Mary Caroline Crawford On Marriage In 17th-Century New England

Mary Caroline Crawford, Social Life in Old New England

(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company; 1915), pp. 201, 202.

ʻPublishing the [marriage] banns three times in the meeting-house, at either town meeting, weekly lecture, or Sunday service, was a custom enforced throughout New England, except in New Hampshire, for nearly two centuries.

The names of the contracting parties were not only read out by the town clerk, the deacon, or the minister, but a notice of the same was placed on the church door, or on a “publishing post.”

Yet the minister, so powerful in many ways, could not, in the early days, perform the marriage ceremony.

That had to be done, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, by a magistrate.

ʻNo rings were used, it is interesting to know, for these magistrate-made marriages of early days. . . .

[One] writer has characterized rings, when used for weddings, as “a Diabollical Circle for the Divell to daunce in.”

With or without a ring, it was only a self-protective measure for a young man to marry as soon as he could.

The State, which had a hand in most things, surrounded the bachelor with a system of espionage which must have been anything but comfortable. Young unmarried men were not allowed to keep house together and were made, as boarders in the homes of others, to feel that they were but poor and unproductive things uselessly cumbering the earth.ʼ

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