[60] Blount’s “Jocular Tenures,” 1679.
[61] “History of the Coronation of George IV.” R. Huish.
[62] Published Nineteenth Century, June 1902.
As I have seen upon a bridal day,
Full many maids clad in their best array,
In honour of the bride come with their flaskets
Fill’d full with flowers: others, in wicker-baskets
Bring from the marish, rushes to o’erspread
The ground whereon to church the lovers tread.
Br. Pastorals, book i.
Drayton, too, alludes to this practice in the “Polyolbion.”
Some others were again as seriously employ’d
In strewing of those herbs, at bridals us’d that be
Which everywhere they throw with bounteous hands and free.
The healthful balm and mint from their full laps do fly.
Song xv.
And gives a long list of wedding flowers, of which Meadow-sweet (sometimes called bridewort) is one. Gilded Rosemary, or sprigs of Rosemary dipped in sweet waters were used, and Brand gives an account of a wedding where the bride was “led to church between two sweet boys with bride-laces and rosemary tied to their silken sleeves.”[63] Nosegays, too, were gathered for weddings, and Brand quotes a remarkable and cynical passage from “The Plaine Country Bridegroom,” by Stephens: “He shews neere affinitie betwixt marriage and hanging, and to that purpose he provides a great nosegay and shakes hands with everyone he meets, as if he were preparing for a condemned man’s voyage.” Herrick’s lines beginning, “Strip her of spring-time, tender, whimpering maids,” are too well known to repeat, but they tell very prettily which flowers were appropriated to the married and which to the unmarried. Dyer tells us that this custom of strewing them is still kept up in Cheshire, with occasional sad results. Often, the flowers that were strewn were emblematical, and if the bride chanced to be unpopular, she stepped her way to church over flowers whose meanings were the reverse of complimentary!
[63] Popular Antiquities.