The Real History Show:
A Victorian wedding
It
was May Day when presenter Bernard Hill and the Real History Show
team arrived at Slaidburn in Lancashire to meet Grace Stephenson and Francis
Howard. The couple were getting married on 5 June and had their hearts
set on a Victorian wedding. With just five weeks to arrange it, the team
swung into action with the combined help of experts on the period and
the couple's friends and family.
Wedding fashion
The date set was 1840, before the dead hand of Victorian respectability
laid its chilly grasp on English festivities. The young queen herself
was married that year, and her choice of a white dress set the pattern
for future wedding fashions. Up to that time, however, any colour was
up for consideration.
Grace and her mother visited the English Costume Gallery at Platt Hall Museum in Manchester to consult costume historian Mark Wallis and his wife Stephanie, who would make the wedding dress. Grace chose a yellow silk jacquard, and Stephanie set to work with urgency.
A barn and a church
Grace's parents have a sheep and dairy farm, and Chris Brooks, a specialist
on Victorian England, inspected their barn for authenticity as a place
to hold the wedding feast. He dated the roof carpentry as 18th century,
so the barn would have been standing in 1840. And in early June of that
year, with the cattle out in the fields and the hay not yet gathered in,
it would have been empty and available for festive use.
The parish church, despite its more modern additions, remains largely as it was in 1840. Vicar Mark Russell-Smith was game to hold a Victorian wedding, even one in which the congregation would be more rumbustious than is the norm today.
Hardly any parish churches had organs in 1840, using choirs and bands instead. The team went to Lancaster to meet Paul Guppy, an instrument-maker who has a collection of early 19th-century music from Slaidburn and even runs a choir that sings it. Grace took along a clarinet that had belonged to her great-great-grandfather. Paul guessed that it had been made in about 1820 – so, with a bit of mending, it could be included in the instruments at the wedding.
Rural traditions
Every area had its own traditions as to how the guests behaved at
weddings. Chris Brooks and fellow historian Shani D'Cruze had looked for
some information on Slaidburn customs of the 19th century. They had managed
to find some documents written by Richard Blakeborough, a Yorkshire folklore
specialist and historian.
At the beginning of the 20th century, he had interviewed elderly people about the customs of their youth in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Until recent county boundary changes, Slaidburn was in the West Riding of Yorkshire, so it seemed that Blakeborough's accounts would be accurate enough to be adopted for Grace and Francis's wedding.
The 1840s were the last period in which the old rural traditions were followed. After that, unemployment began to sap the villages and snobbery banished their customs as vulgar. However, the percentage of brides who were pregnant increased between the 1840s and 1870s, rising from 33% to 60%. It was considered no disgrace for a rural bride to go to the altar with a swelling waistline, and in some areas, all brides were pregnant.
Grace, however, was giving that one a miss, and she also decided to go for a bit of inauthenticity as regards underwear. Knickers were a middle-class Victorian invention, and a farmer's daughter of 1840 would have worn only knee-length stockings and a long skirt as her lower garments.
A Thomas Hardy wedding
Grace's godparents pitched in, with Roger supplying sheep of the Lonk
breed, dating back to 1740, and Joan producing antique butter-making equipment,
with which 1.5 kilograms (3lb) of butter was produced. Chef Andy Roberts
arrived with a copy of The Experienced English Housekeeper by Elizabeth
Raffald, a cookery book written in 1769 and popular for generations, which
had a recipe for wedding cake for the cooks to follow. Meanwhile, the
whole village was fitted with costumes and coached for their roles as
early 19th-century wedding guests.
After a long period of rain, the wedding day turned out fine. As everyone trooped off to church, the scene looked like one from a Thomas Hardy novel. This was just what Grace had wanted, for it was his books that had inspired her desire for a joyously festive wedding like one from early Victorian times.
