British Wedding Traditions

August is the most popular month for weddings here in the UK, so we thought it a good time to take a look at the customs, superstitions and traditions that surround the big day. As an ecards company with an over two-decade accumulation of wedding and anniversary cards, it’s a subject with which we are quite familiar! It’s also one riddled with half-remembered history: many “age-old” traditions turn out to be younger than your grandmother and several of the most confidently repeated stories are, frankly, nonsense. So, from stag dos to sawing logs in half, here’s a brief tour of how we marry in Britain, how we came to do so, and how much of the world does things very differently!

A Brief History of Marriage

Weddings themselves are, of course, ancient. Our earliest evidence of something resembling a marriage contract dates back to 2100 BC in ancient Mesopotamia, but ancient humans were almost certainly “pair-bonding” well before that – some suggest hundreds of thousands of years ago. They just didn’t have writing to formalise it yet.

What we would now recognise as a wedding here, however, is far more recent than you might think: it was only in the Marriage Act of 1753 that couples in England and Wales became required to marry in a formal Anglican ceremony with banns read or a licence obtained, with exceptions for Jews and Quakers – but, notably, not Catholics – and only in 1836 that civil marriage became an option (allowing non-Anglican religious weddings to be recognised).

Before the Big Day

Long before the ceremony come the first celebrations: the “stag do” for the groom and “hen do” for the bride. Essentially one party for the groom and his close male friends and family, and one for the bride and her close female friends and family. Nowadays this is as likely to be a few drinks down the local pub as it is to be a raucous weekend in Kraków fuelled by cheap alcohol and bad decisions.

The names are older than the parties and are not – as many expect – from a British root. In fact, “stag” is American slang from the 1830s, meaning a man attending without a woman. Though “hen” as slang for a woman dates from the 1620s, “hen party” is a similar story: slang from 1880s America meaning a gathering of women. It was only as a 20th-century import that these terms were attached to the bride, groom and their respective parties – in the UK, at least.

The parties themselves can probably be traced back to a Scottish ritual of feet-washing on the eve of the wedding. This evolved into a game of capturing, dirtying and then cleansing both bride and groom. Alongside it sat additional regional customs, such as “chantie jumping” – the bride jumping over a chamber pot in the street, into which passers-by would drop money in exchange for a kiss.

Eventually, various pre-wedding workplace traditions for the women – who would almost always leave paid work upon marriage and become housewives – emerged. The evolution of the men’s tradition is a little harder to track, but by the 18th–19th centuries, the “bachelor’s dinner” – a formal banquet focused on toasts rather than debauchery – had emerged as the dominant one. These eventually became the modern “hen do” and “stag do”.

Most of these older, highly regional traditions have now died out, though some remnants remain of a few, usually more recent, ones. One popular example is the rhyme “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”. The earliest record of this is in 1871, though that version misses the “something old”, and the rhyme was intended as a charm against the “evil eye”. The borrowed item would ideally belong to a happily married woman in the hope that a little of her good fortune (and fertility) would rub off on the bride. Today, the bride simply gathers four items from friends and family – perhaps a more positive sentiment, with no curse to ward off!

Saying “I do” – or not!

If the couple marry in the Church of England, the process begins weeks earlier with the “calling of the banns”: an announcement, read aloud in church on three Sundays in the three months before the wedding, of the couple’s intention to marry. The congregation is invited to declare any “cause or just impediment”, in case there is any (probably highly scandalous) reason the couple cannot be married – for instance, the groom is already married. Of course, in practice, nobody ever speaks up.

Nowadays, few take that route. Far more common is a legally civil marriage than a legally religious one, which, aside from simply being more appropriate for those who have no religion, are religiously undecided or follow a religion other than the Church of England, holds several major advantages. Chief among these is the ability to choose a wedding venue other than a church: an outdoor pavilion looking out over the beautiful countryside, an historic stately home, or simply a small, intimate secular event in a registry office. Additionally, religious weddings use a set series of vows, while civil weddings use a few legally mandated ones but allow couples to add their own to these if they wish. At the end of the liturgical vows, instead of the Hollywood “I do”, it is “I will”, or in the legal vows, a longer “Declaration” and “Contracting Words”. Fortunately, in both civil and religious cases, the bride’s promise to “obey” has long been optional!

Once the vows are done, the rings are exchanged – another modern development: historically, only the bride received a ring and it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the groom receiving one became widespread – and not until recently that it became standard for him to continue to wear it after his wedding day.

In either case, it is common for only a small group of close family and friends to be present at the ceremony itself. After the ceremony, more guests arrive – generally (especially for religious marriages) to a different venue – for the reception.

