Of all the life-cycle points, getting married is the most public. The way couples celebrate their wedding has always depended largely on their class, relative affluence or poverty, religion, and the region where they lived, but also on the dictates of fashion, which may vie strongly with those of tradition. The Victorian era was a major watershed in the way weddings were held, and E. M. Wright correctly identifies mobility (both social and geographical) and fashion as the factors involved:

The bridegroom's friends and relations are often complete strangers to the bride's kith and kin, their ways and beliefs are unknown to each other. They cannot join together in some time-honoured ceremonial when the newly-wedded pair enter their new home; instead, they wave hats and handkerchiefs in the wake of a train or a motor which is carrying the couple to a distant dwelling-place. The bride, too, has up-to-date ideas. She wants to make a sensation, like Lady Dunfunkus Macgregor's daughter, a description of whose marriage she has just read in the Daily Mail … Her dress and her doings, and all the wedding festivities, must as far as possible be modelled on a fashionable pattern, till finally modern conventionalities and not ancient customs rule the day.

Weddings necessarily take place under the constraints of legal and ecclesiastical regulations, but these change over time. Medieval rules forbidding marriage during penitential seasons, on high festival days, and after midday, are long gone; civil marriages came in in 1836; the 1994 Marriage Act allowed premises other than churches and registry offices to host marriage ceremonies. By May 1998 there were over 2,000 newly approved venues, mostly hotels and stately homes, but also museums, sports facilities, and halls, and a new industry of what might be called ‘genre weddings’ sprang up almost overnight. In addition, many couples now choose to go abroad to marry, and members of alternative religions (Wiccans, Druids, etc.) hold ‘handfasting’ rituals at sacred sites which, though not binding in law, are true marriages to the participants. It is too soon to say how these major changes will affect the traditional aspects of weddings, and what compromises between old and new will evolve.


Nowadays, the convenience of a weekend wedding outweighs any lingering superstition. Saturday is by far the most popular day, with 76 per cent of weddings in 1979 and 68 per cent in 1994; Friday is easily the second choice, with 11 per cent and 14 per cent, nearly three times as many as any midweek day. Similarly with the precepts noted in so many 19th-century sources, but now disregarded:

The custom of throwing things over the bride and groom has a long history, though the items thrown have changed. The earliest reference is from 1486; when Henry VII brought his wife to Bristol ‘a baker's wife cast out of a window a great quantity of wheat, crying “Welcome! and Good Luck!”’ (S. Seyer, Memoirs of Bristol, quoted in Folk-Lore Record 3 (1880), 133). Wheat or corn is mentioned regularly until the later 19th century, and occasionally flower petals and sugar plums. In 1874 Francis Kilvert recorded in his Diary (11 August) the throwing of rice, and this remained common till paper confetti was introduced around the turn of the 20th century. Almost at once there were complaints that it littered the aisle and spoiled the bridal costume, and was merely ‘a refined kind of horseplay’ (Surrey Gazette, (13 Sept. 1904), 3, reprinting from a Coventry parish magazine). Vicars and registrars regularly ban it, to little effect; a return to rice is often proposed as more environmentally sound.

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