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In the courting capers of high society, the Elizabethan merchant classes saw only a silly hankering for dead days of chivalry. As an ideal, chivalry was as outdated as that of celibacy. Out of the wreckage of the Middle Ages the institution of marriage had survived, and to the puritanical merchants it seemed a satisfying state. They were not so narrow as to seek to proscribe romantic love as a foundation for wedlock; but it had to be a cleaned-up version, expressing itself within the restraint of religion. Other kinds of romantic love were a public nuisance. The new bourgeoisie had no inclination, no time and perhaps no talent for prolonged and complex amours. Adultery, apart from being a sin, required more leisure than they could spare and brought too many complications in its wake. There were more important things to think about: the riches of East and West beckoned. Frederick Engels was not far from the truth when he said that for the bourgeoisie the sixteenth century was the tune of knight errantry. 'They too had their romance and their raptures of love, but on a bourgeois footing and in the last analysis with bourgeois aims'.
Meanwhile the humbler ranks continued to choose their own partners freely and, once having plighted their troth, to foretaste the privileges of the marriage bed. William Shakespeare's first child by Ann Hathaway was born six months after his marriage, a union into which he was probably rushed by Ann's family. Determined moralists can find evidence enough in Shakespeare's works to convince them that he disapproved of his own behaviour. There is, for instance, Prospero's warning to his daughter's suitor, in her presence, in The Tempest:
If thou dost break her virgin knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister'd,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.
In Twelfth Night is the priest's description of the ideal betrothal, suitably sanctified:
A contract of eternal bond of love,
Confirmed by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,
Strengthened by interchangement of your rings;
And all the ceremony of this compact
Sealed in my functions by my testimony.
Few troth plights, it would seem, lived up to this noble specification, and probably not Shakespeare's. Parents of both parties might or might not be present at the pledging ceremony; priests rarely were.
The betrothal ring often took the form of a gimmel ring. In its commonest form, this was a hoop which separated into two circlets, one for each contracting party. After marriage the two components would be reassembled to form the bride's wedding ring. Some gimmel rings split into three or four, the additional rings being worn by witnesses of the betrothal. Many of these compound rings were elaborately carved, and were often held together by a clasped hands device. . From time to time through the sixteenth century there were ecclesiastical blasts against those 'private and secret contracts' which were designed, in the Church's view, to permit the parties to indulge in 'unclean behaviour'. The ancient (possibly Danish) practice of hand-fasting, or hand-in-fist betrothal, which seems to have been a form of trial marriage, caused much priestly head-shaking. The Scottish version of hand-fasting is described in Sir Walter Scott's The Monastery:
We Border men are more wary than your inland clowns of Fife and Lothian-no jump in the dark for us-no clenching the fetters around our wrists until we know how they will wear upon us-we take our wives, like our horses, upon trial. When we are hand-fasted, as we term it, we are man and wife for a year and a day-that space gone by each may choose another mate, or at their pleasure may call the priest to marry them for life-and this we call hand-fasting.
The Church called it something else. There is an unconvincing theory that the practice originated in rural districts because of the scarcity of priests. If a child was born during the period of hand-fasting there could be no retreat from marriage.
The author of The Christian State of Matrimony quoted in Brand's Popular Antiquities says of hand-fasting: 'Into this dish hath the Devil put his foot'. In some places 'it is the custom, well worthy to be rebuked, that at the Hand-fasting there is made a great and superfluous banquet, and even the same night are the two hand-fasted persons brought and layed together- yea, certain weeks afore they go to Church'.
An aide memoire issued to priests during Elizabeth's reign contained this question:
'Whether they have exhorted young folk to abstain from privy contracts, and not to marry without the consent of such their parents and friends as have authority over them; or no,'
The Church still had the power to punish incontinent lovers, as the next chapter will show.
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