The practice of jus primae noctis ("right of the
first night") is, in simplest terms, the right of the local noble to deflower local peasant
brides on their wedding night before their newlywed husbands.
Precedence for this practice supposedly goes back for many thousands of years, with the
first reference of something like it going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh
from over four thousand years ago.
This practiced (apparently) reached its crescendo during the Middle Ages in Europe, and today
is popularly depicted in Hollywood in such films as Braveheart.
But did it really ever happen?
Well, fortunately for peasant brides and their husbands, it turns out there is no solid evidence
of this practice happening in reality at all.
Not a single well documented incident recorded, nor a single victim’s name passed down.
It could be argued that women in these periods, in general, would not be considered noteworthy,
especially peasant women, but with a practice spanning (supposedly) thousands of years,
and the presumable rage it would induce in the peasant populace, not to mention occasional
bastard offspring and perhaps a boatload of secret weddings to avoid the issue, odds are
at least a few documented cases would manage to make it down through posterity.
Or even just a record of the law in some court case, as there are such records of numerous
other laws.
But any such evidence simply doesn't exist outside of fictional works or, for instance,
cases where people were trying to rally the peasant class against their lords using the
supposedly former practice of jus primae noctis to whip the mob up.
In fact, the very first mention of this in the Epic of Gilgamesh, we see the hero Enkidu,
who was sent by the gods to stop Gilgamesh after the people cried out to the gods for
aid, physically blocking a wedding place to challenge Gilgamesh over this appalling abuse
of power.
In another early account (in the 5th century BC), Heraclides Ponticus describes how the
king of the Island of Cephalonia instituted this practice.
Once again, the commoners weren't pleased and one man went ahead and dressed himself
as a bride and subsequently murdered the king when the monarch tried to exercise his lordly
right.
For his efforts, the cross-dressing man was made the new king by the overjoyed masses.
There's also the matter of disease to consider.
While these girls were all (supposedly) virgins on their wedding day, that didn't mean they
were free from diseases that frequently devastated life through most of history.
And, let's face it, these lords weren't just sleeping with these women, but many others
to boot.
If the lords were truly sleeping with many or all of these women in their little fiefdoms,
beyond spreading diseases to every corner of their lands, jus primae noctis would have
been a deadly law for a lord of a fiefdom of any real size, assuming he chose to take
advantage of it.
So it should come as no surprise then, that while it's possible there exists a few rulers
in history who actually tried something like this at some point, as mentioned, most historians
think the vast majority of accounts are pure fiction or exaggeration.
For instance, Louis Veuillot writing in France during the 19th century stated: "Nothing,
absolutely nothing, in the archives of Justice authorizes us to say that our forefathers
ever made a crime into a law.
If we search the evidence and the literature we find the same silence everywhere.
The Middle Ages had never heard of the droit du seigneur [aka jus primae noctis]."
Other European scholars shared Veuillot’s opinion.
Germany’s Karl Schmidt penned a thorough treatise on jus primae noctis in 1881, and
came to the conclusion that is was “a learned superstition.”
Over and over again historians from then to now have tried to find hard evidence of this
occurring and come up empty, despite the numerous accounts, sometimes explicitly fictional and
other times thought to be, throughout written history in nearly every major culture.
For instance, famed philosopher Hector Boece in the 16th century described this practice
perfectly during the reign of the Scottish king Evenus III and claimed the practice went
on for centuries.
It turns out, though, no such king ever existed and much of Boece's accounts concerning many
of the legendary kings of Scotland are thought to be pure fiction.
Similar fictional trends are seen elsewhere concerning this supposed law.
Back to Europe and the middle ages, what is true is that in many feudal societies, peasants
were required to get permission from their lord to marry.
This requirement was called the culagium.
This often involved payment of a fee to be granted such permission (some claim this law
replaced jus primae noctis, but while there is hard evidence of culagium, not so much
with jus primae noctis, as mentioned).
Besides an extra source of revenue, another purpose of the culagium was the nobles safeguarding
their investment by making sure they didn’t lose their valuable serfs to a neighboring
lord for nothing.
In essence, jus primae noctis in some cases functioned as a tax due when a serf’s daughter
married a man not on the lord’s estate.
By requiring the tax, it also made it easier to track such movements in populace, as well
as perhaps deny it when prudent.
In addition, in some areas the Church also demanded payment of a fee to get the couple
out of a three day waiting period before consummating their union.
(One can only imagine how they tracked this.)
During that three day waiting period, the betrothed were supposed to be deep in prayer
to prepare themselves fully for their physical (and spiritual) union.
Of course, payoff your local clergy and you could go forth with a clear conscience.
In the end, let’s face it, life was brutal for peasants, and especially peasant women,
in this era.
