A bridegroom was often called upon to pay toll. It was a Somersetshire custom for the village children, on the occasion of a wedding, to fasten the churchyard gates with a wreath of evergreens and flowers; a floral bond which always required a "Silver Key" to unlose. A writer to _Notes and Queries_, in January, 1858, states that on the occasion of his marriage, some years previously, when passing through the village adjoining that in which the marriage had taken place, his carriage was stopped by the villagers, holding a band of twisted evergreens and flowers, who good naturedly refused to let the carriage pass until toll had been paid.
At Burnley, in Lancashire, an old custom prevailed by which all persons married at St. Peter's Church, in that town, paid a fine to the boys at the Grammar School; the money thus obtained being applied, according to the records, for the maintenance of the school library. This custom appears to have been kept up down to the year 1870, about which time Burnley Grammar School was rebuilt, and, on its re-opening, the practice of paying fines to the boys was discontinued.
It is a common saying in Lancashire that a bride should wear at her wedding:--
"Something old and something new, Something borrowed, something blue."
This saying, and the practice of it, is common in other parts of England; the writer knows a lady who, when married at Bedford, five years ago, carried out the couplet to the letter; on this same bride being brought by her husband to his home in Lincolnshire, at the end of the honeymoon, the custom of lifting the bride over the threshold was observed; the bride and bridegroom got out of the carriage a few yards from the house, and he carried her up the steps, and into the hall. This was formerly a common practice in the North of England, and in Scotland, and is the remains of an old Roman custom which has survived the onslaught of time and change.
It was an old custom to strew the path from the house of the bride to the church with sawdust or sand, and so recently as the year 1876 a "sawdust wedding" took place from a house in Sunderland. The custom would originate, no doubt, in a desire to secure a clean path for the bride to walk upon, and this was often ornamented with devices, which would be easily done with either material.