Weddings, weekdays, work and leisure in urban England 1791-1911: the decline of Saint Monday revisited

Past & Present, Nov, 1996 by Douglas A. Reid

However, so far as weddings were concerned, and at first sight somewhat contrary to the implications of my earlier work, it appears that Saturday -- with its afternoon half-holiday initiated in mid-century -- was not widely substituted for Saint Monday.(37) (Figure 1) Why? The obvious explanation of this lag between the introduction of Saturday half-holidays and the rise of Saturday weddings would seem to be the law's insistence, until 1886, upon morning ceremonies. For more than thirty years after the introduction of Saturday half-holidays it was impossible to use them to get wed. Only in 1886 was the designated period extended from noon to 3 p.m. On the face of it, then, this legal inhibition hindered the establishment of a Saturday wedding tradition, which, even when it did start to grow, grew very slowly, so that Saturday had acquired barely a seventh of all weddings even by 1914 (Figure 1). Thus, the hypothesis that weddings can be seen as proxy data for patterns of work and leisure seems convincing as far as an established tradition -- Saint Monday -- is concerned, but, primarily for legal reasons, it appears to offer a less sure guide to the rise of the new tradition of Saturday half-holidays.

But if Saint Monday was being squeezed by more intensive work-discipline, and the use of Saturday was inhibited by the law, which day benefited? The answer dramatically revealed by Figure 1 is Sunday. Weddings on "the first day" increased slowly at first, from the just over one-seventh of the total in 1811 to just over one-fifth in 1841, but then nearly doubled between 1841 and 1871 (rising by twenty percentage points), and by the end of the century Sunday weddings constituted approximately half of all weddings. Thus the decline of Saint Monday in the second half of the nineteenth century was registered in the enhanced popularity of Sunday weddings, notably in 1851, 1861, 1871 and 1891 (See Figure 1). Another, possibly complementary, explanation might be that Sunday weddings were encouraged by Evangelical clergymen seeking to emphasize the sacred nature of the wedding ceremony. However, if this was the case, then it was odd that the Evangelical parsons Moseley and Miller, at St Martin's, were so reluctant to lend their authority to such ceremonies by officiating themselves.(38) Nevertheless, Sunday grew at the expense of other days too, particularly in 1861 and 1871 (Figure 1).

So Monday, predominantly, and Sunday, increasingly, together accounted for between one-half and two-thirds of all the Birmingham weddings by 1851. Only Tuesday (and to a smaller extent Thursday) even achieved a one-seventh share. Such support for Tuesday weddings as there was is consistent with the idea that a small minority of workers occasionally took a Saint Tuesday holiday,39 and Thursday's profile may be explained by the fact that it was a general market-day of long standing.(40) Perhaps a general tightening up of work-discipline in the second half of the century helps explain the decline in the popularity of both, and the enhancement of Sunday and Monday's joint preponderance. Lowest of all was the proportion of weddings on Fridays, the day of the week when work was hardest and longest in preparation for pay-day and the settling up of accounts on the Saturday. This was reinforced by lingering superstitions about the unsuitability of getting married on the day which tradition had it was that of Christ's crucifixion.(41)