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Hello, to haven't to hold from this day forward for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, the love and to cherish till death us do part.

These marriage vows have been recited at church weddings since 1552, whenever two individuals have pledged to enter into a relationship for life.

But before the wedding service was written into the book of common prayer, marriages were much more informal.

Couples could simply promise themselves to one another at any time or place, and the spoken word was as good as the written contract.

The ancients permitted polygamy and the taking of concubines, so how did monogamy come to be the favoured mode of the west?

What was the purpose of marriage, property, procreation, financial stability, companionship, or love?

And what role have the state and the church played in legislating on personal affairs?

With me to discuss marriage, our Janet Soskis, reader in philosophical theology at Cambridge University, Frederick Peterson, lecture in history at Aberdeen University, and Christina Heardman, social historian, and journalist.

Frederick Peterson, the Babylonians had laws governing sexual relations between men and women. Did that include governing marriage?

Both yes and no. It included marriage in that it had certain presumptions about what marriage was, that it was usually monogamous.

And it regulated crimes in marriage, such as adultery if a married woman had an adulterous affair.

She would have to be tied to her adulterous partner and drowned, for example, if she refused sex with her husband, the same punishment came about.

With the comparable punishments for men?

Not really, no. But on the other hand, if a man did withdraw himself from his wife, he lost his property and he could be exiled.

So there were quid pro quo, so to speak, in this situation.

But as I understood it, it was decided that permitted polygamy as well.

Usually, the presumption was a monogamous marriage in the Babylonian codes, at least. A man would be allowed to take a second wife if, for some reason, the first wife could not have a child.

And the second wife was sort of a second rate wife. She was there for legitimate offspring rather than anything else.

So we see marriage already then as being regarded as an essential form of social cement?

Maybe not so much a social cement as an institution that had to be regulated, an institution in which sexual activity could take place,

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