Author Topic: Doing away with the wedding breakfast  (Read 3141 times)

JeanFromBNA

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #15 on: August 22, 2019, 03:26:00 pm »
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Wasn't there a wedding rehearsal on Downton Abbey?

Don't ask me; I gave up on DA after Season 2 when the character-implausibility and social and historical inaccuracies got too much to bear. For a diplomat's son and the husband of an earl's niece, Julian Fellowes either doesn't seem to know very much about aristocratic life, or he's just made up him mind to write whatever guff will pass for the international market.

But a wedding rehearsal at Downton just makes no sense. For one, there was no 'making it personal' in weddings then; you just all went up to the church and walked up to the altar, the service took place exactly as it had done ever since the prayer book was published in 1662, then you walked back out again. Everybody had seen it dozens of times and knew exactly what to do. For another, it wasn't a show! None of the wedding party or the guests expected it to be slick as a stage number; a bit of shuffling around and mumbling wasn't an issue. The notion of being rehearsed for a wedding - just like actors or music hall artistes!!! -  would have been unthinkably insulting.

Edited to add: if anybody knows which episode that was and where to find it on Youtube, I'd be interested to watch it. I honestly can't imagine what the scriptwriters could have dreamed up for the family to rehearse, given that they had been getting married in exactly the same way in the same church for generations.
A quick Google search didn't turn up anything.  I'll have to re-watch a couple of episodes to see if I can find it, or maybe I've imagined it.  In the meantime, if you don't think that it derails from your thread too much, would you mind telling us Leftpondians what made Downtown Abbey codswallop besides a possibly-non-existent wedding rehearsal?
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Aleko

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #16 on: August 26, 2019, 02:42:05 am »
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In the meantime, if you don't think that it derails from your thread too much, would you mind telling us Leftpondians what made Downtown Abbey codswallop besides a possibly-non-existent wedding rehearsal?

Hi Jeanfrom,

Sorry for the delay responding to you! I had to refresh my memory banks, it being years since I stopped watching, and once I started - well, brace yourself for a screed...

There was just a constant stream of macro- and micro-assaults on historical accuracy. It started right from the beginning with the whole Cora/Robert relationship. He is supposed to be crushed with guilt about having married her for money: but (a) the British aristocracy had been marrying for money for centuries, and indeed would have thought it very selfish and irresponsible not to; and (b) she had married him for social status, which he and society at large would have seen as a very fair deal all round. Also, that whole plot point about all her money having gone straight into the Downton estate leaving her with nothing, is pretty much impossible. No properly-drawn up marriage settlement failed to settle a proportionate slice of money on the bride personally, so that if her husband squandered the dowry, or he threw her out of the house so he could live with his mistress, or - as in this case - failed to sire an heir so that after his death the estate went to a nephew or cousin, she would be comfortably provided for. (At least one commentator on Downton has described the series as one long whine by Fellowes against the male inheritance of peerages, as without that that his wife would be a Countess; and they had a point.)

The Downton household contains less than a quarter of the number of servants it would in reality have had. In 1912 Highclere Castle, the house where Downton was filmed, had 25 maids, 14 footmen and three male chefs! It's understandable that the production cast reduced numbers, not only on the grounds of expense but so there weren't too many below-stairs characters to recognise and relate to; but it did mean that the whole servant community was far more cosy and tight-knit - and far less regimented and hierarchical - than it realistically would have been.  For example, the upper servants wouldn't even have sat down to eat with the rest; they would have had their own meals in the steward's or housekeeper's room and been waited on by junior servants.

Relationships between the family and the servants were also far closer and more casual than they would ever historically have been. Yes, a very few servant roles (valet, lady's maid, nanny) required intimacy with one of the family, and the senior servants (butler, housekeeper) might - not necessarily would - have been in the confidence of the master and  / or mistress of the house; but the family would barely have known the names of most of the other servants, and might rarely have even seen many of them. The scene where the Earl, interviewing his new chauffeur Branson in the library, casually gives him permission to borrow books, is beyond ridiculous. A room like the library would have been totally off-limits to any servant who didn't have a job to do there; no house-owner would have cheerily let them browse and borrow books. (Heck, can you imagine any present-day millionaire allowing that?)

