavern within the Rules of the Fleet Prison. Fleet marriages were performed within the boundaries, or ‘Rules’, of the Fleet Prison. Unlike modern prisons, the boundaries of the Fleet and many other such contemporary institutions were permeable, with people coming and going, and claiming their own peculiar habits of self-governance. The Fleet Prison was demolished in 1846 and immediately became a fascination for nineteenth-century scholars, who produced a series of books on the prison and its inmates. There has been no authoritative recent history of the prison; however, thorough studies of debt and debtors like Finn's The Character of Credit give a vivid picture of life within the prison.