Page "Jumping the broom" Paragraph 10

Research by the legal historian Professor R. Probert of Warwick University has since shown that the actual history of the broomstick wedding, at least in the United Kingdom, has a much shorter history than has been claimed.

The earliest references to ‘ broomstick ’ marriages in England did not refer to a practice of jumping over a stick, but rather to any kind of sham or dubious ceremony.

The earliest use of the phrase is a quote from the Westminster Magazine of 1774: " He had no inclination for a Broomstick-marriage ", the person in question simply stating that he did not want to go through a ceremony that had no legal validity, it having been suggested to him that he would pretend to be marrying by having a French sexton read the marriage service to him and his young bride.

A satirical song published in The Times newspaper of 1789 referring to the rumoured clandestine marriage between Prince Regent and Mrs. Fitzherbert also reflects this symbolic usage of the broomstick imagery: “ Their way to consummation was by hopping o ’ er a broom, sir ”, and there are plentiful other examples of ‘ broomstick ’ being using in other contemporary contexts but all with a similar implication of dubiousness or fakery.

This meaning survived into the early nineteenth century: during a case heard in London in 1824 regarding the legal validity of a marriage ceremony consisting of nothing more than the groom placing a ring on the bride's finger before witnesses, a court official commented that the ceremony " amounted to nothing more than a broomstick marriage, which the parties had it in their power to dissolve at will.

" A decade later, the 1836 Marriage Act, which introduced civil marriage, was contemptuously referred to as the ‘ Broomstick Marriage Act ’ by those who felt that a marriage outside the Anglican church did not deserve legal recognition.

Some also began to use the phrase to refer to non-marital unions: a man interviewed in Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor admitted: " I never had a wife, but I have had two or three broomstick matches, though they never turned out happy.

" By the 1850s, though, this meaning of ‘ broomstick ’ had fallen out of currency and references to ‘ broomstick marriages ’ began to be interpreted literally, as though they had involved a couple actually jumping over a stick.

Folklorists such as Gwenith Gwynn, interviewing people in the early twentieth century, were unwittingly discovering folk memories of a Victorian misunderstanding rather than an actual, earlier folk practice.