But in fact the whole Branson story arc is consistently absurd. He plans a criminal assault on a Downton dinner-guest, which is known to Carson, but doesn't even get the sack; he claims to be a socialist and Irish patriot but sits out the entire World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence comfortably as an imperialist lackey (literally) in Downton without lifting a finger for it; then when he finally has to leave Downton on account of having tried to elope with one of the Earl's daughters (nothing less would have got him the sack) he swans into a good job with a Dublin newspaper, well-paid enough to allow him to support a wife, for which he can't possibly be in any way qualified - if he has any experience at all in writing or journalism it's at least seven years ago, and since then he has been rusticating in the Yorkshire countryside, not seeing anything at all of political life and events even in London, let alone Ireland.

The characters' attitudes are resolutely modern. Girls who get pregnant out of wedlock are sympathised with, not labelled as **** and turned out of the house. And while everyone except the youngest and most naïve of the servants knows that Thomas the footman is gay, nobody has a problem with this: they dislike him because he's a slimeball, not because they honestly believe that homosexuality is an abomination, "peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum" ("that horrible crime not to be named among Christians") as the majority of people at the time - including genuinely nice, kind people - honestly did. Indeed, the Earl not merely doesn't sack Thomas for making sexual advances to a new footman; he puts pressure on the lad to drop his (100% true) accusation of indecent assault, and promotes Thomas to under-butler! No, no, no, that would not have happened in period. Not unless the Earl himself was gay and deliberately hiring gay servants (safer; they couldn't shop him to the police or the press without outing themselves).

Clangers were constantly dropped in non-period language and manners. E.g. the butler and footmen wear white-tie evening dress during the day  -and even out of doors! -  rather than their daytime livery: a big no-no.

Glaring anachronisms, e.g: Mrs Patmore the cook. (NB that having a woman heading up the kitchen in an earl's household is itself implausible;  a house of that status would have at least one male chef - as mentioned above, Highclere had three - paid a whole lot more.)  She is going blind with cataracts (medically perfectly plausible); hides this because she dreads simply being sacked if her employers find out and ending her days in the workhouse (also perfectly plausible historically - many well-off people did sack their servants when they became ill or disabled, which should alert viewers to the untypical benevolence of the Crawleys). When her problem is discovered Robert pays for an operation for her (OK; it's untypical, but some employers were that generous). She then comes back to Downton wearing a pair of dinky dark glasses, sighted and able to work again, hooray!  But the specs simply disappear shortly after her return, implying that she only needed them while she was recovering from the operation, and for the rest of the series she apparently has perfectly good sight. And that's ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE! The first cataract implant operation was in 1950 (and for decades after that it was a big-deal, complex, very expensive procedure, nothing like the outpatient deal it is now). Before that, all surgeons could do was remove the clouded lens. Literally just that. Without the lens, the eye couldn't focus and was permanently very long-sighted, so the patient was equipped with a pair of spectacles with lenses thick as jam-jar bottom, and peered through these. It wasn't brilliant, just a lot better than being blind.

And the issue of Robert - aged 48 at the outbreak of WWI - being 'too old to fight' and thus hanging resentfully around Downton all through the war was ludicrous. The Army was desperate for trained officers, especially ones with experience of active service; men who had fought in the Boer War, as Robert had done, were gratefully taken back on to the active list. He would have been about the average age for a regimental commander; many officers 10 or more years older than Robert commanded troops on the Western Front. And of course it wasn't only front-line officers that were needed; even men who really were no longer young or fit enough for that were in demand as staff and training officers (In fact, in real life there was a big training camp for recruits at Catterick near Ripon, which it's canon was the nearest serious-sized town to Downton. Robert was perfectly qualified to command that, and could still have been home to dinner every night.)

