18th Century Dating: From Booty Calls to 'Bundling'

Summary

Betwixt The Sheets: Episode Summary

Title: 18th Century Dating: From Booty Calls to 'Bundling'
Host: Kate Lister
Guest: Dr. Angela Muir, Lecturer in British Social and Cultural History, University of Leicester
Release Date: October 25, 2024

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Introduction to 18th Century Dating Customs

Betwixt The Sheets opens with host Kate Lister introducing the episode's focus on dating customs during the Georgian period in 18th-century Wales. She sets the stage by highlighting the quaint yet complex nature of historical courtship practices, particularly emphasizing a tradition known as bundling.

Historical Context: Georgian Wales and Social Structures

Kate Lister delves into the societal framework of 18th-century Wales, where rural settings and dispersed populations influenced unique dating behaviors. She introduces Dr. Angela Muir, an expert on British social and cultural history, who provides deeper insights into the era's social dynamics.

[04:00] Kate Lister: "Navigating singledom and dating is a minefield at the best of times, and it is fascinating to see how people did it in years gone by."

Bundling: Misconceptions vs. Reality

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to bundling, a historical dating practice often misunderstood or romanticized. Bundling involved courting couples spending the night together side by side, fully clothed, sometimes separated by a wooden divider. Contrary to popular folklore, Dr. Muir clarifies that the traditional image of a woman being confined in a sack is largely a myth.

[26:02] Dr. Angela Muir: "No, no. And I mean, you get teenage early 20 something couple together. They're alone at night. Come on."

She explains that actual bundling was more about companionship and getting to know each other within the safe confines of the woman's household, rather than a strict prohibition against physical intimacy.

Illegitimacy and the Poor Law

Dr. Muir explores the impact of illegitimacy on single mothers and their children, placing it within the context of the Poor Law—a series of laws regulating welfare and support for the impoverished. She emphasizes that the primary concern surrounding illegitimacy was financial responsibility, not moral judgment.

[08:34] Dr. Angela Muir: "A child born outside of wedlock."

Dr. Muir discusses how parish records from the Court of Great Sessions in Wales provide rich details about social attitudes and economic obligations. These records reveal that 20% of children in certain Welsh parishes were born to unmarried mothers, often due to economic constraints rather than immorality.

Social Stigma and Class Differences

Contrary to Victorian stereotypes, Dr. Muir argues that illegitimacy in Wales carried less stigma than commonly believed, especially among the lower classes. High rates of illegitimacy were often driven by poverty, making it a pragmatic rather than a shameful aspect of life.

[18:26] Dr. Angela Muir: "It's like, well, this is just life. We have to deal with it."

She contrasts this with upper-class experiences, where illegitimate children were discreetly noted in parish records without overt labeling, indicating a nuanced approach to social hierarchy and reputation.

Autonomy of Single Women and Single Men

The conversation shifts to the autonomy of single women, highlighting that many could support themselves through smallholding and subsistence farming. Dr. Muir notes that single women often lived independently or with extended family, maintaining a level of privacy and autonomy uncommon in other historical contexts.

[22:14] Dr. Angela Muir: "So you have people being bounced around across parish boundaries."

Regarding single men, Dr. Muir observes that records seldom highlighted stigma but often portrayed them as rakish or repeat offenders in matters of illegitimacy.

[37:51] Dr. Angela Muir: "Yeah. But I have to say the single men who catch my attention are rather rakish."

Cultural Comparisons and Modern Relevance

Dr. Muir draws parallels between historical practices like bundling and modern dating behaviors, suggesting that while the mechanisms have changed, the underlying challenges of dating and relationships remain.

[40:38] Dr. Angela Muir: "It's a thing that was imported to the colonies in North America."

She also humorously speculates about the revival of bundling in contemporary culture, underscoring the enduring fascination with historical dating customs.

Conclusion: Reassessing Historical Narratives

In wrapping up, the episode encourages listeners to reassess preconceived notions about historical dating and social norms. Dr. Muir emphasizes that while there were undoubtedly challenges and tragedies, there was also a level of pragmatism and support within communities that mitigated some of the harsher aspects of illegitimacy and singlehood.

[38:56] Dr. Angela Muir: "Presumably, based on the records that I look at, if a young woman openly admitted to being pregnant, said, I need some support..."

Kate Lister concludes by acknowledging the complexity of historical social structures and invites listeners to reflect on how much—or how little—has truly changed.

