The Marriage Act 1836, which introduced civil marriage, was contemptuously called the "Broomstick Marriage Act" by those who felt that a marriage outside the Anglican church did not deserve legal recognition. This meaning survived into the early 19th century during an 1824 case in London about the legal validity of a marriage ceremony consisting of the groom placing a ring on the bride's finger before witnesses, a court official said that the ceremony "amounted to nothing more than a broomstick marriage, which the parties had it in their power to dissolve at will." Later examples of the term broomstick marriage were used in Britain, with the similar implication that the ceremony did not create a legally-binding union. If British practitioners never used a physical leap, Parry wonders how European-Americans and enslaved African Americans in the American South and rural North America learned about the custom. He describes correlations between the ceremonies of enslaved African Americans and those of the rural British, saying that it is not coincidental that two groups separated by an ocean used similar matrimonial forms revolving around a broomstick. In his book, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, Parry writes that African Americans and British Americans had a number of cultural exchanges during the 18th and 19th centuries. Parry, however, contests the claim that no part of the British custom involved jumping. Probert says that the word broomstick was used in the mid-18th century in several contexts to mean "something ersatz, or lacking the authority its true equivalent might possess" because the expression broomstick marriage (a sham marriage) was in circulation, folk etymology led to a belief that people once signified an irregular marriage by jumping over a broom. ĭespite these allusions, research by legal historian Rebecca Probert of Warwick University has failed to find evidence of an actual contemporary practice of jumping over a broomstick as a sign of informal union. In 1789, the rumoured clandestine marriage between the Prince Regent and Maria Fitzherbert is cited in a satirical song in The Times: "Their way to consummation was by hopping o'er a broom, sir". A man brought his underage fiancée to France and discovered that it was as difficult to arrange a legal marriage there as in England, but declined a suggestion that a French sexton might simply read the marriage service before the couple because "He had no inclination for a Broomstick-marriage". Ī 1774 use in the Westminster Magazine also describes an elopement. The French text, describing an elopement, refers to the runaway couple hastily embarking on " un mariage sur la croix de l'épée" (literally "marriage on the cross of the sword") this was freely translated as "performed the marriage ceremony by leaping over a broomstick". The earliest use of the phrase is in the 1764 English edition of a French work. References to "broomstick marriages" emerged in England during the mid-to-late 18th century to describe a wedding ceremony of doubtful validity. The expression may also derive from the custom of jumping over a besom ("broom" refers to the plant from which the household implement is made) associated with the Romanichal Travellers of the United Kingdom, especially those in Wales. Possibly based on an 18th-century idiomatic synonym for a sham marriage (a marriage of doubtful validity), it was popularized with the introduction of civil marriage in Britain by the Marriage Act 1836. The custom is also attested in Irish weddings. It is most widespread among African Americans and Black Canadians, popularized during the 1970s by the novel and miniseries Roots, and originated in mid-19th-century antebellum slavery in the United States. Jumping the broom (or jumping the besom) is a phrase and custom relating to a wedding ceremony in which the couple jumps over a broom. "Marrying over the Broomstick", 1822 illustration of a "broomstick-wedding" by James Catnach
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