How are our weddings different from medieval times?

As I wait for the remaining photos from my daughter’s wedding, I find myself pondering about marriage in the middle ages. I am thrilled that my daughter has found a love match. However, if we had lived in medieval times, it would have fallen to myself and my husband to find her a suitable match and that romance would not have been part of the equation. Rather, she would have been married off into a family who had a political or financial station that would strengthen one or both families. These types of alliances had very little to do with romance and if we would consider it an extraordinary blessing if she grew to love her spouse.

Other issues differed in to whom and how she was married.

In medieval times, weddings occurred at the door and not inside the church. If the wedding was at the church door, they would not even need a priest to officiate the wedding. Considering that my daughter wore an off the shoulder dress, she would have to choose warmer months to get married if the ceremony was outside in whatever limited shelter the church had to offer.

The vows were also quite different. Peter Lombard, a scholastic theologian and Bishop of Paris born around 1095, only required the words “I take you as my wife” and “I take you as my husband” for the marriage to be valid. Although a priest was not required, by law, it certainly helped to prove that you were indeed married.

The word wedding came from the old English “weddian” and meant “to pledge oneself” and the tricky part was that this pledge could take the form of any gift given.

Which meant a number of the gifts my daughter’s now husband had given to her in the past could be construed as a pledge, and that was where the ecclesiastical courts had to step in and pass judgement in many misunderstood gifting gestures.

In a wedding ceremony that included a Holy Mass the groom would receive a kiss of peace from the priest. He would then pass on this kiss to the bride. Now, in those times, the priests were all men, but for my daughter’s wedding, the officiary was a female pastor.

I am wondering how well the guests, as well as bride and groom, would have responded if the female pastor kissed the groom.

While choosing a suitable spouse, my husband and I would have also had to do some research on how closely our genealogy was linked to the groom.

In 1215. Pope Innocent III reduced the prohibited degrees of kinship from seven to four. Under the new ruling, she would have been able to marry her cousin. Before this rule, she would only be able to marry her sixth cousin. Considering the large number of cousins my daughter’s husband had as guests at the wedding, I am mindful that he would have been able to marry many of them. Quite an interesting thought.