Bundling

A bundling board in place at the Benchmark Inn in Provincetown, Massachusetts,

in case you are looking for a proper New England way to spoil a fun weekend.

In my post on Pauline Bonaparte, I mentioned the fact that, from about 1780 to about 1820, an Enlightenment window opened on the world, and people were far freer in both language and sexuality, until Victorianism arrived on the heels of Romanticism in the late 1820's and slammed that window shut again.

In 1859, an historian named Henry Reed Stiles, mired in Victorianism, wrote a book on the history of Connecticut, in which he spoke scathingly of “the camp vices and recklessness” that descended on New England after the Revolutionary War, which “flooded the land with immorality and infidelity,” and caused both church and temperance to be ignored.

And then he said,

“Bundling, that ridiculous and pernicious custom which prevailed among the young to a degree which we can scarcely credit, sapped the fountain of morality and tarnished the escutcheons of thousands of families.”

Wrong move, Hank. They didn’t mind being called drunken and licentious pagans, but when he slammed bundling, they came out of the woodwork, according to Stiles, “buzzing around my ears.” How dare you label such a fine old New England custom as immoral? Stiles attempted apologies all around, but got a very cold shoulder. And so, as a mea culpa, he wrote a little book on the subject, taking a far warmer and less judgmental attitude. Apology accepted.

You may have heard the term before, and been confused about its meaning. Here’s the skinny. In the first century of its history, America suffered from a chronic shortage of beds. Inns were few and far between, and usually grotty. And so, “bundling,” in its essential form, was simply two people, often not of the same sex, sleeping in the same bed, either fully clothed or one above the covers and the other below.

But fairly soon, bundling came to mean something quite different. It became a custom of colonial America in which young men and women who were courting or engaged were allowed to sleep with one another in the same bed, usually in the fashion stated above. Astonishingly, it was most prevalent in Puritan New England and Quaker Pennsylvania, both areas notorious for their sexual prudery. There was even a thing called a “bundling board” that could be laid between them to help to insure there was no hanky-panky.

Stuffy British historians loved to imply that bundling was a strictly American phenomenon, but this is not the case. It was practiced in the same period and under the same name in Wales, and the old custom of “hand-fasting,” a period of trial marriage in Olde Scotland, was related to it. In Holland, (where of course, they were to stick strictly to conversing with one another) it was called “queesting.” In Switzerland, it was the “kiltgang.” And so it goes.

It wasn’t always easy to court in those days. Finding privacy and personal space was often a problem (the drive-in hadn’t been invented yet) and everyone knew what it meant when a couple took a walk or went off to see if Mom’s roses were in bloom. Also, in the countryside, young men sometimes had to travel quite a distance to come a’courting and spend a little time with their lady love, and so they often spent the night with the family. Houses were much smaller then, and on the surface, anyway, it seemed as if it would be difficult to indulge in much more than some whispered conversations, with Mom and Pop sleeping just across the short hallway in the tiny shotgun house. But what’s really bizarre about the custom is the way that parents tended to wink and turn a blind eye to the inevitable kissing, groping, and just plain shoving the damn board under the bed.

So, of course, it was inevitable that lots of couples jumped the gun. In fact, the figures differing from time and place and from scholar to scholar, it’s still a fair guestimate to state that about one-quarter of colonial brides going down the aisle were pregnant already. In early Puritan days, a seven-months baby could get both the husband and wife a literal public thrashing, but thinking softened a great deal by the late 17th and the 18th century, and seven or eight-months babies happened in the best of families. A lot.

And what’s even more interesting is that, typically, the parents on both sides were perfectly serene and content with the situation. There are several reasons for what seems such a reversal of expected attitudes. First, most parents in those days wanted their children happily married and producing grandkids as quickly as possible. Keep ‘em out of trouble. Elements of this attitude remain for many married thirtysomethings whose mothers are always carping about “When are you going to start your family?”

But there’s another explanation that sprang from attitudes of this period, one being that a state of betrothal between a couple was looked on quite seriously. In fact, by the early Victorian period, a man who walked out on an engagement could find himself smacked with a “breech of promise” suit, ordered to fork over major sums for the emotional damage he’d caused, nearly as if it were a divorce. Other, less well-known customs sprang from the same source.

For example, mostly in Germany, there was a tradition of paying what was called “wreath money” in a similar situation, the payoff termed Kranzgeld in German. (Wasn’t it Kipling who warned us that once you have paid the Danegeld, you’ll never be rid of the Dane?) This was money paid to a woman whose fiancé walked out on her after having taken her virginity, thereby lowering her chances of marrying well considerably. The money was compensation for this loss. Virginity had enormous value in these cultures; symbolically, in the same part of the world, a woman was entitled to wear a wreath of myrtle when she was a virgin being married, but if she’d lost her virginity, it was a wreath of straw.

It’s a little like that great commercial from a few years ago, when the smiling bride leans down to the little boy at the reception, and he says sweetly, “My mommy says you’ve got a lot of nerve wearing white.”