Fellowes also claimed that Robert was not called up because he was a landowner. That's not merely not true but amounts to a libel on the British aristocracy, who have always accepted that their one absolute duty and raison d'etre, the basis of all their privileges, is to fight for the monarch against his/her enemies. In 1910 every peer had personally sworn an oath to King George V at his coronation to do that very thing. And they did. They went to fight en masse; by the end of 1915 nine peers and ninety-five peers' sons had been killed in battle. In all, 24 peers were killed in action in the war.

Then there's the stupid bit where Robert is finally made Colonel of the North Riding Volunteers*, expects to go to France in command of them, and is utterly dashed to be told that it's only an honorary post. But the full Colonelcy of a Territorial regiment was, and is, always an honorary post! He's a local landowner, who acts as patron of the regiment, lets it use his estates for field exercises, gives dinners for the officers and awards the prizes for the marksmanship competitions. Robert could not possibly not have known that. (Indeed, it's a good question why he hasn’t been its colonel ever since he retired from active service; he's exactly the kind of person who would be offered the post. He would certainly have known whoever was Colonel, and known exactly what that entailed.) Also, as an ex-soldier himself he could not possibly have been unaware that for a honorary colonel to wear uniform other than on specifically regimental occasions is very, very bad form, and that he had no business whatsoever to be hanging around Downton in khaki.

*Never mind that the Volunteers were a 19th-century movement that had been completely subsumed into the Territorial Army long before the outbreak of WWI - they would have become a Territorial Battalion of a regular country regiment.

Fellowes decided to have the Downton Abbey household carry on their pre-war life for the first two years of the war, largely unaffected by it; it only starts to impinge on them in 1916. Which is absurd. Everybody had lost relatives in the war (certainly all the aristocracy), or at least had friends who had. There was a major 'servant problem', since able-bodied men were called up and women found they could get far better pay and conditions in munitions factories than in service. And, most of all, in rural Yorkshire where they live, a huge shocking atrocity took place - in December 1914 the German Navy shelled the Yorkshire ports of Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, destroying hundreds of houses and killing many civilians. Nothing like that had even happened before. The whole nation was rocked back on its heels, and people at Downton, just 50 miles inland would have felt themselves almost directly under attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Scarborough,_Hartlepool_and_Whitby


One more thing (since I've probably bored you all to tears already): the Crawleys were strikingly selfish and unpatriotic during the war. Many great houses were turned into hospitals right at beginning of the war (including Highclere Castle, the real 'Downton', where the Countess of Carnarvon began fitting it out for the purpose before war broke out; it was taking patients already in September 1914), and scads of duchesses and their daughters trained as nurses and did real nursing work - assisting at operations, emptying bedpans, the lot; many of them behind the lines in France. The Crawleys' half-hearted effort, right at the end of the war, offering convalescent facilities to officers only, with two of their daughters providing a little ladylike bustling around, is pathetic in comparison.
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caroled

Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #17 on: August 26, 2019, 03:56:35 pm »
Not bored to tears at all! Would love this to be a separate regular thread. Still love the show , even though historical inaccuracies seem to run rampant. Do tell me more!
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jpcher

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #18 on: August 27, 2019, 03:56:10 pm »
Not bored to tears at all! Would love this to be a separate regular thread. Still love the show , even though historical inaccuracies seem to run rampant. Do tell me more!

I suggest you start a thread in the "Entertainment" topic under "The Brimstone Lounge - Off Topic Discussion" category.  ;)

JeanFromBNA

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #19 on: August 30, 2019, 02:48:36 pm »
Thank you for the long and detailed reply, Aleko.  And to cap off the list of errors, I did re-watch Season 3, Episode 1, which took place immediately preceding Mary and Matthew's wedding, and they had a wedding rehearsal ;D. I remember thinking at the time that I didn't think that rehearsals were done back then.

Some of the soapy plots and plot holes were frustrating, but I admit to being a fan.  It was so enjoyable to watch. My grandparents were in service at around the same time the series took place, and they brought to the U.S. some very English opinions of How Things Should Be Done at table and in the household. Watching Downton Abbey brings back fond memories.