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Notable Quotes

• Dr. Angela Muir [12:00]: "It was more holding people financially accountable for it."
• Dr. Angela Muir [18:26]: "It's like, well, this is just life. We have to deal with it."
• Dr. Angela Muir [26:02]: "No, no. And I mean, you get teenage early 20 something couple together. They're alone at night. Come on."
• Dr. Angela Muir [37:51]: "Yeah. But I have to say the single men who catch my attention are rather rakish."
• Dr. Angela Muir [40:38]: "It's a thing that was imported to the colonies in North America."

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Additional Resources

For those interested in exploring more about Dr. Angela Muir's work, visit her website or the University of Leicester staff pages.

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Betwixt The Sheets offers a thought-provoking examination of historical dating practices, challenging stereotypes and uncovering the socio-economic factors that shaped relationships in 18th-century Wales. Through engaging dialogue and expert insights, listeners gain a deeper understanding of how past societies navigated the complexities of love, responsibility, and societal expectations.

Transcript

[Kate Lister]

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[Kate Lister]

Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. And you are you.

[Angela Muir]

And I'm so glad that you are.

[Kate Lister]

Here with me and that we can do this thing together. But before we can, I have to tell you that this is an adult.

[Angela Muir]

Podcast, spoken by adults to other adults.

[Kate Lister]

About adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects.

[Angela Muir]

And you should be an adult too.

[Kate Lister]

And if you can't tick every single one of those off of your list, you have no business listening to this podcast at all. Be off with you. And for the rest of you, on with the show. Dating customs are a funny thing, aren't they? Especially when you look back through history. Some of them, by modern standards at least, feel a little twee, shall we say, a little naive, perhaps. Look at this prime example from the Georgian period. Inside this cozy home, on a farmstead, up in a small bedroom, lie a courting couple who are partaking in something sweetly and innocently called bundling. What is bundling? I hear you ask. Well, I'll tell you, this is where the couple who have been courting will get to know one another a little bit better. And they'll do that by spending the whole night lying side by side, bundled up together, but keeping all of their clothes on. Aha. Or at least that was supposed to be the plan. Some of them, like this couple here, even had a little wooden divider down the middle of the bed, because that'll do it, right? That'll keep a horny couple apart. A little piece of wood. But what other ways did young Georgians navigate the dating world? I think we better get out of here and leave this Georgian couple to get on with their bundling.

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What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course.

[Angela Muir]

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button.

[Kate Lister]

Era now. Era now.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

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Goodness, my beautiful dance.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.

[Kate Lister]

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kay Lister. Navigating singledom and dating is a minefield at the best of times, and it is fascinating to see how people did it in years gone by. But I've got a soft spot for those who stick two fingers up to the whole process. And in today's conversation, we're going to find out about women who lived out in the country, owning their own property with livestock and grain, and building lovely little lives all for themselves. This is cottage core in the Georgian period and I am here for it. Helping us navigate this minefield today is Dr. Angela Meir, lecturer in British Social and Cultural History and director of the Centre for Regional and Local History at.

[Angela Muir]

The University of Leicester.

[Kate Lister]

What autonomy did women have in this world and how did this change the further down or up the class ladder you went? And what happened in situations where illegitimate children were involved? Well, I am ready to get bundled up if you are.

[Angela Muir]

Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

[Kate Lister]

It's only Angela Muir.

[Angela Muir]

How are you doing?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

I'm good, thank you. How are you?

[Angela Muir]

I'm thrilled to be talking to you. That's how I'm doing. I love it when we speak to people who have a property niche, subject interest, and that seems to be what.

[Kate Lister]

You are, which is?

[Angela Muir]

I don't know. What would you describe your research focus as, Angela?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Well, if I'm not being overly professional, I joke that I'm the leading expert on Welsh Bastards in more ways than one. But if I, if I am being professional, I'm a British social and cultural historian who focuses on Wales in the 18th century. But I look specifically at gender and deviance and illegitimacy and those sorts of things. But in, specifically in Wales and looking more at the lower orders of society, not the posh people.

[Angela Muir]

Why Wales and why illegitimacy and why poor people? There has to be an origin story for this as to how you ended up here. What's that?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

So years ago, when I was doing my Masters, I was doing that at Swansea University. I took a one year leave of absence from my job in Canada and that was 14 years ago. I never went back. When I was trying to figure out what to do for my Master's dissertation, I read an article by Nick Woodward on infanticide in Wales. And at the end of that article it said, before we can really know more about infanticide, we need to know more about illegitimacy in Wales. And at that point there really hadn't been anything done. So I thought, oh, okay, there's an idea. And I just haven't looked back. There's been one other person to do a PhD on illegitimacy in Wales, but otherwise I think it's just me and.

[Angela Muir]

Her, just the Sue.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

So that one sort of sentence at the end of an article just got me, just got me started. And Wales is one of those places that it's often overlooked by historians of Britain and it's assumed that it's either just like England or there aren't many records available. And in many ways neither of those are true. So it's, for a historian, it's an open playing field because there's just so much left to be explored about Wales.

