To lose your apron or your garter shows that your lover is thinking of you. Three candles burning at the same time is the sign of a wedding; and the girl who is nearest to the door, the cupboard, and the shortest candle, will be married first. When two people accidentally say the same thing at the same time the one who finishes first will be married first. There are a great number of omens similar to these last, equally stupid, and not worthy of notice.
“Friday is a cross day for marriage,” and “If you marry in Lent you’ll live to repent.” Should you in marrying
“Change the name, and not the letter,
You’ll change for the worse, and not for the better.”
but it is lucky if your initials form a word.
“The young men of a place, when they know that a person is paying attention to a girl or woman, seize hold of him, place him in a wheelbarrow, in which they wheel him up and down until they are tired, when they upset him on the nearest pile or in a pond. This is called riding in the ‘one-wheel coach;’ and to say that a man has ridden in the ‘one-wheel coach’ is tantamount to the expression that he has ‘gone-a-courting.’ ”—Rev. S. Rundle, Transactions Penzance Natural History Society, etc., 1885–1886.
When a younger sister marries first the elder is said to dance in the “bruss” (short twigs of heath or furze), from an old custom of dancing without shoes on the furze prickles which get detached from the stalk. Only old maids can rear a myrtle, and they will not blossom when trained against houses where there are none. It is considered extremely unlucky here to break or lose your wedding-ring, also for a wedding-cake to crack after baking. A lady told me of one made for a couple she knew, which fell to pieces when taken out of the oven. Before the wedding-day came the bride had sickened of some disorder, was dead, and buried. A hole in a loaf, too, foretells a separation in a family; and to turn one upside down on a table wrecks a vessel. “If a hare cross the path of a wedding party, the bride or bridegroom will die within seven years.”—Rev. S. Rundle, Cornubiana.
“A young woman who has been three times a bridesmaid will never be a bride.” “It was an old custom, religiously observed until lately in Zennor and adjacent parishes on the north coast of Cornwall, to waylay a married couple on their wedding night and flog them to bed with cords, sheep-spans, or anything handy for the purpose, believing that this rough treatment would ensure them happiness and the ‘heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord,’ of a numerous family. At more modish weddings the guests merely entered the bridal chamber, and threw stockings in which stones or something to make weight were placed, at the bride and bridegroom in bed. The first one hit of the happy pair betokened the sex of their first-born.”—Bottrell.
Should there be a great discrepancy between the ages of the bride and bridegroom, or the marriage of a couple in any way be a matter of notoriety, they are in West Cornwall on their wedding night often treated to a “shallal,” a serenade on tin-kettles, pans, marrow-bones, &c. Any great noise in this part of the county is described as being “a reg’lar shallal.” In olden times (in fact the custom is not quite discontinued at the present day, for I heard a whisper of one having taken place in a small fishing-village two years ago) married people accused of immorality were in Cornwall punished by a “riding.” I will give the description of one by Mr. T. Q. Couch.
“A cart was got, donkeys were harnessed in, and a pair personating the guilty or suspected were driven through the streets, attended by a train of men and boys. At Polperro (East Cornwall) the attendants acted as trumpeters; the bullocks’ horns used by the fishermen at sea for fog or night signals were always available for the purpose. The mummers were very cautious, by careful disguise in dress or voice, and avoiding of anything directly libellous in their rather ribald dialogue, to keep themselves out of the clutches of the law. I remember one riding when an old rusty cannon of the smuggling period was waked up from its long quiet for service for the occasion, and bursting, led to the mutilation of several and the death of one.” On the borders of Devon and in that county this ceremony was known as a “mock-hunt.”