A bridesman is a close male friend and/or relative of the bride, one who walks down the aisle in the bridal ceremony in the traditional place of a
bridesmaid
Bridesmaids are members of the bride's party in a Western traditional wedding ceremony. A bridesmaid is typically a young woman and often a close friend or relative. She attends to the bride on the day of a wedding or marriage ceremony. Tradi ...
.
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë (, commonly ; 21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature.
She enlisted i ...
made reference to bridesmen, seemingly in the modern sense, in the final chapter of her 1859 novel
''Shirley'', which is set in
Yorkshire
Yorkshire ( ; abbreviated Yorks), formally known as the County of York, is a historic county in northern England and by far the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its large area in comparison with other English counties, functions have ...
in 1811–12: "Amongst the bridal train the most noticeable personages were the youthful bridesmen, Henry Sympson and Martin Yorke."
The term, however, has an ancient and obscure, possibly
confabulated origin. The term is first noted by the
Encyclopaedia Judaica
The ''Encyclopaedia Judaica'' is a 22-volume English-language encyclopedia of the Jewish people, Judaism, and Israel. It covers diverse areas of the Jewish world and civilization, including Jewish history of all eras, culture, holidays, langu ...
from the European Jewish Diaspora of the middle of the 13th century. In this context, a bridesman was not a friend of the bride but of the groom. He paid for and arranged the wedding from his own money and would be repaid someday by the groom. It was a position of the highest level of honor in male friendship. It was akin to the modern-day
best man
A groomsman or usher is one of the male attendants to the groom in a wedding ceremony and performs the first speech at the wedding. Usually, the groom selects close friends and relatives to serve as groomsmen, and it is considered an honor to be ...
.
In
Hungary
Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...
, where the word for bridesman is "
vőfély" or sometimes "vőfény" (depending on the region), the ancient tradition of the bridesman is still very popular. The vőfély is the "spokesman" of the bridegroom ("vő" means son-in-law).
References
Wedding ceremony participants
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