hing movement by which the church remodeled all the ideas and
institutions of the age, and integrated all social interests into a
system of which it made itself the center and controlling authority. The
controlling tendency in the mores of the age was religiosity,--a desire
to construe all social relations from the church standpoint and to set
all interests in a religious light. Marriage fell under this influence.
The priests displaced the earlier prolocutors, and strove to make
marriage an ecclesiastical function and their own share in it essential,
although they did not make the validity of marriage depend on their
share in it.[1365] In different places and amongst different classes the
custom of church marriage was introduced at earlier or later times, and
the doctrine of priestly function in connection with marriage became
established with greater or less precision. Friedberg[1366] considers
the ordinance of the Synod of Westminster[1367] (1175) the first
ordinance which distinctly prescribed church marriage in England, but
from that to the establishment of a custom was a long way. Pollock and
Maitland[1368] think that marriage, in England, belonged to the
ecclesiastical forum by the middle of the twelfth century. Rituals of
Salisbury and York of the thirteenth century show the early church
customs, only rendered more elaborate and more precise in detail.[1369]
There is also ritual provision for an ecclesiastic to bless the bed of
the spouses after they are in it, in order to drive away the evil
spirits. In 1240, in the constitutions of Walter de Cantelupe, marriage
is called a sacrament, because it prefigures the sacrament between
Christ and the church. Marriage was to precede _concubitus_. There was
to be no divination or use of devices for luck. By synodal statutes of
1246 it was ordered that priests should teach that betrothal and
consummation would constitute irrevocable marriage.[1370] If people
treated church ordinances and forms with neglect they were punished by
church discipline, but the marriage was not declared invalid. Hence the
system was elastic and could not be abruptly changed.

+433. Conflict of mores and church programme. Betrothal and wedding.+ In
Germany the popular resistance to a change of the mores about marriage
was more stubborn than elsewhere. Although ecclesiastics were present at
marriages, until the thirteenth century, they sometimes took no
part.[1371] In the poems, from the beginning o