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A perusal of the statute book might suggest that there was little change to weddings law during the 1920s and 1930s. There were, however, numerous Church of England Measures that altered the rules governing its weddings and caused them to diverge from those applicable to the newly disestablished Church in Wales. And there were even more orders validating marriages that had not taken place in accordance with the law, illustrating how often mistakes were made. There were also changes in how couples married, with the balance between Anglican and civil weddings shifting in the light of the church’s growing reluctance to conduct the remarriages of the divorced and the changing implications of marrying in a register office. While the Marriage Act 1949 finally brought all of the laws regulating marriage and weddings together into a single statute, it did very little by way of recasting the terms in which the law was stated, even less by way of removing anomalies, and absolutely nothing by way of reconsidering the way in which different types of marriages were regulated in different ways. All it achieved was to consolidate the complexity of the existing law.
The Marriage Act 1836 established the foundations of modern marriage law, allowing couples to marry in register offices and non-Anglican places of worship for the first time. Rebecca Probert draws on an exceptionally wide range of primary sources to provide the first detailed examination of marriage legislation, social practice, and their mutual interplay, from 1836 through to the unanticipated demands of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. She analyses how and why the law has evolved, closely interrogating the parliamentary and societal debates behind legislation. She demonstrates how people have chosen to marry and how those choices have changed, and evaluates how far the law has been help or hindrance in enabling couples to marry in ways that reflect their beliefs, be they religious or secular. In an era of individual choice and multiculturalism, Tying the Knot sign posts possible ways in which future legislators might avoid the pitfalls of the past.
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