Who has the right to sanction a marriage?
Traditionally in England, marriage was regarded as both a civil and an ecclesiastical matter from the time of the Norman Conquest on until a much later date. For instance, the Crown set the minimum age for marriage and various other legal regulations as far back as 1236. F.W. Maitland, “The Constiutional History of England (1961, Cambridge Edition) at 28. In England, until the time of Henry the Eighth, most regulation of marriages occured through Canon Law and was enforced by ecclesiastical courts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_law Questions of the validity of marriages and things of that sort were tried in the ecclesiastical courts. Their decrees were enforced by the civil courts as well. At the time of Henry VIII, the crown took over the regulation of marriage, but adopted the Canon Law restrictions governing who could marry whom. Maitland at 510-11. The legal theory behind his regulation of who could and could
