Wedding Traditions That Seem Made Up

✓Protection for the baby to come

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The rhyme is younger than it feels: the earliest recorded version dates only to 1871, and the full 'Lancashire' wording to an 1876 newspaper. Victorian folklore held that 'something old' and 'something blue' also baffled the Evil Eye.

✓Live birds or a snake

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The rest of the pie held oysters, lamb testicles, pine kernels and cocks' combs, and refusing a slice was considered rude and unlucky. A glass ring baked inside marked the next woman to marry, a forerunner of the bouquet toss.

✓Queen Victoria

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Before Victoria, brides married in any colour, and black was popular in Finland. Her Honiton-lace gown was widely illustrated, and elite Victorian brides followed suit.

✓Charivari, or shivaree

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In Europe the ritual was often punitive, aimed at shaming remarried widows or adulterers; in North America it became good-natured hazing, with brides wheeled around in wheelbarrows and cowbells tied under the wedding bed.

✓Deep yellow

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It evoked the veil of the Flaminica Dialis, a priestess who could never divorce, and so was a good omen for lifelong fidelity. Romans linked the verb 'nubere' (to marry) to 'nubes', a cloud, picturing the bride as clouded over.

✓Emmer wheat

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The rite needed ten witnesses and the high priest of Jupiter presiding, and it was nearly impossible to dissolve. Only children of a confarreatio marriage could become a Vestal or the Flamen Dialis.

✓A trial marriage

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The word comes from Old Norse 'handfesta', to strike a bargain by joining hands, and in Old English simply meant making a contract. Its modern wedding revival came largely through neopagan ceremonies in the late 20th century.

✓To confuse evil spirits or jealous ex-lovers who might try to harm the newlyweds

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Bridesmaids once wore exactly the same dress as the bride and veiled their faces heavily so that jealous suitors and evil spirits could not pick out the real bride.

✓A silver sixpence in her shoe

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The full rhyme concludes with 'and a silver sixpence in her shoe,' which was meant to protect the newlyweds' financial future and bring wealth.

✓Jumping the broom

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The custom is documented among enslaved people in the American South in the 1840s and 1850s, and was revived a century later, helped by the 1970s novel and miniseries 'Roots'. Similar broomstick weddings existed in rural Britain.