True-Love Knots and Bride Favours

Lovers in the north of England and Scotland gave each other a true-love knot as a token of plighted faith, and Hone derived the name from a Danish word meaning to plight one’s troth. The same idea lay behind the knots of coloured ribbon handed out as bride favours and worn in the hat for weeks after a wedding, once given in their hundreds even at the weddings of the nobility. Gay’s pastoral The Spell has a girl knotting her lover’s garter with her own three times, and by 1831 favours were always white.