Jus Primae Noctis: Fact or Fiction?
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?
Numerous historians have studied the subject and the result is that 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 enforce 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. The peasant class didn’t appreciate 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.
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Bonus Fact:
- Besides the lordly right to first night, the fourteenth century Sir John Mandeville claims during his travels he encountered an island “Where the custom is such that the first night that they be married they make another man to lie by their wives for to have their maidenhead…for they of the country hold it…so perilous for to have the maidenhead of a woman.. I asked them the cause why that they held such custom: and they said, that of the old time man had been dead for deflowering of maidens, that had serpents in their bodies that stung man upon their yards [penis], that they died anon.”
- Despite most movie fans connecting the nickname “Braveheart” with William Wallace because of the award winning film with Mel Gibson (1995), in real life the specific nickname actually belonged to one of the semi-bad guys depicted in the film- Robert the Bruce. While Robert (then the Earl of Carrick) really did switch sides several times during the Wars of Scottish Independence, there is no record of him betraying Wallace and the Battle of Bannockburn wasn’t waged spontaneously as it seemed in the movie. He had been battling the English for nearly a decade up to that point. Robert ultimately became the King of Scots from 1306 and held that title until his death in 1329.
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This whole “right of the first night” thing is as much an urban legend as chastity belts. No historical references for them either.
I think people just make this stuff up because it sounds like something the unenlightened people of the past would do. Gotta make ourselves feel superior so we accuse them of all sorts of things that aren’t true.
Oh, chastity belts existed, all right. I saw one in the Tower of London museum when I was 13 years old and I’ve had nightmares about that horrific thing ever since. It’s too horrible to describe, but let’s just say they had all the bases covered. I imagine that any woman unfortunate enough to have to wear that awful thing made friends with the locksmith pretty quickly!
Okay, so add this to the historical inaccuracies in Braveheart I already knew about…and that film is just complete hogwash from beginning to end. I hate it when they make a “historical” movie and then change all the important facts. They should have just made it a fantasy movie, thrown in a few dragons, while they were at it.
While there is no evidence of it occurring, it does not mean it didn’t happen. There are historians who have read accounts that it did happen. It is not quite so black and white. Also the movie for the most part is pretty accurate because it is based on a poem that actually depicts William Wallace’s life.
I believe the part about the church’s fees is inaccurate. You are referring to the banns which had to be published (i.e read from the pulpit) for three consecutive holy days (normally Sundays) so it meant keeping it in your pants for weeks. A marriage license (which you paid the church for) gave you license to marry immediately.
The “right of the first night” was real. The Turks of the Ottoman empire inforced it in their conqured lands but it was a great shame for the catholic and ortodox christian women and their husbands so it was rarely spoked of. Especially if 9 months later the woman gave birth to a slightly darker child. People from Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary and others know this from stories that were past down through generations. It is also one off the reasons people from the Balkans don’t like muslims very much. I know this from a story of a conflict my family had with the Turks when a local Turkish nobel came to inforce the rule on one of my ancestors. The short story is my ancestor (Croatian Herzegovinian) chopped off the Turks head and the whole village had to move from Turskish ruled Herzegovina to Venetian Dalmatia because the penalty for that was burning the village and killing all of it’s people but at least he didn’t get his wife haha. But unfortunately most people weren’t so close to the border so they had to endure the shame.
I read also stories that many medieval European counties
Greetings from Croatia 🙂
Bare,
I heard similar story about the “first night right” from Ottoman occupied Greece. A friend of mine whose father was greek, told me that it was common for Turks to show up at weddings and decide whether to take the bride away or not, if they liked her. It sounded absurd and repulsing, but I guess it might be true. Just out of curiosity: Do you know how did your family cope with living in Dalmatia under the Venetian rule? Since part of my family comes from Veneto area in Italy, this is one of my main fields of historical interest.
Greetings from Brazil
Similar stories are told of times when there was muslim rule in northern India. It was said muslim gangs would abduct Hindu brides and gang rape them and it per they legal. To this day Hindu wedding cremonies in North India are conducted at night, though night is considered inauspicious time in Hinduism.
