THE MORES CAN MAKE ANYTHING RIGHT AND PREVENT
CONDEMNATION OF ANYTHING
The mores define the limits which make right and wrong.--Public
punishments.--Prisons in England in the eighteenth century.--
Wars of factions; penalties of defeat.--Bundling.--Two forms of
bundling.--Mediæval bundling.--Poverty and wooing.--Night
wooing in the North American colonies.--Reasons for it.--Public
lupanars.--The end of the lupanars.--Education needed to
clarify the judgment.
+572. Mores define the limits which make anything right.+ At every turn
we find new evidence that the mores can make anything right. What they
do is that they cover a usage in dress, language, behavior, manners,
etc., with the mantle of current custom, and give it regulation and
limits within which it becomes unquestionable. The limit is generally a
limit of toleration. Literature, pictures, exhibitions, celebrations,
and festivals are controlled by some undefined, and probably
undefinable, standard of decency and propriety, which sets a limit of
toleration on the appeals to fun, sensuality, and various prejudices. In
regard to all social customs, the mores sanction them by defining them
and giving them form. Such regulated customs are etiquette. The
regulation by the mores always gives order and form, and thus surrounds
life with limits within which we may and beyond which we may not pursue
our interests (e.g. property and marriage). Horseplay and practical
jokes have been tolerated, at various times and places, at weddings.
They require good-natured toleration, but soon run to excess and may
become unendurable. The mores set the limits or define the disapproval.
The wedding journey was invented to escape the "jokes." The rice and
old shoes will soon be tabooed. The mores fluctuate in their
prescriptions. If the limits are too narrow, there is an overflow into
vice and abuse, as was proved by seventeenth-century puritanism in
England. If the limit is too remote, there is no discipline, and the
regulation fails of its purpose. Then a corruption of manners ensues. In
the cases now to be given we shall see the power of the mores to give
validity to various customs. The cases are all such that we may see in
them sanction and currency given to things which seem to us contrary to
simple and self-evident rules of right; that is, they are contrary to
the views now inculcated in us by our own mores as axiomatic and beyond
the need of proof.[1834]
+573. Punishments for crime.+ Mediæval punishments for criminals,
leaving out of account heretics and witches, bore witness to the
grossness, obscenity, inhumanity, and ferocity of the mores of that age.
The punishments were not thought wrong or questionable. There was no
revolt against them in any one's mind. They were judged right, wise, and
necessary, by full public opinion. They were not on the outer boundary
of the mores, but in the core of them. Schultz[1835] says that the
romancers have not exaggerated the horrors of mediæval dungeons. Many of
them still remain and are shown to horrified tourists. There was no
arrangement for having them cleaned by anybody, so that in time they
were sure to become horribly dangerous to health. They were small, dark,
damp, cold, and infested by vermin, rats, snakes, etc.[1836] Several
dungeons in the Bastille were so constructed that the prisoners could
neither sit, stand, nor lie, in comfort.[1837] Fiendish ingenuity was
expended on the invention of refinements of suffering, and executions
offered public exhibitions in which the worst vices in the mores of the
time were fed and strengthened. Many punishments were not only cruel,
but obscene, the cruelty and obscenity being destitute of moral or civil
motive and only serving to gratify malignant passion. A case is
mentioned of a law in which it was provided that if a criminal had no
property, his wife should be violated by a public official as a
penalty.[1838] In the later Middle Ages, after torture was introduced
into civil proceedings, ingenuity and "artistic skill" were manifested
in inventing instruments of torture.[1839] A case is given of
extravagant cruelty and tyranny on the part of a man of rank towards a
cook who had displeased him. It was impossible to obtain protection or
redress. The standpoint of the age was that a man of rank must be
allowed full discretion in dealing with a cook.[1840] In many cases
details were added to punishments, which were intended to reach the
affections, mental states, faiths, etc., of the accused, and add mental
agony to physical pain. "Use and wont" exercised their influence on
people who saw or heard of these acts of the authorities until cruelties
and horrors became commonplace and familiar, and the lust of cruelty was
a characteristic of the age.
