Walker dress kilt

http://www.scotweb.co.uk/sr_swhdr_budget8ydkilt

Handfasting Defined

So what is a handfasting?

The answer is actually quite complex. Here’s a good starting point:

Handfasting is an ancient Celtic custom, especially common in Ireland and Scotland, in which a man and woman came together at the start of their marriage relationship.

Their hands, or more accurately, their wrists, were literally tied together. This practice gave way to the expression “tying the knot” which has come to mean getting married or engaged.

The handfasting ritual recognized just one of many forms of marriages permitted under the ancient Irish (Brehon) law.

The man and woman who came together for the handfasting agreed to stay together for a specific period of time, usually a year-and-a-day. At the end of the year the couple faced a choice. They could enter into a longer-term “permanent” marriage contract, renew their agreement for another year, or go their separate ways.

The custom hails from the pre-Christian era but continued after Christianity was well established because it was not ordinary for either the Church or government to play a role in witnessing marriages during this period. (Even though Marriage was one of the seven sacraments, it wasn’t until the Council of Trent, which began in 1537, that the Church required that the Church witness marriages. Government registration of marriages in Ireland only began in the middle of the 19th century.)

From http://www.handfasting.info/histirish.html

In order to understand historical handfasting, one must first understand marriage. Marriage in late medieval Scotland, like marriage just about everywhere else in late medieval Western Christendom (that is, anywhere they looked to the Bishop of Rome as head of the Christian church), could be formed two ways:

1. Exchanging consents in the present tense (I take you to be my husband, etc.)
2. Exchanging consents in the future tense (I will take you to be my husband, etc.) followed at any time (days, years) by sexual intercourse on the strength of that promise. The logic here was that after a future promise, sex was considered to amount to present tense consent, and present tense consent made marriage.

Note that for either method of late medieval marriage, for the marriage to be valid it did not matter if there were any witnesses or not.

Witnesses only made it easier to prove.

It did not matter if a priest was present or not.

It did not matter if the marriage was blessed, or a mass followed, or not.

It did not matter if banns had been posted in advance or not.

It did not even matter if the marriage was consummated or not.

A couple who exchanged consents in the present tense in the back woods with only squirrels for witnesses, against the wishes of their parents, and never had sexual intercourse was just as legally and bindingly married by the law of both church and state as a couple married by the Pope himself with the proud parents looking on and a child nine months later.

So why, then, isn’t handfasting still practiced on a large scale? It seems like a perfectly rational idea. Leave it to radical religions to ruin something so beautiful as marriage -

Then, in the early 16th century, came the Reformation, and some Protestant countries changed their marriage laws, requiring a priest or minister and the proper form for valid marriage, while some did not. Divorce gets thrown in here, too. And sometimes you had a divergence — with civil law and (Protestant) church law in some regions having different rules for what made a valid marriage.

Then, in 1563, came the Council of Trent, which changed Roman Catholic canon law to require a priest and the proper form for a valid marriage. In Catholic countries, a simple exchange of present tense consents and an exchange of future consents followed by sexual intercourse were no longer valid ways to get married.

But because the Scottish Reformation had happened before Trent (1560) yet the Scots didn’t get around to reforming marriage laws until after Trent, in 1567, the Trent reforms did not affect Scotland and the Scottish Protestants did not copy the Catholic Trent reforms for their new Protestant state. So both Scottish civil law and the Protestant Kirk kept essentially the same laws regarding what makes marriage as before the Reformation — consent in present tense or consent in future tense followed any time later by sexual intercourse— the only changes being to permit divorce & remarriage and to reduce the forbidden degrees of consanguity.

Though the civil law remained essentially the same, the cultural customs surrounding marriage did change over the nearly four centuries between the Scottish Reformation and 1940. Of relevance to the issue of handfasting, in regularly formed marriages formal betrothal ceremonies (handfastings) faded away; it would appear that by the late 17th century, they were no longer practiced, or at the very least hand changed in nature and terminlogy such that they were no longer called “handfasting”

From http://medievalscotland.org/history/handfasting.shtml

Essentially, handfasting has been suppressed by the church’s constant intrusion into normally private matters. By requiring witnesses, priests, blessings and legal contracts, the sacred oath between two souls has become nothing but a stiff formality.

Caspers

http://www.ocparks.com/caspers/