[Angela Muir]

And what kind of documents is it that you're looking at? What time periods do you look at for this?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

I look mainly at sort of from the late 17th century through to the early 19th century. My book that I have about deviant maternity, I used a lot of parish records, which are very similar to what we have in England. But what most of my research now uses are records from the Court of Great Sessions in Wales, which was similar to the English Assizes, although there was some other civil stuff that they did there. So this was the highest criminal court in Wales from the Acts of union in the 16th century right through until they were abolished and replaced with the assizes in the 19th century. And what makes them unique compared to their English counterparts is the survival of pretrial Depositions, where there's some survival of these in England, but in Wales, there's a huge survival of these because the language of the people was often Welsh, but the courts were held in English. So the records of the statements people made to officials after a crime had been reported would be translated and transcribed. So they're all written in English, even if that's not the language of the person who was giving the evidence. All these depositions were just bundled in with the rest of the records from any sitting of the court. And they've, you know, a lot of them have survived. So there's really, really rich detail, not only about crime, but just what people were thinking or doing, what else they witnessed, you know, what the weather was like. All of these details are contained in these records and there's lots of them.

[Angela Muir]

Is there a difference between illegitimacy and bastardry? No, they're the same thing.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yeah. It's just the language. So a child born outside of wedlock.

[Angela Muir]

And was this against the law? Like, why is the law involved in this?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

The main reason, I mean, if you go far back enough, there would be ecclesiastical courts that would have been concerned with this, but by the 18th century, they had really fallen out of. They weren't really being used for much more than defamation cases. The main concern really had to do with money. An unmarried woman having a child outside of wedlock would have been at risk of poverty. And because of the poor law, it would have been the parish that would be responsible, or the parish that the mother or the child belonged to would be responsible for carrying the burden, the financial burden, because a single woman, with or without child, didn't have a lot of financial options. But then you add childcare to that mix and it's going to be the community that has to pay for them and help support. So most of the concerns had to do with money. And so that's why most of the records we have, at least the records of the sort of people I look at, it all has to do with poor law and poverty and concerns around who's going to be financially responsible for taking care of this child.

[Angela Muir]

So what was the poor law? For anybody who might be listening, who's not familiar with that term, what was that? And what kind of date are we thinking of here?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

So poor law is sort of a misnomer in a way, because it wasn't a single law. There were a series of laws, the legislation was updated all the time, but we really sort of pinned the poor law as becoming a thing in the late Elizabethan period. So these were laws that regulated who was eligible for support and who wasn't, and you could be punished otherwise. So communities at that time were based around the parish. So the, you know, the parish church wasn't just the place that you would go to worship, it would be part of your community. And officials in the parish would collect poor rates or basically taxes from those who could afford it and then distribute essentially an early form of welfare to those who needed it, whether because you were sick or infirm or in some places out of work. Although that the concept of unemployment wasn't really a thing then. Early welfare support was something that was administered at the level of the parish. And then right up into the 19th century there is new legislation introduced all the time to try and help make sure it was only those who were deemed deserving who were in receipt of poor law support. And so issues around illegitimacy did change all the time. So where would you receive support? In the place where the mother was born or the mother had settlement? Does the child receive settlement? Settlement being an idea similar to kind of modern day immigration, where the place that you belong and where you have access to welfare support. So you have people being bounced around across parish boundaries. You have welfare women who were pregnant and in labor being moved across parish boundaries so that she wouldn't be a burden to the one parish. Yeah, there's accounts of this, of women in labor being denied support and just being thrown on the back of a horse and taken across a bridge together into a different parish to make her someone else's problem. It's horrific.

[Angela Muir]

Jesus.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

And that goes right up into the early 19th century when we have the new poor law brought in. And that's where we see the establishment of workhouses in every county. And that's sort of the, you know, the Dickensian, Charles Dickens, horrible workhouse. That system replaces the old poor law system.

[Angela Muir]

And they did try to pass laws.

[Kate Lister]

What was it?

[Angela Muir]

The bastardry laws or the laws where like you tried to make only the mother responsible, not the father, or words to that effect. What was that?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

It changed a fair bit. In some cases you would have. So a mother or a father, if you could identify him, were at risk of being imprisoned for having a child outside of wedlock.

[Angela Muir]

Imprisoned?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yeah, imprisoned. Although I don't have a lot of records of that happening often, but it did, but it was more holding people financially accountable for it. So you would have official records drawn up. Bastardy bonds, which is a great name, nice, but horrible thing. So the idea of the Bond would hold someone financially accountable for the maintenance of a child. So it was typically the father or could be the father's family or just someone with means or who was presumed to have means, who is bound financially to provide maintenance payments. You'd also have affiliation orders, and this was a formal document that legally identified who the father was. Of course, this is before paternity testing, so there's no way of knowing.