Hanna

Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #20 on: August 30, 2019, 10:37:58 pm »
I’m a fan of Downton Abbey, but was tired of the social justice topics. I’m not really in need of being educated about social issues by the programs I watch on television, and most of those plot-lines were truly ludicrous. The jazz singer and cousin what’s her face, for example.

I was also constantly annoyed by how stupid they constant made Robert’s character.

As an aside, I know many Americans including me tend to romanticize that period in England. I was fascinated to hear one of my managers in England absolutely go off the ledge when I mentioned the show; he despises the whole idea. (But if you handed him an estate I’m sure he’d take it!)
« Last Edit: August 31, 2019, 05:28:00 am by Hanna »
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LifeOnPluto

Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #21 on: August 31, 2019, 02:08:50 am »
Aleko - thanks for the fantastic analysis of Downton's inaccuracies!

Back on topic, I thought it was quite common in the UK to have A lists and B lists for weddings. The A list guests get invited to the main part of the reception (eg a sit down dinner, and speeches, etc), and the B List guests join the party later in the night for dessert and dancing.

As an Australian, that always struck me as being rather rude, but I recall on the old boards, there were a few Brits who defended the practice.

Sara Crewe

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #22 on: August 31, 2019, 04:46:34 am »
Aleko - thanks for the fantastic analysis of Downton's inaccuracies!

Back on topic, I thought it was quite common in the UK to have A lists and B lists for weddings. The A list guests get invited to the main part of the reception (eg a sit down dinner, and speeches, etc), and the B List guests join the party later in the night for dessert and dancing.

As an Australian, that always struck me as being rather rude, but I recall on the old boards, there were a few Brits who defended the practice.

The rule in the U.K. is that you can *add* people at each stage but you can’t remove them.

Therefore, everyone who is invited to the service must be invited to the next stage (usually the meal), some extra people will be invited to the second stage and then everyone from the first and second stages must be invited to the third stage which is dancing and perhaps a buffet.

Having a ‘pretend’ reception with canapés and then sneaking off with your *real* friends for a meal is just as shatteringly rude in the U.K. as anywhere else in the world.
« Last Edit: August 31, 2019, 04:50:34 am by Sara Crewe »
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Aleko

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #23 on: August 31, 2019, 12:45:41 pm »
Sara Crewe, you pretty much nailed it.

I'd only add that there isn't always a third stage; an evening dance is not traditional. There are two reasons for this:

1: For well over a century the hours for weddings in England were restricted by law, to prevent people (such as eloping minors) sneaking off and getting a clergyman to marry them clandestinely at dead of night, or some other time they could count on nobody being in church to spot them. From 1837 a marriage was only legal if it was performed between 8 am and noon; then in 1886 the permitted hours were extended to 3pm; in 1934 to 6pm. It was only in 2012 that it became legal to marry at any time of day or night. But the Canons of the Church of England consistently lagged behind the law: DH and I got married in 1992 and the vicar told us we were in luck; a year or so previously the Canons had finally been updated to come into line with the 1934 legislation, so he was allowed to marry us at 5pm as we wanted.

So, from 1837 to 1886 nobody in England could get married except in the morning; after that the laws were successively relaxed, but right up to from 1886 to 1990-ish, anyone wanting a Church of England wedding still had to have it before noon. This meant that the 'wedding breakfast' started no later than 2, so by maybe 5 or 6 everyone would have had enough food and festivity; partying on till it was time for an evening meal and then dancing into the night would have meant 12 or more hours non-stop..

