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1. Stag night/Bachelor’s party
Spartans celebrated a single man’s last night of freedom with a raucous party (although, somewhat disappointingly, they watered down the wine to avoid a wedding day hangover). In Roman times this was called the bachelor dinner when men would gather for a feast and to toast their comrade. And then they would go kidnap the bride. Until the 18th century, it was common practice for grooms to abduct brides before the wedding.

Bride kidnapping has been a thing since the founding of Rome, when Romulus threw a giant party, invited the people of Sabine to a party, and then stole all their women.

English brides could expect to be kidnapped until the Marriage Act was passed in 1753, and mock-kidnappings are still a wedding tradition in parts of Eastern Europe. Sadly, the real thing is still practiced all over the world.

2. Engagement ring

Pope Innocent III introduced the period of waiting between betrothal and marriage in 1214, and engaged couples started displaying their commitment with a ring.

Archduke Maximilian of Austria was the first person to put a diamond ring on it, when he got all up in Mary of Burgundy’s grille in 1477. Engagement and wedding rings go on the third finger of your left hand because ancient Egyptians believed the vein in that hand ran directly to the heart.

3. White wedding dress

Queen Victoria started the trend for white weddings when she commissioned a white lace gown for her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840. Before that, brides just wore their best dresses on their wedding days.

4. Impending weddings were originally publicly announced to prevent incest

The ‘posting of the banns’ is a Roman Catholic tradition that dates back to 1215, and was introduced so that people could speak up about potentially clandestine and incestuous marriages.

5. Saving Wedding Cake to eat one year later

The most cited explanation for this tradition is that in the late 1900s, when expensive multi-tier wedding cakes were coming into fashion, couples saved the top level to serve it at their first child’s christening, which was expected within a year after the wedding.

6. Best man

The grooms man who proved to be the most skilled kidnapper became the “best man”. Which is fair enough. You wouldn’t want the worst man beside you on your big day. In Anglo-Saxon England, the best man accompanied the groom up the aisle to help him defend the bride.

7. Bride on the left

And the kidnapped bride stood to the groom’s left, so that his right hand was free to fight off rival suitors .

8. Walking up the aisle

Even when weddings became more civilised, the wedding was still a business transaction between the father of the bride and the groom and it’s where we get the tradition of the father walking the bride up the aisle. This all started to change after the married women’s property acts in the 1880s but the custom remained.

9. Bridesmaids

and Grooms men

They helped protect the bride and groom from physical threat of jealousy suitors and angry relatives.

The wedding party dressed alike to confuse evil spirits who might target the bride and groom, which is slightly more commitment than organising the bridal shower, tolerating orange taffeta, and trying not to turn up drunk on the day.

10. Tossing the bouquet

Wedding guests in 14th-century England would literally tear the clothes off the bride for luck.

The tossing of the bouquet and throwing of the bride’s garter developed as a distraction technique, presumably because brides were sick of stumbling naked into their own receptions.

11. Bride’s bouquet

The bouquet was to ward off evil spirits and originally made of herbs like garlic and rosemary, rather than flowers.

12. Wedding cakes

Wedding cakes weren’t originally eaten but thrown at the bride for fertility luck. In ancient Rome, marriages were sealed when the groom smashed a barley cake over the bride’s head. The cakes weren’t exactly tasty. But, by the mid-sixteenth century nicer tastier cakes were being made and that stopped all the cake smashing and inspired more cake eating. Brides of the early 1900s notably had a cake that resembled fruitcake. The wedding cake as you know it has only really taken off over the past 70 years or so.

In medieval England, guests would stack cakes higher and higher and the bridal couple would have to kiss over taller and taller piles of wedding cake, leading to the tiered confections we see today.

13. Carrying the bride over the threshold

Roman grooms carried their brides over the threshold to protect them from the demons that lived in the floor. Another view says since the bride will have been kidnapped she would be reluctant or pretend to be.

14. Honeymoon

Ancient Norse bridal couples went into hiding after the wedding, and a family member would bring them a cup of honey wine for 30 days.

Which is how we got the honeymoon — we celebrated weddings with one moon’s worth of honey wine.

15. Tying tin cans to the bridal car

One theory says that back in Ancient Egypt a father would give the groom his daughter’s sandal, marking that an exchange had taken place.

Another explanation, one that seems most likely considering all the superstition surrounding wedding traditions, is that tying shoes and cans to the departing vehicle made a noise that was believed to keep evil spirits away. — buzzfeed.com/babble.com