[Angela Muir]

Just ask you about that. How do you prove that?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

It's one of those things where you're guilty until proven innocent. So if it seemed viable that a man could be the father of a child, there was a good chance he would be held responsible. And a lot of the records I look at, you have an account where a woman says, oh, he. He's the father of my child, but he was trying to get me to swear the child to someone else. So trying to make someone else financially responsible, often someone who may have been of a higher status. So just trying to shift responsibility that way. There's some accounts of midwives who would threaten to withhold their services to a woman who is actively in labor, saying, unless you tell me who the father is, I'm not going to help you. So, quite cruel.

[Angela Muir]

This is unbelievably cruel. This sounds like these women are so vulnerable. If you were a pregnant woman, you found yourself up the spout, as my mother would have said, and you're not married to the guy, maybe you've had a dalliance. What on earth are your options here? How do you even go about applying? Do you just turn up at the parish and admit what's happened? What's the process here?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

That is one option. You could go to parish officials and say, oh, got a spot of bother here. Can you please help? And that probably did happen in many cases, and we don't have a lot of record of that, other than payments made by parishes to support women, unmarried women, during their period of lying in. And we do have evidence of that, and sometimes we only have that record. And there's nothing else to suggest there was anything horrific or dramatic about their experiences. But some women did choose to conceal, either intentionally or they were just in complete denial. If this was a young woman and she wasn't wise to the ways of the world, she may not even know she was pregnant or she just was actively denying it. So some women did conceal, and once it started to show a bit, you might be confronted by, you know, your parents or your master or mistress or parish officials to try and, you know, get you to admit who the father was and to make arrangements for the birth of the child. And some women concealed all the way along. And then, you know, we have evidence of this as well, unfortunately, of women who did deliver and delivered secretly. And whether the child was stillborn or, you know, there was an act of violence against the child. Unfortunately, we do have a lot of cases of what we now refer to as infanticide. It wasn't referred to as that before, but, you know, we have a lot of records of newborn child murder, and it was almost always illegitimate children. And that's partly because of how the law was written at the time. Technically speaking, only unmarried women could commit infanticide according to a 17th century law. It was understood that a married woman would never want to do that, would never have reason to do that. The whole idea of, you know, postpartum psychosis wasn't. Wasn't really acknowledged at the time. It was just that, well, an unmarried woman to hide her shame will do away with her child. So we'll make that a separate category of murder.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Angela after this short break.

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[Angela Muir]

Sold. Huh?

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[Angela Muir]

What?

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You still haven't sold yours? You told me about it months ago.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

I just.

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[Dr. Angela Muir]

Oh, the offer's great.

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Don't have another car yet.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

I could trade it in for this car I love. Come on.

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[Dr. Angela Muir]

Ah, you're right.

[Kate Lister]

Let's go.

[Angela Muir]

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[Angela Muir]

What was the stigma then around being illegitimate and being a single mother at the time? And did it differentiate according to class?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

That's a really good question. Kate Gibson, who's done some work in England, has focused on that. But in Wales, there's not a lot of evidence that there was much stigma, because in Wales, levels of illegitimacy were so high in some areas. Some of the parishes I've looked at, 20% of children born in any given year were born to unmarried mothers. It's likely due to economic factors more than anything, the Victorian commentators like to say that it was because women were so immoral, the Welsh are so immoral with their language and their ways and all of these things. But, you know, realistically speaking, it's just because poverty was endemic and you needed money to get married and set up your own household. So if you were engaging in certain courtship customs that let you get pregnant and you couldn't afford to get married, you're probably going to have an illegitimate child. So I. I suspect it wasn't something that was highly encouraged, but it was so common that it's like, well, this is just life. We have to deal with it. But there's not a lot of evidence of the label of, you know, someone being bastard or illegitimate, following them throughout their lives. It's really only in infancy and early childhood where you see payments made from the parish to the bastard or base or natural born, all those different euphemisms for illegitimacy, the payments being made by the parish to support a child. But once that's done, you don't tend to see that anymore. You don't tend to see teenagers or adults being referred to as being base or natural, unless it's maybe in a will of a parent, where you have people listening their beneficiaries, otherwise the label doesn't tend to follow people throughout their life. So it likely didn't carry a significant amount of stigma.

[Kate Lister]

That's amazing.