Sorry, but Biljana Plavšić is not a historian.
Bare,
Are you sure? Statuory rape might be in common, but in whole Serbian, Croatian and others history, there is nothing that’d support such a claim. Also, we don’t like muslims due to bad history between each other.
Hi, greetings from Hungary! As far as I know it was a practice in Hungary – but I did not know that it came from the muslim Turkey. Thanks for the information
“Voltaire also, incidentally, made his fortune by helping to rig the lottery.”
Your linked article is in conflict with this click bait. Voltaire didn’t “rig the lottery.” He and others ran a scheme to win because the lottery was stupidly designed. Geez…
Of course, because if there were such a practice of among feudal lords, surely we’d have some written account of it from the victims, just as we do from slaves of the degradations they suffered, or all the accounts of domestic violence we have from women of all stations considered property in their time….oh wait, slaves and peasants didn’t generally tend to read or write, nor one would think, tell each other stories of things that for them was just a part of the life of the subjugated, especially the humiliating and painful aspects they’d want to forget. Nor do we have accounts from even literate high-born women of domestic violence, and only know about the treatment of women from accounts of men, either boasting of their exploits or lamenting what they were forced to do to disobedient wives, daughters, or sisters who forgot their place.
But still, the author is probably right, about “the 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.” Except that there have been untold numbers of bastards in modern times that were simply raised by other men, and since these were women had just been married, it’s perfectly logical that their husbands would simply raise the bastard children as their own, just as was the case of the husbands of mistresses to kings who raised bastard children with royal blood. Why would they need “secret weddings” if they were newly married? About the rage the author contends it would induce: Does the author understand how subservient and demoralized these people were? What kind of horrors, humiliations, degradation, and deprivations they suffered generation after generation? How few uprisings there were of the billions of subjugated throughout the millennia? Rage was a luxury they couldn’t afford, and certainly couldn’t to act upon it. Suicide was a more common means of escape. Everything about the author’s line of thinking on this defies logic, particularly the “secret weddings,” for newly wed peasant women.
As for writing the law down, feudal rights didn’t need to be written down, because the entire point of feudalism is that serfs have no rights, and nobles were throughout much of history, above the law where serfs were concerned. Look what the Marquis de Sade had to do before being punished, precisely because he only abused peasants, and that was during a period of relative prudishness compared with earlier times. And considering that King Henry the VIII was ravaged by syphilis, and who knows what other STDs, after sleeping his way through the court and the palace servants, which was presumably the case with other monarchs and nobles as well, I don’t think STDs were a major concern among feudal lords. And by the way, Henry the VIII wasn’t young when he died, not for life expectancy for the time, and until the advent of AIDS, STDs weren’t an imminent death sentence, unlike the plague, small pox, TB, cholera, typhoid, typhus, and influenza that were far more apt to kill one than an STD. Additionally, the author is ascribing a promiscuity to young peasant women who would’ve been kept under close scrutiny, since loss of virginity would’ve meant her parents would be stuck with her forever, and examinations performed by midwives wasn’t unusual. Also, the feudal lord presumably wasn’t required to sleep with every newlywed peasant woman, since the law portion would’ve applied to the peasants being forced to submit, for the lord it would’ve been a right—meaning he could decide who and how many, or not to participate at all. Feudal lords were THE deciders. It was the right of monarchs to decide who would marry and who wouldn’t, but wasn’t written. Men were permitted to beat their wives, but laws weren’t written stating that until people began living in close proximity to one another. The sounds of distress from women being beaten disturbed their neighbors’ peace, so laws were instituted stating men could only beat their wives during daylight hours, becoming illegal once the sun set, up until the sun rose again. The author is applying modern thinking and assumptions to periods in which they simply didn’t exist, and is mistaken about the lethality of STDs.
