Marriage in rural Essex at the end of the middle ages was a multifaceted experience. For one thing, rather than a discrete action at a given point in time it was a process with successive stages, that might (or might not, depending upon the participants' predilections and circumstances) draw in friends, neighbours, relatives and ecclesiastical authorities. It was a process with wide legal ramifications ranging from defining the validity of the union itself to affecting the transmission of property. It was moreover a critical lynchpin in demographic processes, signalling the inception of a new family unit and of legitimised procreative careers.

Late-medieval canon law had evolved a conception of marriage based upon the free consent of partners who had attained legal minimum age and who were without inhibiting ties of consanguinity or previous contracts to others. A regular union was to proceed through espousal or ‘trothplight’, publication of banns in the parish church to help ensure the detection of impediments if such existed, and finally nuptial solemnisation with exchange of vows, again at the church and in the presence of clergy. Nevertheless, unions formed either by the couple's free consent, regardless of parental or seigneurial wishes, and expressed by exchange of vows in the present tense, or alternatively by mutual promise of future marriage followed by sexual intercourse, were also regarded at canon law as legally binding though ‘clandestine’ and irregular.