Handfasting

Handfasting was a historical betrothal and marriage custom recorded in Scotland and parts of England, most closely associated with the border regions, in which a couple publicly joined or clasped hands before witnesses to declare their intention to marry, in some documented local variants entering a trial union understood to last for a fixed period, commonly a year and a day, before a formal church wedding either confirmed or ended the arrangement. The exact legal and social weight of handfasting varied by period and locality, and its status under older Scottish irregular-marriage law, where a couple's mutual declaration before witnesses could itself constitute a valid marriage, made it a documented if informal alternative to a church ceremony in some communities into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The term and the gesture of binding hands were later revived, in a substantially reinterpreted form, within twentieth-century Wiccan and neopagan wedding ritual, where a handfasting ceremony is a distinct modern practice rather than a continuation of the historical Scottish custom.