Louis Veuillot wrote in 19th century France that: “Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the archives of Justice authorizes us to say that our forefathers ever made a crime into a law.” As far as I know, rape of peasant women wasn’t against the law. Peasants in general were viewed as little more than beasts of burden, only a small step above slaves, and women in general were the property of men, so peasant women had absolutely no rights and were considered to be of less worth than some animals. Note that all the historians listed, and I’m guessing the others among the “numerous historians” who have studied this, were all men, of whom would want to believe that their male predecessors were capable of such behavior, especially Veuillot, who was writing during a period when Victorian morality was spreading outside Britain, across the continent and the Atlantic. Frankly, I’m surprised the author of this is a woman since it sounds as if it’s written from the male perspective, one with little insight into the reality of the experiences of women centuries or millennia ago, which though different, have underlying commonalities in the way in which women are viewed today, views that didn’t substantially shift until the last century, and the patriarchal ethos that persists in modern cultures, even in Western cultures. There have been accounts, either written or handed down verbally, that were dismissed because modern people couldn’t imagine their predecessors being capable of things they came to view as abhorrent, including genocide, and even well documented accounts of the Holocaust that are being repudiated by some historians, albeit ones that are on the fringe, due to biases. A century from now, the Holocaust may be considered a hoax. It’s human nature to reject the worst acts of humanity, particularly if perpetrated by those of the same gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality. There are still those who try to justify slavery and the American civil war fought to perpetuate it.
I’m not contending that it was an actual tradition among feudal lords for millennia, it may very well not have been, but the arguments presented here aren’t conclusive or particularly persuasive, some aren’t even logical, ignore the realities of the relevant time periods, most are based upon the opinions of male historians, some of whom were from earlier centuries and almost certainly had a biased and skewed perspective because of the views and morality of their time, and none of which is at all sufficient to definitively pronounce that such a practice never existed, or that it’s completely absurd to even consider the notion, which seems to be the position of the author, judging by the tone of this piece.
The point is we know about all the stuff you mentioned already through other means because it wasnt that long ago and its been documented through other means anyway. Plus im sure some slaves and a lot of domestic abuse victims have in fact written and documented thier treatments plenty.
We have to go by what evidence we have, period. Otherwise we’re only assuming and speculating based on here say and weve all played the phone game in kindergarten so we sll know how that goes. And fortunately there is no evidence of this behavior no matyer how much you might hate men, sorry.
Also, study up on your diseases, STD’s could be quite the death sentence, especially before the advent of antibiotics and decent hygene such as the middle ages… Try looking up syphilis first…
I think rather than looking to books genetic may provide a clearer answer. As I understand it one of the most dominant Y chromosomes in the world is trace to Genghis Khan homeland and was spread by him and his relatives in their conquests. Women were offered up or taken. I don’t think you will find record of this in the law library. That it is in the history books is testament to our writing it and not the Huns.
Virginity tests have been debunked as valid indicators of anything, because hymens can tear, from intercourse or other causes, and they can also simply stretch and spring back, depending on the individual’s tissue elasticity etc. So examining the hymen is just invasive and meaningless and always was.
I think it’s more about sexual fantasy of moderns. Imagine the fantasy some men have of being a woman’s first. Particularly if it’s a king or nobleman.
The poor peasant husband has to “wait it out” on their wedding night while the nobleman gets to have his way with his Christian woman bride. Imagine what goes through her husband’s mind as she voluntarily surrenders to him, letting him be her first and the first to “educate” her on how to please a man and what would be “expected” of her.
The nobleman not only gets to be the firstin her, he is, “by law,” allowed to spend the entire night with her giving her all those new sensations and “introducing” her to sex through all those positions he tries with her. He warns her when he is about to ejaculate deep into the depths of her Christian innocence, providing her the royal seed she wants.
The child they conceive, when it is delivered and raised, the couple knows it’s not the husband’s and she isn’t as sexual with him as she might have been had she not given the nobleman or king her Christian innocence. As a woman never forgets her first, all through their marriage she always “looks back” and “compares” the way her husband attempts to satisfy her with how that nobleman did.
Though reluctant in the first part of their time together that fateful night she was about to give the nobleman her virginity, she soon became more relaxed and dropped her self-imposed religious restrictions when he held and kissed her and began to seduce her. She comes to enjoy his passion and tells him she loves him. Imagine the nobleman paid her some other visits in the future when he wanted to express his love to her in that special way and “re-enact” that special night they spend together.