LOVERS IN REVOLT

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 376, 10 November 1932, Page 7

LOVERS IN REVOLT

ANTIQUATED LAW CON SUMM ATION OF MARRIAGE FORBIDDEN AFTER 3 P.M. ' IN ENGLAND. 3 CUSTOM OF MIDDLE AGES. Hundreds of young coupies who have lately been making wedding arrangements in Britain have been complaining of the marriage law there which forbids the p'erformance of ceremonies after 3 o'clock in the afternoon — a law! that does not obtain in New Zealand. The young people have been asking: "Why should it he necessary to be ; married hefore 3 o'clock in the afternoon? Why," they say, " "cannot the ceremony he fixed later, so that we can celebrate it with a dinner party?" A strong feeling is growing among young men and wom 211 to-day that : the marriage laws deslgned for the Middle Ages should he amended and made more in harmony with modern habits. Most of their elders have a vague idea that the restriction of mar- . riage to 3 p.m. has some important social or religious idea. This is the origin of it, quoted from medieval canon law: — "The church' orders that marriages ; shall not be made exeept in -the daytime, for those who intend honourably and honestly need not fly the light, and since parties are most serious in the morning it is appointed that it (ths marriage ceremony) shall he celehrated between the hours of 8 and 12." In 1868 the Royal Commission on the Marriage Laws recommend'sd that so far as the State was concerned the restrictions on the hours of marriage 1 should be discontinued. In 1886 the j question was raised once again in the House of Commons. Until that dats the latest possible nuptial hour was noon, and origin ally the Bill extended the hour until 4 p.m. On the grounds that jt) is dark in England in the winter by 4 o'clock and that it would he better to limit the rule so as not to allow marriages to he solemnised after dark, 3 o'clock was the hour ifixed. A legal expert has explained that the original rule was probably due to the idea that as evening approached there would he "a tendency to turn a religious ceremony into a festivity. Only another Act of Parliament could win an extension of the marriage hour.