[Angela Muir]

So 20% of people in some areas of Wales, 20% of mothers are single, 20% of kids are illegitimate. How long would payments be made by the parish? What was their sort of cutoff date? Today you're responsible until the child's 18, whether or not you're married or not. But what was it in Wales?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

It was often sort of the age of seven. They liked things in increments of seven, seven or three back in the day. So often up until the age of, or early adolescence or until they could sort of provide for themselves. So you do see children receiving payments from maintenance payments, and then they're put out to apprentice. But not like a big fancy guild apprentice where you go and learn some super fancy trade that, you know, like you see in London. These are pauper apprenticeships, where you see essentially a form of fostering or foster care, where you'll have a child placed in another family's household and you'll learn something like husbandry or farming, or a daughter would learn something like housewifery. So it's essentially just taking a child and putting them into a household where presumably they'll be better cared for financially. But whether or not they're actually cared for or exploited is, you know, that's debatable.

[Angela Muir]

So it's not that you'd get like 20% of single mums, like with their kids with them, because that must have been very difficult. Presumably you couldn't go and work if you had a child with you. I'm just trying to get an idea of how this works, because the mother's got to earn money somehow and she's unmarried, she's on her own. How is she earning money and having a baby?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

So for lower class women at the time, the most common form of employment was working in service. And most households wouldn't have wanted a pregnant woman or a woman with a small child working. It just wasn't practical. And we're not talking all the sort of big grand houses, the upstairs, downstairs sort of thing. Average households would have had servants because that was just the nature of life at the time. You needed help doing everything. So even fairly low down the social order, you would have servants in the home, but you probably didn't want a woman who had a child doing this. So it could be family would take care of the child or the woman would live with her mother's or father or extended family. So arrangements you might even still see today where someone will move home and have the child, grandparents might help raise the child while the woman works, or just you'd have a woman who was essentially on the dole until the child was old enough to be put out to apprentice.

[Angela Muir]

Wow. Were these mostly working class women? What was the deal if you were posh? I guess if you've got the money, you can do things very differently, can't you?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yeah, if you're posh, you might be sent away to be married or just sent out to the for a nice holiday in the country for a couple of months. We don't have a lot of records, at least the sort of records I look at that deal with sort of mid lean or upper class women, other than perhaps baptism records where you have a child being listed and they might not even. You get a lot of euphemisms in parish records because that's one of the places we identify a lot of illegitimate children. But that wasn't one of the details that parish officials were legally required to write down in these registers. So they're registers of every baptism, marriage and burial that happened in a parish. Only sort of the basic information was required. But officials did decide that they would say whether or not a child was illegitimate. And so you get a lot of euphemisms, especially for higher up the social order. So instead of a child being listed base or legitimate or bastard or natural, all of the different things that they like to use, instead of that, you might just have the child of and then you'd have the mother and the father's name listed, but different surnames. So if you know how to read that, that's an illegitimate child, but it's not actually adding that label to it. But beyond that, if you're not in receipt of Poor Law support, you would only find evidence of that in personal correspondence or, you know, family. Family collections of letters or diaries or those sorts of things. It's not going to show up in anything to do with the Poor law.

[Angela Muir]

Was there anything in Wales, like the Foundling Hospital in London, which was set up to take in illegitimate children because often the mothers just couldn't provide for them.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

No. And you didn't even have hospitals in Wales in the 18th century.

[Angela Muir]

Wow.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

It was all quite. Yeah, just the population was so small. Everything was very parish based. So, yeah, there were no formal institutions in Wales. It was all administered at the local level.

[Angela Muir]

I suppose it's kind of difficult to look at, like cause and effect. But when you're looking at something like this and these kind of statistics and datas and everything, what can it tell us about dating culture in Wales amongst the working classes, amongst these people who, if you're going to have penetrative sex.

[Kate Lister]

A baby might follow.

[Angela Muir]

That's just the fact of it. And it would seem that that happened quite a lot.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yeah, a fair bit.

[Angela Muir]

What can we extrapolate from that about what it must have been like to date at the time?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Well, risky if you're poor in Wales. This is one of the things where there are a lot of assumptions about Wales that it's sort of based on loose bits of evidence. And then folklorists later on kind of ran with it and suggested that there were these elaborate courtship customs for the middling and lower classes in Wales, where it's one of those things that's rooted in grains of truth, but then people have run away with it and turned this very, very elaborate. But, yeah, it's Wales, it's sparsely populated. It's not like you can get together down the local. Because everyone's sort of scattered about on their various farms. There's no necessarily. There's no local place to meet other than, say, annual hiring fairs that might happen in the spring. And you can get young people together who are looking for work and they can run off and have a roll in the hay. You have to come up with something else. There's no sort of local place to get together. And so there's this tradition of young men and women gathering so as a couple, not groups of them, but like a man and a woman gathering in the woman's home and spending time together in the woman's home. So you'll go on dates, but the date will be in the household of the woman in this couple, which could either be her family home or it could be the home of her employers, presumably, because that's a safer space for the woman to occupy because she's with her family. And there might be a level of supervision. Often there wasn't supervision. And so you'd have young couples spending sometimes an entire night together sat up in the kitchen of the home or even in bed together.