+574. Prisons in England in the time of Queen Anne.+ The prisons of
England, in Queen Anne's time, were sinks of misery, disease, cruelty,
and extortion, from which debtors suffered most, on account of their
poverty. Women contributed to the total loathsomeness and suffered from
it. The Marshalsea prison was "an infected pest house all the year
long." There were customs by which jailers and chaplains extorted fees
from the miserable prisoners. In the country the prisons were worse than
in London. Pictures are said to exist in which debtor prisoners are
shown catching mice for food, dying of starvation and malaria, covered
with boils and blains, assaulted by jailers, imprisoned in underground
dungeons, living with hogs, with clogs on their legs, tortured with
thumbscrews, etc. "Nobody ever seems to have bothered their heads about
it. It was not their business." In 1702 the House of Commons ordered a
bill to be brought in for regulating the king's bench and fleet prisons,
"but nobody took sufficient interest in it, and it never became an
act."[1841] If the grade and kind of humanity which the case required
did not exist in the mores of the time, there would be no response. It
was on the humanitarian wave of the latter half of the century that
Howard succeeded in bringing about a reform. The prisons in the American
colonies were of the same kind as those in the old country. The Tories,
in the revolution, suffered most from their badness. It is not known
that personal abuse was perpetrated in them.
+575. Wars of factions. Penalties of defeat.+ Political factions and
religious sects have always far surpassed the criminal law in the
ferocity of their penalties against each other. Neither the offenses nor
the penalties are defined in advance. As Lea says,[1842] the treatment
of Alberico, brother of Ezzelino da Romano, and his family (1259) shows
the ferocity of the age. Ezzelino showed the same in many cases, and the
hatred heaped up against him is easily understood, but the gratification
of it was beastly and demonic.[1843] Great persons, after winning
positions of power, used all their resources to crush old rivals or
opponents (Clement V, John XXII) and to exult over the suffering they
could inflict.[1844] In the case of Wullenweber, at Lubeck,[1845]
burgesses of cities manifested the same ferocity in faction fights. The
history of city after city contains similar episodes. At Ghent, in 1530,
the handicraftsmen got the upper hand for a time and used it like
savages.[1846] All parties fought out social antagonisms without reserve
on the doctrine: To the victors the spoils; to the vanquished the woe!
If two parties got into a controversy about such a question as whether
Christ and his apostles lived by beggary, they understood that the
victorious party in the controversy would burn the defeated party. That
was the rule of the game and they went into it on that understanding.
In all these matters the mores of the time set the notions of what was
right, or those limits within which conduct must always be kept. No one
blamed the conduct on general grounds of wrong and excess, or of broad
social inexpediency. The mores of the time were absolutely imperative as
to some matters (e.g. duties of church ritual), but did not give any
guidance as to the matters here mentioned. In fact, the mores prevented
any unfavorable criticism of those matters or any independent judgment
about them.
+576. Bundling.+ One of the most extraordinary instances of what the
mores can do to legitimize a custom which, when rationally judged, seems
inconsistent with the most elementary requirements of the sex taboo, is
bundling. In Latin Europe generally, especially amongst the upper
classes, it is not allowed that a young man and a young woman shall be
alone together even by day, and the freer usage in England, and still
more in the United States, is regarded as improper and contrary to good
manners. In the latter countries two young people, if alone together, do
not think of transgressing the rules of propriety as set by custom in
the society. Such was the case also with night visits. Although the
custom was free, and although better taste and judgment have abolished
it, yet it was _defined_ and regulated, and was never a proof of
licentious manners. It is found amongst uncivilized people, but is
hardly to be regarded as a survival in higher civilization. Christians,
in the third and fourth centuries,[1847] practiced it, even without the
limiting conditions which were set in the Middle Ages. Having determined
to renounce sex, as an evil, they sought to test themselves by extreme
temptation. It was a test or proof of the power of moral rule over
natural impulse.[1848] "It was a widely spread custom in both the east
and the west of the Roman empire to live with virgins. Distinguished
persons, including one of the greatest bishops of the empire, who was
also one of the greatest theologians, joined in the custom. Public
opinion in the church judged them lightly, although unfavorably."[1849]
"After the church took on the episcopal constitution, it persecuted and
drove out the _subintroductae_. They were regarded as a survival from
the old church which was disapproved. The custom that virgins dwelt in
the house with men arose in the oldest period of the Christian
church."[1850] "They did not think of any evil as to be apprehended."
