<P> References to "broomstick marriages" emerged in England in the mid-to - late 18th century, always to describe a wedding ceremony of doubtful validity . The earliest use of the phrase is in the 1764 English edition of a French work: the French text, describing an elopement, refers to the runaway couple hastily making un mariage sur la croix de l'épée (literally' marriage on the cross of the sword'), an expression the English translator freely renders as' performed the marriage ceremony by leaping over a broomstick' . </P> <P> A 1774 usage in the Westminster Magazine also describes an elopement . A man who had taken his under - age bride off to France discovered it was as hard to arrange a legal marriage there as in England, but declined a suggestion that a French sexton might simply read the marriage service through before the couple as "He had no inclination for a Broomstick - marriage". In 1789 the rumoured clandestine marriage between the Prince Regent and Maria Fitzherbert is similarly referred to in a satirical song in The Times: "Their way to consummation was by hopping o'er a broom, sir". </P> <P> Despite these allusions, research by the legal historian Professor R. Probert of Warwick University has failed to find any proof of an actual contemporary practice of jumping over a broomstick as a sign of informal union . Probert also points out that the word broomstick was used in the mid-18th century in several contexts to mean' something ersatz, or lacking the authority its true equivalent might possess .' She therefore argues that because the expression broomstick marriage, meaning' sham marriage', was in circulation, folk etymology led to a belief that people must actually have once signified irregular marriage by jumping over a broom.. Tyler D. Parry, Associate Professor of African American Studies, contests the claim that no literal jump was used in Britain, arguing that enslaved people of African descent and British migrants engaged in numerous cultural exchanges during the 18th and 19th centuries . He shows numerous correlations between the ceremonies of slaves and those of the rural British, contending it is not simply coincidental that two groups, separated by an ocean, utilized similar matrimonial forms revolving around the broomstick . If British practitioners never used a physical leap, Parry wonders how enslaved people in the US South learned of the custom . </P> <P> There are later examples of the term broomstick marriage being used in Britain, always with a similar implication that the ceremony so performed did not create a legally binding union . This meaning survived into the early nineteenth century: during a case heard in London in 1824 regarding the legal validity of a marriage ceremony consisting of nothing more than the groom placing a ring on the bride's finger before witnesses, a court official commented that the ceremony "amounted to nothing more than a broomstick marriage, which the parties had it in their power to dissolve at will ." </P>

When do you jump the broom in a wedding ceremony