more
restricted, and finally falls to the chief of the tribe, or to the
priest, as a religious act, to be exercised by them alone. The feudal
lord assumes the right as a consequence of his power over the person who
belongs to the land, and which is his property; and he exercises the
right if he wills, or relinquishes it in lieu of a tribute in products
or money. How real was the "right of the first night" appears from Jacob
Grimm's "Weisthumer."[38]

Sugenheim[39] says the "jus primae noctis," as a right appertaining to
the landlords, originates in that his consent to marriage was necessary.
Out of this right there arose in Bearn the usage that all the first-born
of marriages, in which the "jus primae noctis" was exercised, were of
free rank. Later, the right was generally redeemable by a tribute.
According to Sugenheim, those who held most stubbornly to the right were
the Bishops of Amiens; it lasted with them till the beginning of the
fifteenth century. In Scotland the right was declared redeemable by King
Malcolm III, towards the end of the eleventh century; in Germany,
however, it continued in force much longer. According to the archives of
a Swabian cloister, Adelberg, for the year 1496, the serfs, located at
Boertlingen, had to redeem the right by the bridegroom's giving a cake
of salt, and the bride paying one pound seven shillings, or with a pan,
"in which she can sit with her buttocks." In other places the
bridegrooms had to deliver to the landlord for ransom as much cheese or
butter "as their buttocks were thick and heavy." In still other places
they had to give a handsome cordovan tarbouret "that they could just
fill."[40] According to the accounts given by the Bavarian Judge of the
Supreme Court of Appeals, Welsch, the obligation to redeem the "jus
primae noctis" existed in Bavaria as late as the eighteenth
century.[41] Furthermore, Engels reports that, among the Welsh and the
Scots, the "right of the first night" prevailed throughout the whole of
the Middle Ages, with the difference only that, due to the continuance
of the gentile organization, it was not the landlord, or his
representative, but the chief of the clan, as the last representative of
the one-time husbands in common, who exercised the right, in so far as
it was not redeemed.

There is, accordingly, no doubt whatever that the so-called "right of
the first night" existed, not only during the whole of the Middle Ages,
but continued even down to