Samlesbury Hall Wedding Chapel

"The Whittaker Room, the Hall’s original chapel dating back to the 1400s, is the perfect romantic setting for your wedding ceremony, with light streaming through the ancient stone mullioned windows. After you’ve said “I Do”, our friendly team will ensure your guests enjoy an ice-cold glass of fizz and a selection of delicious canapés in the beautiful 16th Century Parlour.  On sunnier days the sweeping front lawn will be the setting for garden games. Our immediate grounds are private and provide your photographer with gorgeous backdrops, including beech hedged lawns, stone steps, Italian courtyard, festoon lit tennis lawn, rosarium and ancient woodland."

What a great place to marry! The above sentences were taken from the website of Samlesbury Hall, on the main road between Preston and Blackburn. The ancient home of the Southworth family, this brick and timbered fourteenth-century manor house is a premier ‘wedding venue’. Surprisingly, it is free to look around when not hired for matrimonial purposes; at other locations, I have paid a lot of money to see a lot less.

According to Statista:

Between 1991 and 2019 the marriage rate in England and Wales fell from 36 marriages per 1,000 people to 17.9, while for the UK as a whole, there were 96,627 fewer marriages taking place in 2019 than there were in 1991. At the same time there has been an increase in the age at which people marry.

Furthermore:

Another trend of recent years has been the rise of civil ceremonies at the expense of religious ceremonies. In 2019, 179,905 weddings were civil ceremonies, compared with around 39,945 religious ones.

So, fewer people are marrying, and of those who do, fewer do so in a church. Would a wedding at the fabulous Samlesbury Hall count as a church wedding if it is held in the former chapel? Presumably not. I suspect that the many ceremonies to take place at this ‘perfect, romantic setting’ contribute to the great numbers of civil ceremonies. In many respects, the Whitaker Room embodies the current British attitude to religion: where once there was an altar with a cross, there is now a pair of chairs for the betrothed; what resembles a cross hanging from the ceiling is in fact a shield with some faux historical symbolism. We Britons like sacred space and wish to marry each other in special locations, but God Himself must needs be excluded.

Monogamous, consenting marriages between men and women are recognised by God, be they civil and secular, or performed in some gaudy temple or lofty cathedral. Church weddings do not make the couple Christians, and the officiating clergy may not bother to seize the occasion to preach the gospel. Yet there is a marriage between God and humanity, a special relationship, an intimacy which no angel can ever know. The Christian is part of that; the non-Christian remains forever estranged and divorced.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son, and sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding; and they were not willing to come." Matthew 22:2-3, NKJV