Description of 17th century aristocratic weddings (Britain)

Flicka

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I have a wedding in my WIP, set in 1628. There are lots of random facts about wedding customs here and there, but most focus on lower classes and rarely detailed. There must be descriptions in letters and diaries, but I can't find any (take Anne Clifford, for example who about her first wedding merely says it was in her mother's chambers). Any tips? And yes, I'll take modern fiction descriptions too. If I end up having to wing it, I'll feel comforted knowing others have winged it too and survived.
 

autumnleaf

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You may have already read it, but Antonia Fraser's The Weaker Vessel is pretty good on the details of women's lives in the 17th century.
 

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Thank you all! I have been meaning to read Antonia Fraser's Weaker Vessels for a while so I'll start there. I'm not primarily looking for "wedding customs" but logistics - where, who was usually invited, how was the day organised etc. - and only the upper crust. That's why I was hoping for some sort of description - right now I feel like I'm operating around vague preconceptions of wedding in the Olden Days™ that I fear may stem too much from films and novels, which may be entirely wrong from a historic point of view. If I had a "real" wedding to base it on on, then I could at least say it wasn't impossible, even if not the only way.
 

benbenberi

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I don't recall if Pepys or Evelyn ever talked about any weddings, and of course they're both a generation or 2 later than you're looking for & I have a feeling there were a lot of social changes in the time between... but that's where I'd start.

There may also be other diary-type resources accessible. Princeton seems to have digitized a number of potentially interesting collections -- here's a listing that links to several.

Bride Ales and Penny Weddings (R.A. Houston, 2014) is a book that may have some of what you need. You can take a look at it here on Google Books.

Good luck!
 

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Birth, Marriage, and Death
Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England
David Cressy
I don't recall if Pepys or Evelyn ever talked about any weddings, and of course they're both a generation or 2 later than you're looking for & I have a feeling there were a lot of social changes in the time between... but that's where I'd start.

There may also be other diary-type resources accessible. Princeton seems to have digitized a number of potentially interesting collections -- here's a listing that links to several.

Bride Ales and Penny Weddings (R.A. Houston, 2014) is a book that may have some of what you need. You can take a look at it here on Google Books.

Good luck!

Thank you! Had not heard about that book so I will look at it. And yes, much could have changed during the Civil War so I'm probably better off looking at late Tudor if there's nothing for the Stuart period. Good point.

ETA: Googling that title, this also came up which sounds promising: Birth, Marriage, and Death:Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England by David Cressy
 
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