Marriage Customs: A.D. 200, Northern Europe

Among the Germanic Goths, a man married a woman from within his own community.  When woman were in short supply, he captured his bride-to-be from a neighboring village.  The future bridegroom, accompanied by a male companion, seized any young girl who had strayed from the safety of her parental home.  Our custom of a best man is a relic of that two-man, strong-armed tactic; for such an important task, only the best man would do.  From this practice of abduction, which literally swept a bride off her feet, also sprang the later symbolic act of carrying the bride over the threshold of her new home.  A best man around A.D. 200 carried more than a ring.  Since there remained the real threat of the bride's family's attempting to forcibly gain her return, the best man stayed by the groom's side throughout the marriage ceremony, alert and armed.  He also might serve as a sentry outside the newlyweds' home.  Of course, much of this is German folklore, but it is not without written documentation and physical artifacts.  For instance, the threat of recapture by the bride's family was perceived as so genuine that beneath the church altars of many early peoples (including the Huns, the Goths, the Visigoths, and the vandals) lay an arsenal of clubs, knives, and spears.  The tradition that the bride stand to the left of the groom was also more than meaningless etiquette.  Among the Northern European barbarians (so named by the Romans), a groom placed his captured bride on his left to protect her, freeing his right hand, the sword hand, against sudden attact.
Wedding Ring: 2800 B.C., Egypt

The origin and significance of the wedding ring is much disputed.  One school of thought maintains that the modern ring is symbolic of the fetters used by barbarians to tether a bride to her captor's home.  If that be true, today's double ring ceremonies fittingly express the newfound equality of the sexes.
The other school of thought focuses on the first actual bands exchanged in a marriage ceremony.  A finger ring was first used in the Third Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, around 2800 B.C.  To the Egyptians, a circle, having no beginning or end, signified eternity, for which marriage was binding.  Rings of gold were the most highly valued by wealthy Egyptians, and later Romans.  Among numerous two-thousand-year-old rings unearthed at the site of Pompeii is one of a unique design that would become popular throughout Europe centuries later, and in America during the Flower Child era of the '60s and '70s.  That extant gold marriage ring (of the type now called a friendship ring) has two carved hands clasped in a handshake.  There is evidence that young Roman men of moderate financial means often went for broke for their future brides.  Tertullian, a Christian priest writing in the second century A.D., observed that "most women know nothing of gold expect the single marriage ring placed on one finger".  In public, the average Roman housewife proudly wore her gold band, but at home, according to Tertullian, she "wore a ring of iron".  In earlier centuries, a ring's design often conveyed meaning.  Several extant Roman bands bear a miniatuare key welded to one side.  Not that the key sentimentally suggested a bride had unlocked her husband's heart.  Rather, in accordance with Roman law, it symbolized a central tenet of the marriage contract: that a wife was entitled to half her husband's wealth, and that she could, at will, help herself to a bag of grain, a roll of linen, or whatever rested in his storehouse.  Two millennia would drag on before that civil attitude would reemerge.
Wedding Cake: 1st Century B.C., Rome

The Wedding cake was not always eaten by the bride; it was originally thrown at her.  It developed as one of many fertility symbols integral to the marriage ceremony.  For until modern ties, children were expected to follow marriage as faithfully as night follows day; and almost as frequently.  Wheat, long a symbol of fertility and prosperity, was one of the earliest grains to ceremoniously shower new brides; and unmarried young women were expected to scramble for the grains to ensure their own betrothals, as they do today for the bridal bouquet.  Early Romans baker, whose confectionary skills were held in higher regard than the talents of the city's greatest builders, altered the practice.  Around 100 B.C., they began baking the wedding wheat into small, sweet cakes (to be eaten, not thrown).  Wedding guests, however, loath to abandon the fun of pelting the bride with wheat confetti, often tossed the cakes.  And as a further symbol of fertility, the couple was required to eat a portion of the crumbs, a custom known as confarreatio, or "eating together".  After exhausting the supply of cakes, guests were presented with handfuls of confetto (sweet meats), a confetti-like mixture of nuts, dried fruits, and honeyed almonds, sort of an ancient trail mix.  The practice of eating crumbs of small wedding cakes spread throughout Western Europe.  In England, the crumbs were washed down with a special ale.  The brew itself was referred to as bryd ealu or "bride's ale", which evolved into the word "bridal".  The wedding cake rite, in which tossed food symbolized an abundance of offspring, changed during lean times in the early Middle Ages.  Raw wheat or rice once again showered a bride.  The once-decorative cakes became simple biscuits of scones to be eaten.  And guests were encouraged to bake their own biscuits and bring them to the ceremony.  Leftovers were distributed among the poor. Ironically, it was these austere practices that with time, ingenuity, and French contempt for all things British led to the most opulent of wedding adornments: the multitiered cake.
The legend is this: Throughout the British Isles, it had become customary to pile the contributed scones, biscuits, and other baked goods atop one another into an enormous heap.  The higher the better, for height augured prosperity for the couple, who exchanged kisses over the mound.  In the 1660s, during the reign of King Charles II, a French chef (whose name, unfortunately, is lost to history) was visiting London and observed the cake piling ceremony.  Appalled at the haphazard manner in which the British stacked baked goods, often to have them tumble, he conceived the idea of transforming the mountain of bland biscuits into an iced, multitiered cake sensation.  British papers of the day are supposed to have deplored the French excess, but before the close of the century, British bakers were offering the very same magnificent creations.
(Source: Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things by Charles Panati)
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