2: It used to be assumed (or at least valiantly pretended by one and all) that the couple had not previously been sleeping together, and therefore that the night of their wedding was The Big Night. So they needed to 'go away' early enough to get to their honeymoon hotel in time for that. 'Going away' was a big traditional event that has been almost completely dropped in the last two or three decades: the couple would slip off, change out of their wedding outfits and reappear in ordinary (but smart and new) day clothes, say goodbye to all their guests and get into their vehicle, which in the interim would have been decorated by the best man and his accomplices with ribbons, L-plates, a sign saying "JUST MARRIED", and old shoes on strings trailing from the back bumper, and everyone would stand on the steps to wave them off. That brought the whole thing to a natural end; a few gannets might hang on to hoover up the last of the food and drink, but generally the guests started going home. It's only since everyone has shed even the pretence that the 'wedding night' is an important rite, that bridal couples have felt able to party on into the night with their guests.
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Nestholder

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #24 on: August 31, 2019, 05:34:13 pm »
I don't think it's legal to get married at home, or in your parents' or grandparents' house, in the UK (unless your grandma happens to own, say, Windsor Castle).  Which is a shame, because I think that sort of wedding sounds charming.  I guess one could have the reception at home, but the actual wedding would have to be in a licensed building.

I honestly cannot remember if we had rehearsal for my wedding, but the grand Rehearsal Dinner definitely was not a Thing then.  Doubt it is now.  I'm not really sure why the rehearsal is necessary, either.  I mean, the celebrant conducts everybody through the wedding - it's not as though you are required to memorise a bunch of lines and come in on cue.

lisastitch

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #25 on: August 31, 2019, 06:48:08 pm »
Sara Crewe, you pretty much nailed it.
2: It used to be assumed (or at least valiantly pretended by one and all) that the couple had not previously been sleeping together, and therefore that the night of their wedding was The Big Night. So they needed to 'go away' early enough to get to their honeymoon hotel in time for that. 'Going away' was a big traditional event that has been almost completely dropped in the last two or three decades: the couple would slip off, change out of their wedding outfits and reappear in ordinary (but smart and new) day clothes, say goodbye to all their guests and get into their vehicle, which in the interim would have been decorated by the best man and his accomplices with ribbons, L-plates, a sign saying "JUST MARRIED", and old shoes on strings trailing from the back bumper, and everyone would stand on the steps to wave them off. That brought the whole thing to a natural end; a few gannets might hang on to hoover up the last of the food and drink, but generally the guests started going home. It's only since everyone has shed even the pretence that the 'wedding night' is an important rite, that bridal couples have felt able to party on into the night with their guests.

In addition, as the age at which people get married has risen, more wedding couples are hosting their own weddings.  When DH and I got married, my parents were definitely the hosts. I had a going-away outfit, and we left when most people were still there.  By the time DS and DDIL got married, they were the ones planning the wedding and reception, and were hosting it in a way that DH and I were not.

jpcher

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #26 on: September 01, 2019, 02:36:59 am »
I don't think it's legal to get married at home, or in your parents' or grandparents' house, in the UK (unless your grandma happens to own, say, Windsor Castle).  Which is a shame, because I think that sort of wedding sounds charming.  I guess one could have the reception at home, but the actual wedding would have to be in a licensed building.

OH! NO! I'm in the US and married my LDH in our home with a licensed pastor. I certainly hope the marriage was legal! All the paperwork said it was. LOL! It was a charming wedding with friends and relatives all attending. A good time was had by all.

What would a licensed building be? A courthouse? A church?

Aleko

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #27 on: September 01, 2019, 05:17:34 am »
Quote
I don't think it's legal to get married at home, or in your parents' or grandparents' house, in the UK (unless your grandma happens to own, say, Windsor Castle). 

Actually it is, if you can convince the Archbishop of Canterbury that you really, really need to get married at home. For example, if you tell him that either the bride or groom is bedbound, or has an electronic tag and will be arrested if they leave their house, he will (hopefully) issue you a special licence to get married there. Such a licence is what's needed when a dying person in hospital wants to marry, or in any other case where it just isn't practicable for the wedding to happen in a regularly licensed place.

Quote
Which is a shame, because I think that sort of wedding sounds charming.  I guess one could have the reception at home, but the actual wedding would have to be in a licensed building.

