page_title: Family in early modern Scotland
section_title: Marriage
hierarchical_section_title: Family in early modern Scotland / Marriage
caption_attribution_description: David Allan (Scottish painter 1744-1796), The Highland Wedding, 1780.
context_page_description: The family in early modern Scotland includes all aspects of kinship and family life, between the Renaissance and the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the beginnings of industrialisation and the end of the Jacobite risings in the mid-eighteenth century in Scotland.
  Scottish kinship in this period was agnatic, with descent judged through a common ancestor, helping to create the surname system in the Borders and the clans in the Highlands, with these systems beginning to break down in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. There was considerable concern over the safety of children. The abolition of godparents in the Reformation meant that baptism became a mechanism for emphasising the role and responsibilities of fathers. Wet-nurses were used for young children, but in most families mothers took the primary role in bringing up children, while the Kirk emphasised the role of the father for older children. After the Reformation there was an increasing emphasis on education, resulting in the growth of a parish school system, but its effects were limited for the children of the poor and for girls.
context_section_description: Lowland Scotland was part of the pattern of late marriage for both men and women (between the mid and late 20s), with a relatively large proportion of the population remaining unmarried. In the Highland and Islands marriage ages may have been lower and more closely resembled Gaelic Ireland. Throughout the period, women could legally marry from the age of 12 and boys from 14. However, while many girls from the social elite married in their teens, most in the Lowlands only married after a period of life-cycle service, in their twenties. Normally marriage followed handfasting, a period of betrothal, which in the Highlands may have effectively been a period of trial marriage, in which sexual activity may have been accepted as legitimate. Marriages, particularly higher in society, were often political in nature and the subject of complex negotiations over the tocher (dowry). Some mothers took a leading role in negotiating marriages, as Lady Glenorchy did for her children in the 1560s and 1570s. They could also act as matchmakers, finding suitable and compatible partners for others.
  In the Middle Ages marriage was a sacrament and the key element in validity was consent. The sacramental status was removed at the Reformation, but the centrality of consent remained. Weddings were often elaborate occasions for public celebration and feasting. Among the poor, the tradition of the penny wedding developed, by which guests contributed to the costs of occasion. There was usually a meal after the ceremony, sometimes followed by music and dancing. These events were strongly discouraged by the Reformed Kirk, particularly in the Lowlands where the Kirk had greatest control, but opposition began to ease from about 1715 to 1725. Unlike in England, after the Reformation, "Irregular marriage", without a church ceremony or any residence qualifications, remained valid if promises were made between the couple in front of witnesses. From the 1730s the border settlements of Coldstream Bridge, Lamberton Toll, and most famously Gretna Green, developed local industries in private and rapid marriages for English couples wishing to take advantage of the more flexible Scottish marriage laws, undertaken by individuals who declared themselves marriage priests. This business would expand rapidly after the passage of Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act in 1754, which completely ended irregular marriages in England, but not in Scotland.
  While among the wealthy, married women often focused on running the household, lower down in society they also worked with their husbands. In rural Scotland this would have included taking part in all the major agricultural tasks around the farm. They had a particular role as shearers in the harvest, forming most of the reaping team of the bandwin. In the Highlands they may have been even more significant as workers as there is evidence that many men considered agricultural work to be beneath their status and in places they may have formed the majority of the rural workforce. There was a stress on a wife's duties to her husband and on the virtues of chastity and obedience. How exactly patriarchy worked in practice is difficult to discern. Scottish women in this period had something of a reputation among foreign observers for being forthright individuals, with the Spanish ambassador to the court of James IV (r. 1488–1513) noting that they were "absolute mistresses of their houses and even their husbands".
  Before the Reformation, the extensive prohibited degrees of kinship, up to the fourth degree through consanguinity, meant that most noble marriages necessitated a papal dispensation. This could later be used as grounds for annulment if the marriage proved politically or personally inconvenient, although there was no divorce as such. After the mid-sixteenth century the prohibited degrees were reduced to those in Leviticus 13: 4–13, which limited them to relationships in the second degree of kinship. Separation from bed and board continued to be allowed in exceptional circumstances, usually adultery, and under the Reformed Kirk divorc
caption: David Allan's painting of Highland wedding from 1780
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