[Angela Muir]

Is this what they call bundling?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

This is, yeah. So this is. This is what we get this custom of bundling from. So bundling in the elaborate version of it that you find in sort of folklore accounts or even travel literature, where the person writing it may not have even seen this or set foot in Wales. It's the idea that you would have a young woman and this would be something that was assumed to happen in the later stages of courtship. The young woman literally bundled up in a sack that was tied up to her neck. So she couldn't move her arms, she couldn't move at all. She was just like this little sack with a head sticking out of it on a bed. And her lover, or the, you know, the guy that was courting her would be in bed with her, but not in a sack. So the idea was that her body was completely off limits.

[Angela Muir]

And who was supervising this?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Well, the idea would be it would be parents, master or mistress, fellow servants, whoever else is in the household. But based on the records that I look at, I'm gonna say nobody. And I'm also gonna say that the sack probably wasn't involved. There's other accounts where there was maybe like a board or a bo or something between the couple. But again, I've not come across much evidence of that. Or maybe that was happening and no one was writing it down. And it's just the stuff that I look at where maybe they just didn't have a big bag for the woman. But we do know that men and women, young men and women who weren't married would spend the night together in bed, as is the custom of the county or country, which is something that I found in these court records, where you end up. There's a woman who is pregnant. And often this is. Is because there's some sort of violence acted against her by the male lover. And the story starts that she was pregnant, and she had become pregnant because they had been spending the night together, as is the custom. And you see that line in some of these records, as is the custom of the. Of the country. So it's clearly acceptable for a young man and woman to spend the night together. And one of the records that I've looked at recently, it was in the kitchen of the family home. And others, the woman would sort of, as soon as the household went to bed, she'd open the door or a window and let the man in, and they'd spend the night together in bed. And this is not only from the couple who's involved in this, but also other servants in the household say, no, no, they used to do that, as is the custom.

[Angela Muir]

I don't think that that sack sounds like it offers a lot of protection, if I'm completely honest. No, from what you're saying, these don't sound like they're entirely chaste situations.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

No, no. And I mean, you get teenage early 20 something couple together. They're alone at night. Come on.

[Angela Muir]

Have you got your bag?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Bring your sack. It's just.

[Angela Muir]

It's kind of sweet, but also bonkers. What were they supposed to be doing? They're not supposed to be having sex because she's in a sack which is tied up to a neck. They're just supposed to be just chatting or like.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yeah. Getting to know each other. I think the idea was, it was, well, what does anyone do on a date? You know, you, you get to know each other and then, you know, enough time passes. It's like, right, well, are we gonna. Wow, they're young, hormonal, horny teenagers. What do you don't think it takes much imagination.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Angela after this short break. Thanks for listening to Betwixt the Sheets. To get all History hit podcasts ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe or you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click.

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[Angela Muir]

What I find fascinating about that is, like, people of the past, they weren't stupid. They were no more stupid than anyone is today. So they must have known what that custom was. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It's like an odd cultural sanction for, like, we're all going to pretend we're not having premarital sex because we put a sack on somebody. But they must have.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yeah, and I suspect they did.

[Angela Muir]

Wales, you're completely mad and I do love you.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Well, and I think the idea was it wasn't just, you know, you can go off and do this with anyone and as, you know, date as many people as you like. The idea was this was a step on the road to marriage.

[Angela Muir]

Oh, I see. Okay. So you couldn't just bundle with any old person.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yeah. But you're doing this just in order to get to know each other well enough to get married. The historian Adrienne Wilson has come up with sort of two categories of courtship. There's courtship led marriage and marriage led courtship. Marriage led courtship being that you would have the promise to get married, which was legally binding. It was as binding as a Marriage, you'd have that promise. And then a couple might engage in premarital sex. Whereas courtship led marriage is you engage in premarital sex and then it's like, oops, you're pregnant, we best get married. So the premarital sex comes before the promise of marriage. And so in Wales, if we take that model and apply it to Wales, it's the courtship led marriage. So you have sort of high risk. You know, if marriage is a thing that matters, this is a high risk behavior. And then just because of the economic reality of, of rural Wales, there's a lot of poverty. It's difficult then to actually get married because the idea is once you're married, you set up your own household. We don't have extended families where you have young married couples staying at home with their parents. And also to get married you have to pay, you know, there's, there's a fee involved in that. So if you can't afford it, well, then you're going to end up with a lot of illegitimate children. Especially if it's acceptable to engage in premarital sex as a part of courtship.

