Although I, too, expected to find that medieval English people married
at the door of the church (partly because of those very same lectures
that John Parsons heard from Michael Sheehan!), I have found from
extensive reading of depositions of marital litigation in the fifteenth
century that it was also quite common to be married in the nave of the
church. (I translated one of these depositions in my *Love and Marriage
in Late Medieval London* [Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press, 1995],
47-48.) Perhaps it depended on the weather. The relatively small "fact"
of the location of the exchange of consent has been spun out by various
historians as an example of the ambivalent attitude the church had
towards marriage (the vows taking place literally on the boundary
between sacred and secular, etc.)
By the way, *Marriage Litigation in Medieval England* was written not by
Brundage but by Richard Helmholz.
Shannon McSheffrey
Concordia University, Montreal
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