Marriage in Church
Not until the time of the Reformation was marriage sanctioned as a rite to be fittingly performed within a church. Prior to this the customary place was at the door of the church, and not within the sacred enclosure. This rule appears to have been transgressed, but until the first Prayer Book of Edward VI. (1549), the rubric of the Sarum Manual was in use, which directed that the man and the woman about to be married should be placed before the door of the church. It was considered indecent to unite in wedlock within the church itself. Chaucer, in his “Canterbury Tales” (1383), alludes to this custom in his “Wife of Bath:”
“She was a worthy woman all her live,
Husbands at the Church door had she five.”
So late as 1559 Elizabeth, daughter of Henry II. of France, was married to Philip II. of Spain by the Bishop of Paris at the church door of Notre Dame; while Mary Stuart had been married the year before to the Dauphin on the same spot.