[Angela Muir]

You don't think of women of the past of having much power, especially when it comes to marriage. But if a woman just said, no, I don't want to marry you, was that all right? Would that have been listened to? You know, I was watching Pride and Prejudice the other night for the millionth time and Obviously Elizabeth refuses Mr. Colin, doesn't she? And her mum freaks out. But would that have just been okay even if you'd bundled with somebody?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yeah, I think the idea of once you're at the stage of bundling, that's where the consent is. And we do have evidence of that potentially being problematic as well. But if you're at the stage where you're willingly entering into that level of relationship, women would have been able to say no. But what we find more often than not is it's the man who's doing the woman a dirty. So she wants to marry, but he's shirking responsibility and doesn't want to. And I have one case where a man, he's at a pub, this is in the early 19th century, he's at a pub all night, drinking with his mate, walks to this woman's house, so he's already been courting a few times, takes off all of his clothes except for his breeches, opens a window and climbs inside. But he accidentally climbs inside the master of the house's bedroom. Oh, God. Not his intended. There's a Scuffle. He's restrained. And then the servant who he was intending to visit comes downstairs and recognizes him and says, like, oh, no. We had been courting for a while, but he hasn't been by in about three months. But he had been, you know, I. When he had been here before, I let him through the door when everyone else had been in bed. And then, you know, we courted in bed, as is the custom.

[Angela Muir]

As is the custom.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

But then she. When, you know, she called things off when she found out he was already married. So she thought she was genuinely courting this guy, but he had no intention of actually marrying her because he had a wife and young child at home already. So he was using this ritual just for a booty call. And we have other examples where a woman who had been courted by a man ends up pregnant and then pursues him for marriage, because that was. They were intimate on the grounds that they would get married. And then the man's like, oh, no, my kid's not mine. Or swear the child to someone else or just sort of puts it off. And sometimes that actually ends very tragically. It ends in violence, where the man makes a choice to end the woman's life instead of. Yeah. Instead of owning up to his responsibility. So a woman absolutely could have said no, but if she's at risk of getting pregnant, she's probably not going to want to say no. She's going to want to make sure that she's, you know, taken care of by the standards of the day.

[Angela Muir]

What about single women? A cause particularly close to my own heart. For those who just went right. For those who just went, no, this is all shit. I don't want to do this. I'm not interested in you or your sack or anything else else. I'm just gonna stay by myself. Thank you very much. How were they viewed? Because I feel like we are. It's still a very pertinent issue to this very day. And I think that we've still got a lot of single stigma around us. Like, not in the same way, you know, like, people aren't trying to put bags over our heads or, you know, make us illegal or anything, but people expect you to be partnered up. And there's. There is always a reaction when you say that. That you're not. So what was this like. Like hundreds of years ago, if you're a single lady?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

We have this idea that it was dangerous to be a single woman and that, you know, going back to some of the theories around witchcraft and women being stigmatized, because you know, the unmarried woman on the edge of the community. But the reality was, especially in the 18th century, I hate this language, but it's the language that used. There was a surplus female population. You know, biologically, more female babies are born than male babies. Men tend to engage in higher risk activities, so they're more likely to die, especially adolescence, through doing stupid things to going off to war, to being involved in dangerous forms of labor. So you end up with more women than you do men. Whether it's because they're never married or widowed. You do have this sort of surplus female population. And there's evidence at least from Wales that women were able to support themselves comfortably by the standards of the day. Yeah. So you have female smallholders. There's one study that was done, I think it was on Pembrokeshire. But you do have female smallholders who. It's a woman who lives by herself, has a couple of sheep and enough of a patch of land to farm for herself. So, you know, smallholders, subsistence farming by women. And in some of the records I've looked at of infanticide, you have women who are living alone who end up pregnant. And you see sort of the power negotiations where someone from the community will want to interrogate a woman's body to see if she's pregnant or has recently given birth and concealed it. And there's a couple of cases where there's a woman Levine on her own and those who are trying to sort of surveil her body aren't knocking the door down and barging in. You do get groping done by communities if it's a younger woman, but you know, an older someone may be in their late 20s or 30s or something like that. They have to surveil in a different way. They have to have to ask permission to go in or they're sort of looking through the crook in the door sort of thing to observe a woman in her body. So there's a sense of autonomy there that they can't just barge in. This woman has a right to her own space and her own privacy. So, yeah, single women were a thing and they weren't necessarily shunned. I'm not going to say it was easy for them because this is a society that women don't have that many economic opportunities. But it was possible for women to. Single women to exist and be okay.

