Banns of marriage

• 1. Introduction

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  Banns of marriage are a practice almost as old as the institutional church itself, yet most people today have never heard the word spoken aloud. Picture a Sunday morning in a medieval parish: before the prayers, before the sermon, a priest rises and reads two names to the congregation, announcing that these two people intend to wed. Anyone who knows of a reason they should not marry is to speak now. That single act, repeated on three consecutive holy days, is the banns. The word itself comes from a Middle English term meaning proclamation, with roots reaching back through Old French to Frankish. For centuries it was the primary mechanism by which Christian communities policed the validity of marriage. The questions this story raises are worth sitting with: why did the church feel the need to announce marriages publicly at all, and what happened when someone actually objected? How did a practice born in a thirteenth-century church council travel across the Atlantic to Plymouth Colony, and how did it quietly survive into the twenty-first century in the Canadian province of Ontario, where it was used to perform the first same-sex marriages in the province's history?

• 2. A Church Council's Answer

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  Canon 51 of the Fourth Lateran Council, decreed in 1215, first established the requirement for public announcement of marriages across the Catholic Church. Before that ruling, public announcements before weddings happened only in some regions; the Lateran decree made it universal. The underlying problem the church was trying to solve was clandestine marriage: unions contracted in secret, without witnesses or community knowledge, which could conceal fraud, bigamy, or forbidden family connections. Three centuries later, the Council of Trent sharpened the requirement on the 11th of November 1563. Under its decree, the names of the parties were to be announced by the parish priests of both individuals, at Mass, on three consecutive holy days before the wedding. The practical complications were immediate. If one partner was Catholic and the other was not, that non-Catholic party might have no home parish in the Roman Catholic Church at all, leaving the priest with no clear counterpart to perform the announcement on the other side. The 1983 Code of Canon Law eventually released this pressure by removing the universal requirement and handing the decision to individual national or regional bishops' conferences. Most Catholic countries kept the practice anyway, suggesting the community still found value in the public announcement even after it ceased to be mandatory.

• 3. How the Words Were Spoken

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  "I publish the banns of marriage between name of the Parish of... and name of this Parish." That sentence, once standard from Catholic pulpits, was the opening of a short but precise formula. The priest would name both parties, name their parishes, invite any objection, and close with the count: "This is the first, second, or third time of asking." The Church of England's Book of Common Prayer of 1662 preserved nearly identical language. Common Worship 2000 offered a simpler alternative, asking whether anyone knows "any reason in law" rather than any "cause or just impediment." For decades this created a quiet legal ambiguity: only the Prayer Book words were explicitly enshrined in the Marriage Act 1949, so using the Common Worship version was technically unresolved. On the 19th of December 2012, royal assent was given to the Church of England Marriage (Amendment) Measure, which resolved the question and gave both forms equal statutory standing. The 2012 measure also changed where in a service the banns had to be read: previously they had to appear at the morning service; afterward they had to be read at the principal service, though additional readings at other services on those same Sundays were permitted as an option. In the Church of Sweden, the announcement takes place during the Notices, which follow the recitation of the Nicene Creed. In 1656, the parish register of St Mary le Crypt in Gloucester recorded banns being published by the bellman, the town crier, in the street.

• 4. Fleet Prison and Gretna Green

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  England's Clandestine Marriages Act 1753, also cited by the statute reference 26 Geo. 2. c. 33, gave the banns the force of civil law for the first time. Before this act came into force in 1754, couples could be married clandestinely by any ordained clergyman willing to do the job. One favourite location was the Fleet Prison, a debtors' prison in London, where clergymen willing to perform irregular marriages could be found. After 1754, the only way to avoid the three-Sunday announcement was to obtain a bishop's licence or the special licence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. If a couple wanted neither, they had to leave England and Wales altogether. Scotland became the customary destination, particularly Gretna Green, the first village over the border from England. That destination grew less attractive after 1856, when Scottish law was amended to require twenty-one days of residence before a marriage. The Isle of Man offered a brief window as an alternative, but in 1757 Tynwald, the island's parliament, passed a similar Act. The Isle of Man's version added an additional penalty with particular bite: clergymen from overseas who married couples without banns faced pillory and ear-cropping. The 1753 Act also pushed Roman Catholics and nonconformists into a corner: because it applied to all marriages in England, they were legally required to marry in the Church of England. That requirement stood until the Marriage Act 1836 finally lifted it. These maneuvers and escapes fed directly into the melodramatic fiction of the period.

