Droit de seigneur

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Droit du seigneur (also droit de seigneur), French for the lord's right, and jus primae noctis, Latin for law (or right) of the first night, are the terms now popularly used to describe the purported legal right of the lord of an estate to deflower its virgins.

Droit du seigneur is often interpreted today as a synonym for jus primae noctis, although it originally referred to a number of other rights as well, including hunting, taxation, and farming. Popular culture, as discussed below, has led to an inappropriate conflation of these two concepts.

1 Possible explanations
2 Other references to the right or its exercise
3 Reference
4 External links

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Possible explanations

The existence of a "right of the first night" in the Middle Ages was a disputed topic in the nineteenth century. Although most historians today would agree that there is no authentic proof of the actual exercise of the custom in the Middle Ages, disagreement continues about the origin, the meaning, and the development of the widespread popular belief in this alleged right and the actual prevalence of symbolic gestures referring to this right.

In fact the jus primae noctis was, in the European late medieval context, a widespread popular belief in an ancient privilege of the lord of a manor to share the bed with his peasants' newlywed brides on their wedding nights. Symbolic gestures, reflecting this belief, were developed by the lords and used as humiliating signs of superiority over the dependent peasants in a time of disappearing status differences. Actual intercourse on behalf of the alleged right is difficult to prove. It probably never occurred.

The origin of this popular belief is difficult to trace. In the 16th-century, Boece referred to the decree of the Scottish king Evenus III that "the lord of the ground shall have the maidenhead of all virgins dwelling on the same". Legend has it that Saint Margaret procured the replacement of jus primae noctis with a bridal tax called merchet. King Evenus III did not exist, and Boece included much clearly mythical material in his account. In literature from the 13th and 14th century and in customary law texts of the 15th and 16th century, jus primae noctis is also closely related to specific marriage payments of (formerly) unfree people. We have good reason to assume that this relation goes back to the early medieval period and has its roots in the legal condition of unfree people and Germanic marriage customs.

On pages 30–31 of his Harlots, Whores & Hookers: A History of Prostitution (New York, New York: Taplinger Publishing, Inc., 1979), Hilary Evans, reiterating theories posited by earlier writers, offers a different explanation of the origins of the "right", what it represented, how it was perceived, and other cultures' practices that may have evolved from causes similar to those that led to the jus primae noctis:

Fertility rites are communal functions in which individual acts are harnessed for the common good. Defloration, on the contrary, is an event in individual life which in primitive cultures is considered so critical that the community rallies around to support the individual. So crucial and irreversible is the act of deflowering a virgin that the responsibility is more than the bridegroom can bear, so ways are found to spread the burden. Among certain Marquesan islanders of the Pacific, for example, it was customary until quite recently for the virgin bride to be laid on a platform of stones while the men of the tribe formed a line, singing and dancing, each in turn copulating with her and so accepting a share of the "blame."

The droit de seigneur, whereby local landowners claimed the right to sleep with every newly-wed bride in their domain, is often misinterpreted as an instance of feudal tyranny. In fact it is quite the opposite: a survival of the old defloration custom which reflects nothing but credit on the ruler; being divinely anointed, he is strong enough to bear the full weight of the responsibility on his shoulders and so spare his subjects entirely. So we can understand the respect given to Conchabar, king of Ulster in Ireland's legendary past, who pierced the maidenhead of every virgin in his kingdom; it was not for his sexual prowess but for his sheer courage that he was praised.

Then an even better solution was found. Why risk your fellow tribesmen, why endanger your king, when you can persuade some complete stranger to do the job? Since he is not subject to your gods, he may hope to escape unscathed from the ordeal; in any case, being [that of] a foreigner, his fate is no concern of yours. So the stranger is made welcome in the virgin's bed; this is what lies behind the readiness—so often misconstrued by people from other cultures—of primitive peoples to allow their guests access to their womenfolk. Marco Polo was astonished by the thirteenth-century Tibetans:

The people of these parts are disinclined to marry young women as long as they are left in their virgin state, but on the contrary require that they should have had commerce with many of the opposite sex; this, they claim, is pleasing to their deities, and they regard a woman who has not had the company of men as worthless. So, when a caravan of merchants arrives, as soon as they have pitched their tent for the night, the mothers of marriageable daughters bring them to the place and entreat the strangers to accept their daughters and enjoy their society so long as they remain in the district. The merchants are expected to give them presents—trinkets, rings or other tokens. When later they are designed for marriage, they wear these ornaments about the neck or other part of the body, and she who exhibits the greatest number is considered to have attracted the greatest number of men, and is on that account esteemed the highest by the young men looking for a wife.

Jus primae noctis may be translated into English as both "right of the first night" and "law of the first night"; law may imply right or obligation or both. The French version employs droit, which means right. With a name suggesting a right—a privilege—, the theory presented in Evans's work may seem dubitable: something perceived or intended as a burdensome obligation is unlikely to be called a right. However, it is possible that the French name for the practice was applied without knowledge of its origin.

In Eurasian literature, the right of the first night, in the sense of the privilege of a powerful man to deflower another man's bride, is a very old topos, present at least as early as Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2000B.C.).

The ethnographic evidence of ritual defloration is quite different from the Eurasian literary topos and the popular tradition of the Middle Ages. Medieval and early-modern travel accounts from India and South America offer reports of prenuptial deflorations of girls by chiefs or priests. Although these customs stem from very different cultural traditions, they meet in the fact that, in both cases, persons of high social rank were involved.

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Other references to the right or its exercise

Voyages historiques de l'Europe (Volume IV: pages 140–141), by Claude Jordan, first published in 1694; the description is similar to Boece's, but attributes the change to Malcolm I of Scotland, in the 10th century.
Voltaire, in 1762
Lorenzaccio (1834), by Alfred de Musset
The Marriage of Figaro, the play by Beaumarchais
The War Lord, the movie starring Charlton Heston
Braveheart, the film directed by Mel Gibson
The Aubrey–Maturin series of novels, by Patrick O'Brian, especially The Yellow Admiral
Chapter 7 of the first part of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which "the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories" is an element of the Party's propaganda
The tale of the ancient Irish hero Cúchulainn
Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters, a Discworld novel

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Reference

Boureau, Alain. The Lord's First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 0226067424.
Wettlaufer, Jörg. "The jus primae noctis as a male power display: A review of historic sources with evolutionary interpretation", in Evolution and Human Behavior Vol. 21: No. 2: pages 111–123. Elsevier, 2000.

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