So, I vaguely recall my high school history teacher mentioning a practice of the puritans in which youth who were courting were sewn into the bed in oder to make it more difficult for any hanky panky to go on, but I can’t remember what it’s called, or any of the specifics. Am I just imagining hearing this or did something like this really happen? I tried a couple of Google searches, but couldn’t find anything. Anyone out there know?
The Puritans were surprisingly non-puritanical when it came to courting practices; they wanted to be sure that the couple were going to be fertile…a surprising number of births happened less than nine months after the wedding.
You should read “Albion’s Seed” by Davis Hackett Fischer; he covers this in depth. Heckuva book.
sirkle, you’re not mis-remembering. There was such a practice, but for the life of me, I can’t remember the name of it either.
Courting couples were allowed to spend the night together, but the parents would sew them into separate bedding compartments.
The word you’re looking for may be “bundling.”
Just for the record, Puritans were called that because they wanted to “purify” the Church of England of all “popish” influences. They were unhappy with the accomodations that Elizabeth I made with the Catholic church. They didn’t seem to realize that such accomodations avoided open warfare, something like what goes on in Ireland to this day.
The tie in with sex came later, and the Puritans weren’t partucularly prudish, they just didn’t go in much for anything that made people seem to be having fun.
Puritans weren’t prudes. They lived in one-room cabins and pretty much grew up with the idea that people had sex. In fact, they considered sexual relations within marriage to be important (Cotton Mather once gave a semon severely chastising a husband who decided he would be holier if he abstained from sex with his wife).
In addition, they knew about premarital sex; they considered any child born in the first six months of marriage to be legitimate. As far as bundling was concerned, they knew that some young couples would not let the board between them stop them.
It was the Victorian era when prudism reached its greatest level.
Of course, in the Victorian Era it was the newly prosperous middle class that was notably prudish. They thought that they were copying the manners and behavior of the Upper Class.
Of course, the Upper Class was randy as hell, with the possible exception of Victoria Regina herself. My own view is that Victoria can be explained by the fact that she was surrounded by minor German aristocracy. That and an over inflated understanding of her own importance.
Of course, the Working Class and the Poor were fornicating, propagating and dying like flies, except for those condemned to a life of boredom and desperation by the acceptance of Methodism.