"Marriage is like a bank account. You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest."
-Irwin Corey
1. It's considered incest if your husband/wife-to-be is related to someone you've ever slept with. And these degrees of consanguinity are far-reaching. For example, if in your youth you boinked some girl who turned out to be the second cousin, twice removed of your fiancee, that marriage is forbidden.
2. You have to publish banns in front of a church before you can get married. People need to be given sufficient time to object to your marriage. This is not nearly as funny or dramatic as the official asking if anyone objects DURING the wedding, as we currently do now.
3. There are no marriage contracts. As in, there is no legal documentation that you are wed to someone. Most marriage cases involve witnesses testifying, "Yeah, they're hitched," or the opposite. This results in lots of hilarious cases where some guy contracts with three women, all named Agnes. Many hijinks ensue.
4. In fact, in order to marry someone, it appears you only have to say something to the effect of "I take you as my wife/husband." There are some men who try to get away with extra clauses such as, "I take you as my wife, as long as you behave yourself." The court seems to find no fault with these clauses.
5. The court can and totally will order two people who hate one another to be wed and "exhibit spousely affection" to one another. One case that sticks out in my mind is a woman who was married to a man for thirty years, but it was discovered that she had actually contracted with another man before that marriage, so she was forced to leave her current husband for this guy she hadn't lived with for thirty years and show "wifely emotion" toward him.
6. There was a lot of extra-marital and pre-marital boinkage.
2. You have to publish banns in front of a church before you can get married. People need to be given sufficient time to object to your marriage.
ReplyDeleteThis is still the norm for Church of England marriages, tho' it is possible to be married by "common licence", which technically is a dispensation, issued by the diocesan bishop, from the normal procedure of having banns read.
(There is also a "special licence", issued by the Archbishop of Canterbury. These are rare. Technically this is a dispensation from the usual conditions about time and place, as well as banns, and derives from the legatine powers that the Archbishop exercised as the Pope's representative. It is used e.g. where one party is gravely ill and a marriage has to take place at a hospital bed.)
The Middle Ages are alive and well and living in the Church of England ....