ABSTRACT
On 11 December 1644, Ralph Josselin attended the wedding of one of his less prosperous parishioners. ‘Dind at a strange vaine wedding,’ he noted in his diary, ‘a poore man gave curious ribbands to all, gloves to the women and to the ringers, yett there was very good company.’ The celebration of marriage in the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries was a very public and joyous occasion. Even the relatively poor, as Josselin recognized with a mixture of disapproval and surprise, put on some show, with ribbons, gloves, bell-ringing and a dinner. Elsewhere, they might have held a bride-ale towards which the guests themselves contributed money and foodstuffs, or at least a drinking and dancing in the alehouse. Among the yeomanry it was an even grander occasion-one Staffordshire man spent 31s. for his daughter’s gown cloth in 1601, with a further 7s. 6d. for bones to line the gown, 16s. for trimmings and 8s. 6d. for her hat, while at a yeoman wedding in Suffolk in 1589 a bullock and seven sheep were consumed by the guests, not to mention prodigious quantities of bread and beer. Gentry weddings were splendid spectacles. When squire Harlackenden’s daughter was married at Earles Colne in 1656, the expenses shocked both him and his friend Josselin, but the indulgent father swallowed his puritan dislike of such vanity and paid up; while the wedding of Sir Thomas Mildmay in another Essex village in 1589 was an event which drew spectators from nearby parishes just to witness the ceremony.1