"In fact, we have only a little clear evidence that the living together
did not correspond in the long run to the assumptions on which it was
based."[1851] The custom was abolished in the sixth century.[1852]
"Spiritual marriage" was connected with the monastic profession and both
were due to the ascetic tendency of the time. "From the time when we can
clearly find monastic associations in existence, we find hermits living
in comradeship with nuns."[1853] We are led back to Jewish associations.
The custom is older than Christianity. The custom at Corinth[1854] was
but imitation of Jewish "God worshipers" or "Praying women."[1855] The
Therapeuts had such companions. Their houses of worship were arranged to
separate the sexes. Their dances sometimes lasted all night.[1856] In
the Middle Ages several sects who renounced marriage introduced tests of
great temptation.[1857] Individuals also, believing that they were
carrying on the war between "the flesh" and "the spirit" subjected
themselves to similar tests.[1858] These are not properly cases in the
mores, but they illustrate the intervention of sectarian doctrines or
views to traverse the efforts to satisfy interests, and so to disturb
the mores.
+577. Two forms of bundling.+ Two cases are to be distinguished: (1)
night visits as a mode of wooing;[1859] (2) extreme intimacy between two
persons who are under the sex taboo (one or both being married, or one
or both vowed to celibacy), and who nevertheless observe the taboo.
+578. Mediæval bundling.+ The custom in the second form became common in
the woman cult of the twelfth century and it spread all over
Europe.[1860] As the vassal attended his lord to his bedchamber, so the
knight his lady. The woman cult was an aggregation of poses and
pretenses to enact a comedy of love, but not to satisfy erotic passion.
The custom spread to the peasant classes in later centuries, and it
extended to the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland, England,
Scotland, and Wales, but it took rather the first form in the lower
classes and in the process of time. In building houses in Holland the
windows were built conveniently for this custom. "In 1666-1667 every
house on the island of Texel had an opening under the window where the
lover could enter so as to sit on the bed and spend the night making
love to the daughter of the house." The custom was called _queesten_.
Parents encouraged it. A girl who had no _queester_ was not esteemed.
Rarely did any harm occur. If so, the man was mobbed and wounded or
killed. The custom can be traced in North Holland down to the eighteenth
century.[1861] This was the customary mode of wooing in the low
countries and Scandinavia. In spite of the disapproval of both civil and
ecclesiastical authorities, the custom continued just as round dances
continue now, in spite of the disapproval of many parents, because a
girl who should refuse to conform to current usage would be left out of
the social movement. The lover was always one who would be accepted as a
husband. If he exceeded the limits set by custom he was very hardly
dealt with by the people of the village.[1862] The custom is reported
from the Schwarzwald as late as 1780. It was there the regular method of
wooing for classes who had to work all day. The lover was required to
enter by the dormer window. Even still the custom is said to exist
amongst the peasants of Germany, but it is restricted to one night in
the month or in the year.[1863] Krasinski[1864] describes kissing games
customary amongst the Unitarians of the Ukrain. He says that they are a
Greek custom and he connects them with bundling.
