Royal Hen Party

Royal Hen Parties

When news broke of the Royal Wedding everyone went into overdrive. Where would the nuptials be held? Who would design the dress? Where would the couple go for their honeymoon? Who would pay for it?

So what about the Royal Hen Night will it entail a week away, several weeks away?  Actually, do future queens or any royals for that matter have a hen night, or do they just stay home with their friends, drink champagne and sing along to the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing?

Time to do a little investigation. We can’t find anything about Princess Diana’s Hen Night, but apparently the world famous torso-rippling Dreamboys claim to have performed for her, whether this was for her hen night or just a royal gals night out well, no-one’s saying.

The inner secrets of Princess Diana’s Hen night might be hush, hush, but we do know that she dressed up as a policewoman along with Pamela Stephenson at Sarah Ferguson’s hen night at a club in Mayfair.

Recently, crown Princess Victoria of Sweden was ‘kidnapped’ at her brother’s birthday party by a group of masked men. It sounds worse than it is. She was kidnapped to go to her own hen party – a night out in Stockholm, followed by a relaxing cruise around the Swedish coast  – all very appropriate.

Today the Hen celebration is saying goodbye to single life, and the world hen Middle English refers to any female bird, which established the hen night as a woman-only affair. The hen ritual gathered popularity in the seventeenth century where it became a time for the bride to concentrate on her ‘bottom drawer’, a dowry of precious objects collected in preparation for her nuptials. To this end, the bride would spend the evening quietly at home.

The hen night would allow the bride to be to receive practical, domestic gifts – all she would need to be the perfect wife ­- a tradition that today still exists in the wedding list.

Fast forward to Victorian England where a hen night, if it was held at all, was a small private gathering where women talked and the bride contemplated her future wifely duties.