Note 901 — Chapter VI · OLD ENGLISH WIFE-PURCHASE YIELDS TO FREE MARRIAGE

"So long as marriage was a strictly civil [lay] ceremony, as well as a purely civil engagement, the bride's father or guardian performed the rite. It was he who took her by the neck and shoulders, and gave her to the bridegroom. He gave the symbolic shoe. In the Danish matrimonial rite of a subsequent period the father's part was even more impressive. In language, never in later times permitted to our English clergy, he declared himself the actual maker of the marriage, when, on hand-fasting the bride and groom, he said to the latter, 'I join this woman to you in honour to be your wife, with a right to half of your bed and keys, and to a third of your goods acquired or to be acquired, according to the law of the land and St. Eric. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.'"—Jeaffreson, Brides and Bridals, I, 53. Cf. on the Danish "hand-fasting" Brand, Popular Antiquities, II, 87, 88; Bullinger, Christen State of Matrimonye, 43.