When they weren't being wiped out by some pandemic, humiliation and subjugation were
just accepted facts of life for those born into the lower social orders.
Jus primae noctis or not, female serfs were at the mercy of their lords (and others),
who really didn’t need an excuse, a law, or a wedding to rape or assault the serfs
inhabiting their land, as we go into much more detail on in our video Did Any Medieval
Knight Ever Actually Rescued a Damsel in Distress?
The peasant class didn't appreciate all this (or many other such abuses) one bit, and so
it's no surprise that they would rally around a concept like jus primae noctis during various
uprisings and instances of political discourse.
In slightly more modern times, this was, for instance, a favorite weapon against nobility
and clergy used by the great enlightenment thinker Voltaire.
(Voltaire also, incidentally, made his fortune by helping to rig the lottery.)
As J.Q.C.
Mackrell states in his book, Attack on Feudalism in the 18th Century France, "the Philosophes
used the Droit [jus primae noctis] as a ploy to exaggerate the specter of oppressed Serfs.
(For them) no charge was too absurd..."
It should be noted here that at this time in France it was also said that lords used
to claim the right of droit de prélassement (right of lounging), a right of a lord to
use one of his subject's entrails, freshly ripped from the body, to warm the noble's
feet...
No charge too absurd indeed.
Speaking of absurd charges… how little Squarespace charges for their amazing website
and hosting service!...
Bonus Fact: Contrary to popular belief, in the western
world, while there certainly are exceptions, particular many among the royals, women in
medieval times did not commonly get married before the age of 18.
That said, it was technically allowed.
For example, the Catholic Church had rules for just about everything, and one of its
most authoritative texts was the Decretum Gratiani.
Written by the jurist Johannes Gratian in the 12th century, it set a minimum age for
betrothal (not necessarily marriage) at seven years for boys and girls, and the lawful age
for a woman to consent to marriage (and, as they called it, “carnal intercourse”)
at twelve, although certain unusual circumstances would render marriages at younger ages valid,
as well.
Gratian was followed by others including Hostiensis (Henricus de Seguisio) who opined that a young
woman’s physical development, not her age, should determine whether she was ready for
marriage.
This all might lead you to believe that the popular idea that in the Western world it
was common for girls of this era to get married is correct.
However, although medieval marriages could legally occur at ages as young as 12, that
doesn’t seem to have been the norm.
As stated in Kim Philips book, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England:
“While marriages at very young ages could and sometimes did take place, particularly
for girls of high social status, it would be a mistake to see marriage below or around
the age of puberty as the norm even for young noblewomen.
. . . Emerging evidence is eroding the stereotype . . . [with] work on low- and lower-middle-status
women [showing that] . . . a large proportion of the sample married between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-two, [and] . . . showing that urban girls [in Yorkshire] tended to
marry in their early to mid-twenties and rural girls . . . in their late teens to early twenties.”
So what about later?
A study performed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) on marriage in North
America and Western Europe mirrors the findings of the Yorkshire researchers; the NBER found
that young women from the 17th through 19th centuries were not all that young when they
got married.
For example, in Massachusetts records dating from 1652 to 1800 demonstrate that the mean
age of first marriage for ladies was between 19.5 and 22.5 years, and records for other
colonies reflect similar ages.
In fact, the average age of first marriage for all of the colonies studied was 19.8 before
1700, 21.2 during the early 18th century, and 22.7 during the late 18th century.
This is consistent with data gathered in England, France and Germany that puts the average mean
age of first marriage for women at 25.1 from 1750-1799 and 25.7 from 1800-1849.
Maintaining the trend, by the end of the 19th century, the median age when women were first
getting married was between 22 and 24 years old, and this tendency continued into the
1940s.
In fact, the lowest median age of first marriage since the early 1700s was had by the baby
boomer generation, where the age dropped to 20.5 years in 1950.
Perhaps unsurprisingly from this, the baby boomer generation also appears to have set
the peak for high divorce rates… more on that in a minute.
What about today?
As of 2010, the median age of first marriage for women was 26.1 (28.2 for men), although
research demonstrates that “marriage is most often delayed rather than foregone,”
and although they may wait awhile, “more than 90 percent of women will eventually marry.”
Back to divorce- while you’ll often read that there is a “50%” chance of any given
marriage ending in divorce, this isn’t quite accurate, or at least doesn’t tell the whole
story.
It only looks at the raw figures of marriages each year vs. the number of divorces.
This doesn’t take into account repeat divorcees, which skew the totals in any given year.
In fact, 67% of second marriages and 73% of third marriages end in divorce.
The average divorce rate for first marriages is only about 41% in the United States, and
these divorce rate figures have been declining significantly in the last few decades, reaching
their peak in the 1970s and early 1980s.
It should also be noted that marriages where both partners have a college degree only end
in divorce about 25% of the time.