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Folkways, by William Graham Sumner
A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages,
Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals
CHAPTER XV
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 522puritanism 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. Schultz1835 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 523and "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 524their 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.
525576. 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 526it 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 Corinth1854 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, 527Scandinavia, 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 Krasinski1864 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 528of 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. Burnaby1865 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. Peters1866 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. Stiles1868 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
529581. 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. Athenæus1871 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 530contamination 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 531phenomena 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 girdle1884 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 532part 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.