+579. Poverty and wooing.+ Amongst peasants there was little opportunity
for the young people to become acquainted. When the cold season came
they could not woo out of doors. The young women could not be protected
by careful rules which would prevent wooing. They had to take risks and
to take care of themselves. Poverty was the explanation of this custom
in all civilized countries, although there was always in it an element
of frolic and fun.
+580. Night wooing in North American colonies.+ All the emigrants to
North America were familiar with the custom. In the seventeenth century,
in the colonies, the houses were small, poorly warmed, and inconvenient,
allowing little privacy. No doubt this is the reason why the custom took
new life in the colonies. Burnaby[1865] says that it was the custom
amongst the lower classes of Massachusetts that a pair who contemplated
marriage spent the night together in bed partly dressed. If they did not
like each other they might not marry, unless the woman became pregnant.
The custom was called "tarrying." It was due to poverty again. Modern
inhabitants of tenement houses are constrained in their customs by the
same limitation, and the effect is seen in their folkways. The custom of
bundling had a wide range of variety. Two people sitting side by side
might cover themselves with the same robe, or lie on the bed together
for warmth. Peters[1866] defended the custom, which, he said, "prevails
amongst all classes to the great honor of the country, its religion, and
ladies." The older women resented the attempts of the ministers to
preach against the custom. Sofas were introduced as an alternative. The
country people thought the sofa less proper. In the middle of the
eighteenth century the decline in social manners, which was attributed
to the wars, caused the custom to produce more evil results.[1867] Also
the greater wealth, larger houses, and better social arrangements
changed the conditions and there was less need for the custom. It fell
under social disapproval and was thrown out of the folkways.
Stiles[1868] says that "it died hard" after the revolution. In 1788 a
ballad in an almanac brought the custom into popular ridicule. Stiles
quotes the case of Seger _vs._ Slingerland, in which the judge, in a
case of seduction, held that parents who allowed bundling, although it
was the custom, could not recover.[1869]
+581. Reasons for bundling.+ A witness before the Royal Commission on
the Marriage Laws, 1868,[1870] testified that night visiting was still
common amongst the laboring classes in some parts of Scotland. "They
have no other means of intercourse." It was against custom for a lover
to visit his sweetheart by day. As to the parents, "Their daughters must
have husbands and there is no other way of courting." This statement
sums up the reasons for this custom which, not being a public custom,
must have varied very much according to the character of individuals who
used it. Attempts were always made to control it by sanctions in public
opinion.
+582. Public lupanars.+ Perhaps the most incredible case to illustrate
the power of the mores to extend toleration and sanction to an evil
thing remains to be mentioned,--the lupanars which were supported by the
mediæval cities. Athenæus[1871] says that Solon caused female slaves to
be bought by the city and exposed in order to save other women from
assaults on their virtue. In later times prostitution was accepted as
inevitable, but it was not organized by the city. Salvianus (fifth
century, A.D.) represents the brothels as tolerated by the Roman law in
order to prevent adultery.[1872] Lupanars continued to exist from Roman
times until the Middle Ages. Those in southern Europe were recruited
from the female pilgrims from the north who set out for Rome or
Palestine and whose means failed them.[1873] It is another social
phenomenon due to poverty and to a specious argument of protection to
women in a good position. This argument came down by tradition with the
institution. The city council of Nuremberg stated, as a reason for
establishing a lupanar, that the church allowed harlots in order to
prevent greater evils.[1874] This statement, no doubt, refers to a
passage in Augustine, _De Ordine_:[1875] "What is more base, empty of
worth, and full of vileness than harlots and other such pests? Take away
harlots from human society and you will have tainted everything with
lust. Let them be with the matrons and you will produce contamination
and disgrace. So this class of persons, on account of their morals, of a
most shameless life, fills a most vile function under the laws of
order." The bishop had laid down the proposition that evil things in
human society, under the great orderly scheme of things which he was
trying to expound, are overruled to produce good. He then sought
illustrations to prove this. The passage quoted is one of his
illustrations. Everywhere else in his writings where he mentions harlots
he expresses the greatest abomination of them. His general proposition
is fallacious and extravagant, and he had to strain the cases which he
alleged as illustrations, but he was a church father, and five hundred
years later no one dared criticise or dissent from anything which he had
said. It went far beyond the incidental use of an illustration made by
him, to cite the passage, with his authority, for a doctrine that cities
might wisely establish lupanars in order to prevent sex vice, especially
in the interest of virtuous women.[1876] Such houses were maintained
without secrecy or shame. Queen Joanna of Naples made ordinances for a
lupanar at Avignon, in 1347, when it was the papal residence. Generally
the house was rented to a "host" under stipulations as to the food,
dress, and treatment of the inmates, and regulations as to order,
gambling, etc.[1877] The inmates, like the public executioners, were
required to wear a distinctive dress. Frequenters did not need to
practice secrecy. The houses were free to persons of rank, and were
especially prepared by the city when it had to entertain great persons.
