Dance The Gretna Green Jig 2683

Gretna Green is a village on the Scottish-English border, near the west coast. If you follow the old coaching route from London to Edinburgh (or Glasgow) – today the A74(M) –, then Gretna Green is the first place in Scotland that you will reach. It is legendary, for the most part, as the destination of eloping couples from England whose parents objected to the relationship – because it was well-known that in Gretna Green one could get married, at very short notice, by the village blacksmith (!).

To explain this we need to cast our net a little more widely. The English Clandestine Marriages Act 1753 prohibited couples of less than 21 years of age to marry without their parents’ consent; if the unthinkable happened the parents were entitled to a veto. In addition, only those marriages were considered legitimate which had occurred either in an Anglican church or abroad (including Scotland with its separate legal system). This law effectively put a stop to weddings conducted by Anglican clergy but outside a church, and/or without prior “banns” (an announcement that a wedding was imminent, together with an invitation for people to object if they knew of issues that would prevent the union, such as bigamy) or a marriage license, which for under-21s would have required parental consent. (The Act did not pertain to Quakers and Jews and indeed the Royal Family. Strangely, none of the laws regulating marriage in England do apply to the royals, which in 2005 caused serious doubts about whether Prince Charles could marry his adored Camilla in a civil – as opposed to Anglican-church – wedding, in the absence of a statutory basis.) In Scotland, on the other hand, it was legal for boys of age 14 and above, and girls of age 12 and above, to marry even without parental consent. In addition, as per Scottish law, a declaration by the couple before witnesses was sufficient to unite them in matrimony.

Thus, an impromptu trip to Scotland was an obvious solution for underage lovers or indeed those who wanted to eschew publicity or were in an extreme hurry. Various settlements near the border were eligible destinations, and Gretna Green rose to its notoriety only after a toll road had been built through the village in the 1770s.

But why the blacksmith? The law only stipulated that the declaration of marriage had to happen in front of “two witnesses” who had to be Scottish citizens. This was virtually guaranteed to apply to a master blacksmith with their own forge, and a blacksmith’s forge, including the blacksmith, was also straightforward to identify for lovers under pressure of time (or pursuing parents). The law was changed in 1856 to require that the bridal couple had to have resided in Scotland for 21 days, and in 1929 the age limit was raised to 16 (for people of any gender), even though parental consent was still not required. 1940 eventually put a stop to weddings in front of nearly-arbitrary witnesses like the Gretna Green blacksmith and his wife. (The Gretna Green smithy had stopped processing metal decades earlier already and was used exclusively for “anvil weddings”.) In 1977, the 21-day residence requirement was repealed. Finally 2006 spelled the end, in Scotland, for “irregular marriages by cohabitation with habit and repute” – until then you could get effectively legally married simply by living together for some time and passing yourself off as Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so (as far as your neighbours and other parties were concerned) even without going to the inconvenience and expense of obtaining a marriage certificate. (Since this was equivalent to a “proper” marriage, one important precondition to being able to make it stick was not being married to somebody else already.) Sadly, no more.

Incidentally, civil weddings were introduced in England and Wales by the Marriage Act 1836, which allowed Roman Catholics (or for that matter any Christians who were not Anglican), Muslims, Hindus, atheists, etc. to enter into legal marriages without having to undergo an Anglican wedding ceremony in a church. At first this was not universally considered a good idea (mostly not by Anglicans). Scotland only followed suit in 1940, with the same law that abolished marriage “by declaration”; from then on even in Gretna Green you would no longer have to look for the blacksmith’s forge but the registrar’s office.

Even so Gretna Green remains a popular place to get hitched – even though the necessity has mostly gone away, the romantic implications do persist.