Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/249

 The Lifting of the Bride. 233

"chaining" the married pair are identical, but because, as we have seen, one rite seems occasionally to merge into the other, or to be combined with it. It is not easy to give a definite explanation of such rites, and it is quite possible that more than one line of thoug-ht has contributed to establish them. The Indian cases may possibly be based on the feeling which would naturally prevail among a com- munity which rigidly practises the law of exogamy, that the newly-married wife is an outsider and must pay some fee to the women of her husband's house before she can be allowed to enter. Again, the fact of the money being pushed under the church door, the blackmail levied on the newly-married pair, and the privilege asserted by the bride- lifters of claiming a kiss from the bride, may suggest the payment of a bride-price to the community, in other words what Lord Avebury would call the commutation for the rights connected with Communal Marriage. Further, the performance of these rites at the church door may repre- sent a pagan or pre-Christian rite of marriage, to which the actual service in the church was a supplement. We know that in ancient times the church door was the place where the marriage rite was performed, and that it was only in the sixteenth century that the service was first done within the church. The same idea may still be traced in the rule that the rite should be performed outside the chancel.^

At any rate, it is hardly possible to trace in these rites of bride-barring any suggestion of marriage by capture. Of this we miss the most characteristic note in the fact that the opposition to the removal of the bride is not confined to her own immediate relations. It seems probable that while capture was certainly one and perhaps not an uncommon mode of securing a bride, its effect, on the actual ritual of marriage, which was a matter quite separate from the method by which the bride was won, may have been less

' See Brand, Obsei-vations, ii., 133.