• 5. The Methodists and the Impediment Tradition

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  The Sunday Service of the Methodists, Methodism's first liturgical text, carried forward the core tradition: it included the opening rubric of the Prayer Book rite, the clause that allowed impediments like consanguinity and prior legal betrothal to be disclosed before a wedding. Methodist banns were to be read over three Sundays, during divine service. Both the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Free Methodist Church, both members of the World Methodist Council, published rubrics for the banns. The African Methodist Episcopal Church version appears in its 1996 Book of Discipline. The language it prescribes follows the old formula almost exactly: the minister announces the names and their parishes, then invites any objection to the union. What distinguishes the Methodist position from the Anglican is less the ceremony than the theology behind the impediments. The larger Protestant break with Rome was not over the means of identifying impediments, but over what actually counted as one. The Church of England, for instance, recognized remarriage after divorce in some circumstances; Rome did not. The mechanism of the banns survived the Reformation largely intact even as the list of disqualifying conditions shifted between churches.

• 6. From Plymouth Colony to Ontario

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  Plymouth Colony's first marriage regulation, passed in 1636, required banns to be read to the congregation three times. Where no congregation existed, a public posting for fifteen days served the same function. Quakers were permitted to announce banns in their own meetinghouses rather than in a broader Christian congregation. The penalty for ignoring the banns procedure in the seventeenth century was a serious fine, which could fall on the groom or the officiating minister. The Dutch colony of New Netherland also required banns as part of its marriage regulations. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, civil marriage licence requirements gradually displaced the banns across the United States. Elizabeth Freedman identifies the mid-nineteenth century as the moment when governmental regulation of marriage in the United States intensified, with prenuptial tests replacing the community-witness function the banns had once performed. Canada tells a different story. In Ontario the public reading of banns remains a legal alternative to a marriage licence to this day. That legal standing became decisive in 2003, when Ontario was not yet issuing marriage licences to same-sex couples. The first same-sex marriages in the province proceeded by way of banns instead, and those marriages were ruled valid. In Manitoba a single reading of the banns in a church ordinarily attended by both parties also substitutes for a licence. Quebec takes a different route: a written notice must be posted at the place of the wedding for twenty days beforehand, a secular equivalent that the Civil code does not call banns. In British Columbia, only Doukhobors retain the right to marry by banns.

• 7. Continental Echoes and Other Uses

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  Belgium introduced its publication requirement in 1796 and removed it in 2000. Germany required banns under civil law until 1998, when the formal public proclamation ended; couples must still register beforehand, but without a public posting. In the Netherlands, the pre-marriage registration process is called ondertrouw. Finland required the banns to be announced in the bride's home parish church on three consecutive Sundays before the wedding. That obligation ended with the 1988 marriage law, though the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland continues the practice unless a couple specifically asks to forgo it. The Finnish name for the banns, kuulutus avioliittoon, translates literally as announcement into marriage. France requires banns to be displayed at the town hall ten days before the wedding. The word banns carries one more life entirely apart from marriage. In medieval theatre, the term referred to the prologue of a play: a spoken announcement at the start of a performance that introduced and summarized the action to come. The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, a Middle English miracle play written sometime after 1461, contains an example of this theatrical usage. The connection between the two meanings is the same root idea: a public proclamation that invites the audience to be present and aware before the main event begins.