In the “Compleat Vintner,” 1720, it is asked:
“What priest can join two lovers’ hands,
But wine must seal the marriage bands?
As if celestial wine was thought
Essential to the sacred knot,
And that each bridegroom and his bride
Believ’d they were not firmly ty’d
Till Bacchus, with his bleeding tun,
Had finished what the priest begun.”
Old plays contain allusions to this custom. We read in Dekker’s “Satiro-Mastix”: “And, when we are at church, bring the wine and cakes.” Beaumont and Fletcher, in the “Scornful Lady,” say:
“If my wedding-smock were on,
Were the gloves bought and given, the licence come,
Were the rosemary branches dipt, and all
The hippocras and cakes eat and drunk off.”
At the magnificent marriage of Queen Mary and Philip, in Winchester Cathedral, in 1554, we are told that, “The trumpets sounded, and they both returned, hand in hand, to their traverses in the quire, and there remained until mass was done, at which time wyne and sopes were hallowed, and delivered to them both.”
Numerous other notes similar to the foregoing might be reproduced from old writers, but sufficient have been cited to show how general was the custom in bygone times. The Rev. W. Carr, in his “Glossary of the Craven Dialect,” gives us an illustration of it lingering in another form in the present century. In his definition of Bride-ale, he observes that after the ceremony was concluded at the church, there took place either a foot or horse race, the first to arrive at the dwelling of the bride, “requested to be shown to the chamber of the newly-married pair, then, after he had turned down the bed-clothes, he returns, carrying in his hand a tankard of warm ale, previously prepared, to meet the bride, to whom he triumphantly offers the humble beverage.” The bride, in return for this, presents to him a ribbon as his reward.