For a very good reason! Society at large needs to know who is legally married and who isn't; and getting married in a private house militates against this need. Up till 1753 you could get married in a private home or anywhere, and the result was that you could never be sure if someone claiming to be single was actually married, or vice versa. (Some people probably weren't 100% sure if they themselves were married or single.) Bigamy was rife, and there was a mass of marital litigation and wrangles over inheritance. All the 18th- and 19th-century legislation laying down the permitted times and places for weddings, and insisting on public notification of one's intentions to marry ("calling the banns") was aimed at ensuring that marriages were public. It's still the law in England that for a church marriage to be valid the church door must be kept open during the marriage service, so that anyone can walk in, to witness the act or object to it - you can't get married behind closed doors.

The vicar who married DH and me said, while explaining to us how to get the banns called, and that if we couldn't produce a valid banns certificate to show us before the day, the wedding couldn't happen, that while this might all sound like antiquated flummery to us, it still is important. He himself had once been conducting a marriage and when he said the bit about "if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace", a man spoke up from the back of the church: "I'm the uncle of the bridegroom's wife, and he's still married to her!" The groom lived in an inner-city district nowhere near anywhere his any member of his own or his wife's family lived, and had never set foot in the local parish church himself, so her reckoned it was safe to have the banns called there, as it was highly unlikely that anybody who heard the banns would know his name. But somebody did, and that person told his wife's uncle in time!

Quote
What would a licensed building be? A courthouse? A church?


Religious marriages can only be performed by a minister of religion who has been registered as an officiant and authorised by the Registrar General to conduct religious marriages. In other words, such an officiant is acting in a dual capacity, both religious and civil, and s/he has to do the legal paperwork accordingly. Where the minister is such an officiant, her/his church will be a lawful place for a wedding. That includes churches of most major Christian denominations, synagogues, Hindu and Sikh temples, and many others. If a minister is not so registered, the marriage has no legal validity and the couple will need to have a civil marriage ceremony as well to be considered married in the eyes of the law.

Until very recently, civil marriages could only be contracted in a registry office. Every district has one; it's where you go to register births, marriages and deaths ("hatches, matches and despatches"). The Registrar performs the marriage.

However, very recently (2012, I think?) this restriction has been relaxed and any suitable place, such as a country house hotel or historic house, may apply to be licensed officially as a wedding venue; a licensed officiant (civil or religious)  comes out to it. However, weddings must still take place in a building (i.e. the wedding venue must have an actual address); you can't marry on a beach or a mountain top.
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gellchom

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #28 on: September 03, 2019, 01:47:48 pm »
Aleko, that was so interesting!  Thanks for sharing that with us.

I guess in the US, the concerns that you raised are covered by having to have a license issued by the state and completed and filed by a legal officiant (government official; licensed clergy; other licensed, sometimes temporarily, person).  The location is rendered irrelevant.  Do you have licenses like that in the UK?

We don't have any requirement like banns, though; closest thing is the waiting period in some states after getting the license.  Come to think of it, although I don't know if it is a legal requirement, local newspapers list marriage licenses granted, so if there is a waiting period, that serves the purpose.  How nearby geographically must the banns be called? 

Why no outdoor weddings in the UK?  I guess you could probably have an official ceremony in a government office the day before and then do your wedding outdoors or in an unlicensed venue, couldn't you?
« Last Edit: September 03, 2019, 01:51:36 pm by Gellchom »

JeanFromBNA

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Re: Doing away with the wedding breakfast
« Reply #29 on: September 03, 2019, 02:24:32 pm »
The vicar who married DH and me said, while explaining to us how to get the banns called, and that if we couldn't produce a valid banns certificate to show us before the day, the wedding couldn't happen, that while this might all sound like antiquated flummery to us, it still is important. He himself had once been conducting a marriage and when he said the bit about "if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace", a man spoke up from the back of the church: "I'm the uncle of the bridegroom's wife, and he's still married to her!"[/b] [/b]The groom lived in an inner-city district nowhere near anywhere his any member of his own or his wife's family lived, and had never set foot in the local parish church himself, so her reckoned it was safe to have the banns called there, as it was highly unlikely that anybody who heard the banns would know his name. But somebody did, and that person told his wife's uncle in time!

Shades of Jane Eyre (or Four Weddings and a Funeral)! I've wondered if this ever happens in modern times.