Women who were natives of the city were not admitted. This is the only
feature which is not entirely cynical and shameless.[1878] In 1501 a
rich citizen of Frankfurt am Main bequeathed to the city a sum of money
with which to build a large house into which all the great number of
harlots could be collected,[1879] for the number increased greatly. They
appeared at all great concourses of men, and were sent out to the Hansa
stations.[1880] In fact, the people of the time accepted certain social
phenomena as "natural" and inevitable, and they made their arrangements
accordingly, uninterfered with by "moral sense." In Wickliffe's time the
bishop of Winchester obtained a handsome rent from the stews of
Southwark.[1881] Probably he and his contemporaries thought no harm.
Never until the nineteenth century was it in the mores of any society to
feel that the sacrifice of the mortal welfare of one human being to the
happiness of another was a thing which civil institutions could not
tolerate. It could not enter into the minds of men of the fifteenth
century that harlots, serfs, and other miserable classes had personal
rights which were outraged by the customs and institutions of that time.
+583. The end of the lupanars.+ All the authorities agree that the thing
which put an end to the city lupanars was syphilis.[1882] It was not due
to any moral or religious revolt, although there had been individuals
who had criticised the institution of harlots, and some pious persons
had founded convents, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for
repentant harlots. Protestants and Catholics tried, to some extent, to
throw the blame of the lupanars on each other. Luther urged the
abolition of them in 1520. They reached their greatest development in
the fifteenth century.[1883] The mere existence of an article so
degrading to both husband and wife as the girdle[1884] is significant of
the mores of the period, and shows how far the mores can go to make
anything "right," or properly customary.
+584. Judgment is beclouded by the atmosphere formed by the mores.
Education.+ Witch persecutions are another case of the extent to which
familiarity with the customs prevents any rational judgment of phenomena
of experience and observation. How was it possible that men did not see
the baseness and folly of their acts? The answer is that the ideas of
demonism were a part of the mental outfit of the period. The laws were
traditions from generations which had drawn deductions from the
doctrines of demonism and had applied them in criminal practice. The
legal procedure was familiar and corresponded to the horror of crimes
and criminals, of which witchcraft and witches were the worst. The mores
formed a moral and civil atmosphere through which everything was seen,
and rational judgment was made impossible. It cannot be doubted that, at
any time, all ethical judgments are made through the atmosphere of the
mores of the time. It is they which tell us what is right. It is only by
high mental discipline that we can be trained to rise above that
atmosphere and form rational judgments on current cases. This mental
independence and ethical power are the highest products of education.
They are also perilous. Our worst cranks are those who get the
independence and power, but cannot stand alone and form correct
judgments outside of the mores of the time and place. It must be
remembered that the mores sometimes becloud the judgment, but they more
often guide it.
[1834] See secs. 184-188, on Fashion.
[1835] _Höf. Leben_, I, 37.
[1836] Scherr, _Kulturgesch._, 377.
