Jus Primæ Noctis

Jus Primæ Noctis, the right of defloration of virgins, granted on the occasion of a marriage to a special person, as a chief or a priest, among many savage races, as the Kinipetu-Eskimo, Caribs, and certain Brazilian tribes. We have accounts by early travellers describing the custom as existing in Nicaragua, Teneriffe, Cambodia, Malabar; and Sugenheim asserts that the French kings Philip VI. and Charles VI. could not, in the 14th century, induce the Bishops of Amiens to give up the ancient right. Among many savages a similar privilege is freely granted to all the guests at a wedding—perhaps a survival of a reward for help in the abduction, although Lnbcock ingeniously attempts to explain it as originally an act of expiation for individual marriage. Again, a period of privileged and unlimited license just before marriage is not uncommon; while we often meet with the practice of lending a wife or a daughter to a stranger from primitive notions of hospitality. Dr Karl Schmidt in his erudite work, Jus Primæ Noctis, eine geschichtliche Untersuchung (Freiburg, 1881), contends that this 'droit du seigneur' never existed in Europe, having left no evidence of its existence in laws, charters, decretals, trials, or glossaries, and that the later belief in it is merely 'ein gelehrter Aberglaube,' which has arisen in various ways, as from reports of individual cases of tyranny and from an unnecessarily gross interpretation being attached to the fine paid by the vassal to his feudal lord for permission to marry. Bachofen, Giraud-Teulon, and Kulischer regard the jus primæ noctis accorded to a special person as a survival from a primitive stage of promiscuity or communal marriage, the ancient communal right being in course of time taken away from the community and transferred to the priest, king, or noble, as its chief representative. It is perhaps more simply to be understood as a mere tribute that may be exacted as a right by superior power, as by the kings of Dahomey; or a supreme mark of loyalty or respect offered to a chief or priest. This alleged ancient seignorial privilege is the central point of Beaumont and Fletcher's odious play, The Custom of the Country.