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A publicationMarriage, as it is lived and recorded

Equality in Marriage

The whole register

All 22 entries, in the order they sit in their sections. This is the complete list; the front page is a selection from it.

Section 1 — Ceremony
Entry	Title	What it is
1.1	Read aloud three times	Banns: the intention read publicly on three separate occasions so that anyone with an objection had a chance to make it. A public-notice system that predates any central registry, and the reason so many marriages happened in one particular season.
1.2	At the door, then inside	For centuries the binding part happened in the porch and the blessing followed indoors. The split tells you which part was legal and which was religious.
1.3	Who could perform it	Priest, magistrate, ship's master, nobody at all — entitlement varied enormously and changed the paperwork completely.
1.4	The witnesses	Two people whose only job was to have been present, and whose names outlast them.

Section 2 — Register
Entry	Title	What it is
2.1	In the same column	Printed registers fix what gets recorded. Once a form has a column for occupation, occupation is recorded for everyone — and once it has none, that fact vanishes.
2.2	Crosses instead of names	A mark rather than a signature, witnessed by somebody who could write. What the pattern of marks across a parish actually measures, and what it does not.
2.3	The duplicate copy	Two copies kept in different buildings, for the obvious reason.
2.4	Occupation, father, parish	The three details a register almost always wanted, and what each was checking.

Section 3 — Tokens
Entry	Title	What it is
3.1	A band with no beginning	A plain circle chosen because it has no start and no end — a reading applied to the object long after people had been using rings for entirely practical reasons.
3.2	That particular finger	The vein-to-the-heart explanation is anatomically wrong and very old. Which is the interesting part.
3.3	Broken and halved	Tokens deliberately split in two so the halves had to be brought back together.
3.4	Paper, then wood, then tin	The anniversary materials are a commercial list of surprisingly recent invention.

Section 4 — Brought In
Entry	Title	What it is
4.1	What the chest held	A dowry chest was an inventory as much as a container: linen counted, listed and sometimes valued, because it might have to be returned.
4.2	The inventory, and who held it	Whether property brought in stayed the bringer's or passed to the household differed by jurisdiction and decided a great deal about what happened later.
4.3	Linen counted by the dozen	Household textiles as the main storable wealth of an ordinary house.

Section 5 — Names
Entry	Title	What it is
5.1	Who changed, and who did not	Name change on marriage is a custom, not a universal, and several European traditions never adopted it at all.
5.2	The two surnames	Systems that carry a name from each parent, and what that does to a family record.
5.3	Tracing a woman through the records	Why the record thins at exactly the point the name changes.

Section 6 — Daily Round
Entry	Title	What it is
6.1	Who kept the accounts	Household accounting was frequently the wife's work regardless of who owned the property, and the surviving books are some of the best evidence of how houses ran.
6.2	Two of everything	Setting up a household from two half-households, and what gets thrown out.
6.3	The separate bedroom	Sleeping arrangements have swung back and forth for practical reasons rather than romantic ones.
6.4	The mantelpiece	The shelf where a shared life accumulates in objects nobody chose together.