[1837] Lacroix, _Moyen Age_, I, 430.
[1838] Schultz, _D. L._, 160.
[1839] Lecky, _Rationalism_, I, 332.
[1840] Schultz, _Höf. Leben_, II, 448.
[1841] Ashton, _Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne_.
[1842] _Inquis._, II, 228.
[1843] _Rerum Ital. Script._, IX, 134.
[1844] Lea, _Inquis._, II, 452.
[1845] Barthold, _Hansa_, III, 291.
[1846] Räumer, _Hist. Taschenbuch_, 2 ser., III, 413.
[1847] Achelis, _Virgines Subintroductae_, 4.
[1848] Harnack, _Pseudo-Clement. Briefe de Virginitate_; Cyprian,
_Epist. IV ad Pompon_ (c. 250 A.D.); Achelis, _Virgines
Subintroductae_; Julicher in _Archiv für Religionswssnsft._, VII,
372.
[1849] Achelis, 12.
[1850] _Ibid._, 74.
[1851] Achelis, 67.
[1852] _Ibid._, 58.
[1853] _Ibid._, 47.
[1854] 1 Cor. vii. 36-40.
[1855] Achelis, 32.
[1856] _Ibid._, 31.
[1857] Lea, _Inquis._, II, 357; III, 109; _Sacerd. Celibacy_,
167.
[1858] Todd, _Life of St. Patrick_, 91.
[1859] This custom existed amongst uncivilized people. Fritsch,
_Eingeb. Süd.-Afr._, 140; Gomme, _Folklore_, 220; Ling Roth,
_Sarawak_, I, 109; JAI, XXI, 120; _Globus_, LXXVIII, 228; La
Hontan, _Voyages dans l'Amer._, II, 133; Masson, _Balochistan_,
III, 287.
[1860] Weinhold, _D. F._, I, 260, ff.
[1861] Wilken in _Bijdragen tot T. L. en V.-Kunde_, XXXV, 205.
[1862] Scheltema, _Frijen en Trouwen_, 59; Schotel, _Het
Oud-Holland. Huisgezin_, 228; _Globus_, LXXXII, 324.
[1863] Rudeck, _Gesch. der Sittlichkeit_, 146, 404.
[1864] _Cossacks of the Ukrain_, 281.
[1865] _Travels in the Middle Settlements of N. Amer._
(1759-1760), 144.
[1866] _Hist. of Connecticut_, 325.
[1867] Stiles, _Bundling_, 80.
[1868] Stiles, _Bundling_, 75.
[1869] Stiles, _Bundling_, 112.
[1870] Page 172.
[1871] _Deipnosophists_, XIII, 25.
[1872] _De Gubernat. Dei_, VII, 99.
[1873] Weinhold, _D. F._, II, 22.
[1874] Schultz, _D. L._, 73.
[1875] Migne, _Patrol. Latina_, XXXII, 1000.
[1876] Scherr, _Deutsches Frauenleben_, I, 275.
[1877] Jaeger, _Ulms Leben im M. A._, 544.
[1878] Rudeck, _Oeffentl. Sittlichkeit_, 26-35.
[1879] Westerhout, _Geslachtsleven onzer Voorouders_, 198.
[1880] Scherr, _Kulturgesch._, 223.
[1881] Trevelyan, _England in the Age of Wickliffe_, 280.
[1882] The origin of this disease being unknown, it has been
suggested that it was due to vice and excess in the Middle Ages
(_Umschau_, VII, 71).
[1883] See _Cambridge Hist. of Mod. Europe_, I, especially Lea's
chapter; Janssen, _Deutsches Volk_, VIII; Schultz, _Höf. Leben_,
I, 452; same author, _Deutsch. Leben_, 254, 257, 277, 283; Du
Laure, _Paris_, 268; Scherr, _Kulturgesch._, 222, on the
fifteenth century.
[1884] Schultz, _D. L._, 283.