As the newlyweds step out of the ceremony venue or upon arriving at the reception venue – sometimes both! – they are showered with confetti. This is often assumed to be a modern flourish but, in fact, the idea of throwing small things at the new couple is one of the oldest customs remaining. In ancient Rome, the pair would be pelted with grains and nuts, and for centuries British couples would be showered in grain – in both cases symbolising wealth and fertility. In recent times, however, it was considered that perhaps something prettier (and softer) could be used – like little pieces of colourful paper.

The Wedding “Breakfast”

The reception follows, generally with some welcome drinks to start along with a little time to catch up with other attendees, and then, to the frequent bafflement of a new couple’s foreign friends, the “Wedding Breakfast” – a formal meal eaten in the afternoon and bearing no resemblance to “breakfast” whatsoever. The name is a hangover from the days when weddings were required to take place in the morning – if the ceremony were not completed by noon, it could be rendered invalid. The celebratory meal after was, thus, literally breaking the fast.

Pride of place, generally, goes to the cake: traditionally a rich, multi-tiered fruitcake, densely filled with dried fruit and soaked in brandy, covered in a layer of marzipan and hard white royal icing. There is a good reason this cake caught on – it keeps fantastically well, so couples have long saved the top layer to eat at a later date, often their first anniversary, or the birth or christening of their first child. The newlyweds’ first task as a married couple is the cutting of the cake: the groom’s hand supporting that of the bride as she makes the cut.

Then come the speeches. Traditionally, the father of the bride first and then the groom – both, in general, very emotional. Then the best man – generally the groom’s best friend or brother – who is expected to utterly humiliate the groom with stories of great embarrassments, incompetencies and the occasional sordid tale. If he doesn’t leave everyone crying with laughter – all in good humour – and include a couple of moments showing his own great love for the groom, then he has not fulfilled his duties.

Nowadays, the speeches tend to go on a little longer, as the bride, mother of the bride and maid of honour – generally the bride’s best friend or sister – also frequently have their say. I’ve even attended one wedding where the bridesmaids were all “maids of honour” and gave quite a scandalous joint speech, much to the dismay of the grandparents and much to the delight of everyone else. Whatever the case, you can expect tears of joy, tears of laughter and generally tears aplenty.

Finally, enters the real party. Introduced, usually, by the “first dance” of the couple, followed by the bridal party and groomsmen joining the dancefloor, along with any other close family of the two, and eventually everyone else. Though there used to be a standard dance – the waltz – along with a common list of music played for most first dances, they are now commonly accompanied by meaningful pieces of music of any type – and any dance style – chosen (and often agonised over) by the couple in advance.

Dressing the Part

No wedding image is more fixed than the bride in a white dress – and no origin story is more misremembered. Queen Victoria is often credited with this invention when marrying Prince Albert in 1840, but she shouldn’t be. Brides had worn white before her – and she did not make it a rule. What she did do was become an inspiration: a gown of white silk satin, trimmed with Honiton lace, became the image of the radiant bride in white. The new print media spread the image like wildfire – and the fact that she’d used handmade Devon lace to support a struggling British industry could only add to the sensationalism.

The idea of white indicating “purity” (i.e. virginity) is a later gloss, though has carried through anyway. Nowadays, many brides get married in white because of tradition, regardless of “purity”, and some deliberately don’t – particularly in second marriages – because of the “purity” association. Many more get married in whatever colour they like best! We seem to be in the middle of a chaotic transition with regard to this one – perhaps we’ll do another blog post in the future in which we can clarify where it has landed.

In more wealthy weddings, hats and fascinators (an almost gravity-defying confection of feathers and netting) are often worn by the women attendees – though these are less common now, in part because of their expense and in part because they’re completely impractical. Another frequent historical overstatement is that they are worn to cover one’s head in church. Though there is an origin with this, the modern reality is mostly just an old British fondness for dressing up.

Around the World

While British weddings have their quirks, they are quite restrained when considered alongside some customs found elsewhere.

In Germany, there is an old tradition of the newlyweds using a two-person saw to cut through a log together – much like the British cutting of the cake, but with a little more sweat. In Sweden, guests keep an eye on the top table: if the groom leaves the room, men dash up to kiss the bride, and if the bride leaves, women dash up to kiss the groom. All cheerfully innocent, of course – a peck on the cheek and some laughter, along with some fantastic photographs.

A money dance of some kind, in which guests offer money to dance briefly with the newlyweds, shower them with notes, or pin notes to the bride’s dress, appears in a startling number of cultures: Polish, Greek, Nigerian, Filipino, Portuguese… A practical option to give the new couple a head start in their life together.

For all the local variation, weddings around the globe are essentially the same: a couple making a promise to each other, with their loved ones to witness, and a celebration of their love – with copious food, drink, dancing, tears and mirth.