[Angela Muir]

What about single men? Because sometimes you do find that they encountered a stigma in a different way almost that they were like being selfish for being bachelors, that they should have married up and be Providing for a family. Sometimes you see that one. And at various points in history, I don't know if it ever happened in Wales, but at various points in history.

[Kate Lister]

They'Ve tried to make being a bachelor.

[Angela Muir]

Fineable because you should go and get married. Was there any stigma to being a single fella in Wales or was it just as long as you've got your sack, have at it.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

I've not come across any stigma, but I have to say the single men who catch my attention are rather rakish.

[Angela Muir]

Oh, okay.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

But that's only because. I think that's because of the records I'm looking at. I don't want to say that all Single men in 18th century Wales Wear rakes, but if they're coming to my attention, they are. They're rogins.

[Angela Muir]

Are they repeat offenders? Have you found like the same name cropping up time and time again like they're old friends? You're like, oh God, you again.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Yeah. In Paris records there's a few where there's. And that's one of the points I make in my book. It's like we always focus on women when it comes to illegitimacy, but it's not like illegitimate children just, you know, spontaneously appear in a woman's womb. Like it's gonna, it's gonna take men there. So you do see repeat male names sometimes in parish records that it's like, yeah, no, he's, he's up to no good.

[Angela Muir]

He's a fuck by him. There's a lot of darkness to this and we've kind of touched on infanticide and murder and domestic violence. Lots of scary stuff. But I was expecting this to be like wall to wall tragedy. But what I'm getting from you is that that isn't the complete picture. That there was an acceptance around premarital sex in a way that perhaps I hadn't thought there would be. And I mean, the support was shit. But it seems that there was support for, for single mothers and illegitimate children.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Presumably, based on the records that I look at, if a young woman openly admitted to being pregnant, said, I need some support, this is who the father is. It was probably pretty uneventful that, you know, she wouldn't receive loads of support, but she would have been provided with a midwife, she would have been allowed to have her period of lying in, which is the period of recovery after giving birth and she would have been given some support by the parish. So, you know, if you sort of play by the rules, I'm not going to say it's a lavish experience, but you would be provided for. It wasn't great, but it wasn't necessarily the worst.

[Angela Muir]

The final question, then, how do you think Wales is different from other places? Is this just Wales with its unique bundling customs and is it different from elsewhere? Or could we look at this and go, actually, maybe things weren't as horrific as you thought they would. On a wider scale, I think we can take.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Because it's the same. It's the same laws, it's exactly the same laws as England, but there's potentially different cultural practices. But we know bundling wasn't just a Welsh thing.

[Angela Muir]

Who else was bundling?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

There's some evidence of it from Scotland, there's some evidence of it from scattered across Europe, and it's one of those things that was imported to the colonies in North America. So it's a thing that happens elsewhere. And I think we can take the Welsh experience and kind of copy and paste it to other rural contexts, at least in Britain as well. It's likely that what's happening in Wales could be similar to, say, Yorkshire, for example, And I'm just grabbing at that. I haven't looked at evidence from Yorkshire, but I think we can sort of look for parallels between other rural contexts, where you have a population that's sort of scattered about and you don't have many large centres for people to gather in. I think it is a very sort of rural agrarian practice.

[Angela Muir]

I think bundling might be due for a revival. I would just love to see someone's reaction if you seriously propose that to them. Them in this day and age.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

It's like, hear me out. First date, maybe second or third date, maybe not a first date thing. It's like, this is going really, really well. How about we go back to mine? I've got a really big sack, I suppose. Yeah. Bundling is maybe like a festival culture. It's like, let's go back to my tent. I've got a big sleeping bag.

[Angela Muir]

Angela, you've been so much fun to talk. Jane, if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

[Dr. Angela Muir]

So they can find me? I have my own website, which is angelamir.co.uk or I'm at the University of Leicester, so on the staff pages there, you can just look for Angela Muir. And I've got my list of publications and contact details and links to some videos and stuff that I've done as well.

[Angela Muir]

Brilliant. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I've had a blast.

[Dr. Angela Muir]

Me too. Thank you.

[Kate Lister]

Thanks for listening and thanks to Angela.

[Angela Muir]

For joining joining me.

[Kate Lister]

And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email [e-mail] We've got episodes on everything from the final episode in our Inside the Witch Trial series taking you to Salem and an episode on the President's sex lives just in time for the big election. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagi and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex Scandal in Society, A podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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Oh, wouldn't because you love wasting money as a way to punish yourself because your mother never showed you enough love as a child.

Whoa, easy there.

[Angela Muir]

Yeah.

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