first wedding night

An unfamiliar voice hailed me from the corner table at the restaurant. He was Stephan Nicholas and introduced him that he was a British nationality.

Over the time our conversation touched on various topics. He had separated from his wife and was going through mental turmoil and showed deep emotion when he spoke.

I told him of my conversation with the Scottish lady in my CARE days, how she felt the Scottish people had been treated shabbily by the English rulers in their Scottish land. The Scottish people were very much frustrated by the practice of primae noctus where the newly wed Scottish brides had to spend the first night with the English nobles and high-ranking officials during thirteenth century Scotland.

He said the Scots are descendants of the Celts and related the Celts were a barbarous lot and how from time to time invaded the English lands and abducted the English women and forcibly married them. He went on to say the primae noctus might have been a revenge on the Scottish people by the English nobles. Under the law known as the primae noctus, the medieval noblemen had the right to spend the first night with newly wedded brides in their fiefdoms.

The first recorded instance of the "first night" custom appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a historical king of Uruk in Babylonia around 2700 B.C. Gilgamesh, as the king, claims the right to spend the first night with every new bride in Uruk on the day of her wedding; Enkidu, the subhuman brute, enters the city, protests this "abuse," and blocks the door of a marital chamber until Gilgamesh bests him in a fight. Enkidu's challenge might be taken as an indication that the custom was already an unpopular one by the time the Epic of Gilgamesh was set down in writing.

First night customs survived in parts of Europe into 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. These customs go back to the early medieval period and have its roots in the legal condition of unfree people and Germanic marriage customs.