Tying the (Tangled) Knot

‘It’s Paul from the Bishop’s Registry,’ said the phone message, ‘Please get back to me before 4.30, it’s a bit urgent’. I saw the message at 4.21. For a Surrogate for Oaths, a call from the Registry is a little like a police car pulling into the drive - you automatically assume you’ve done something wrong. In fact the call concerned a forthcoming wedding for which I needed to adminster an oath, and it would all turn out more complex than usual.

Liam and Rianne wanted to get married at Ellington, in the eastern part of the diocese. They come from a Traveller background; Travellers typically marry younger than has ever been the custom in mainstream English culture (except for medieval nobility), let alone now, and that applied in this case. Rianne was 17, and therein lay their problem: the minimum marriage age in England and wales has been raised to 18 to counteract forced marriages, and nobody was quite sure when it would come in. Their parish priest suggested they wait, but they were adamant they didn’t want to, and that left only a couple of days for the wedding to take place.

Nothing about it was straightforward. A little while before the couple were due to see me, I flicked through the guidance notes and suddenly remembered that, as a minor, Rianne needed to have permission to marry from her parents or guardians. The guidance notes give no instructions as to the form or wording for this. I knew Rianne had no relationship with her father, but Marian their priest had already met her mother, so I hurriedly phoned and asked Liam to make sure his prospective mother-in-law wrote and signed a note to this effect. It turned out to be scribbled on a sheet torn from a pad, which I trimmed so that when I sent it to the Registry it didn’t look quite so dodgy. Rianne had no relationship with her father, and last year changed her name by deed-poll so the name on her passport, issued before the change, was now different from her legal name. when she and Liam arrived – they’d come into the church as Toddler Praise was finishing so they were treated to that! – they discovered that they’d forgotten the deed poll certificate so had to drive ‘home’ to get it. while they were gone I looked at Liam’s driving licence and realised the address was somewhere in Sussex, neither Ellington nor wherever it was they’d just gone which they’d assured me was only ten minutes away. So what was their connection with Ellington? Marian had told me they lived there. When they got back they told me they were all staying with Rianne’s brother, but their actual home was in Ellington. I would have to send all the stuff off to London and trust that, if any question was raised, Marian had something to prove it was true.

Liam is actually a Christian who goes to a ‘gypsy church’ – these tend to be pretty serious, and he gibbed a bit about swearing the oath, but in the end did so. So all was well, and I sent them off to Ellington (via Rianne’s brother’s house) to get married. I assembled all the bits of paper, rather more than I usually put together, and posted it all off to the Registry. If I get another call on Monday, my heart will beat uneasily!