JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS. - That in the Middle Ages, particularly in the 11th to 13th centuries, but also much earlier and much later, feudal lords had and exercised a right to spend the first night of marriage with the wives of their subjects (i. p. n., or more crudely ius cunnatici), is an opinion not well founded, which the fanciful Scottish historian Hector Boece (1526) was the first to put into circulation, and which then, accepted by even serious writers, was spread beyond the limits of decency by an abundant and for the most part shoddy literature.
Beginning with Girolamo Muzio (1553), who reported traditions said by him to be not remote, some have believed in the existence of such a right also on Italian soil, and certain charters and narratives from various regions and ages, Venetian, Piedmontese, southern, from the 12th century onward, have been interpreted as alluding to it.
How much truth and how much arbitrariness is contained in what is told of the i. p. n. cannot be established except by distinguishing. A custom of having the bride deflowered by an authoritative personage of her tribe, or of her own family, is attested among primitive peoples, and its origins are variously explained by ethnologists. And it is no less certain that nameless abuses, in disparate places and times, were perpetrated by feudal lords to the detriment of the wives of their subjects. It is not proved, on the other hand, that this pagan custom continued among the Christian peoples of the Middle Ages, nor that those feudal abuses rose in any place or time to a true and proper right. It is proved only that many feudal lords, in Italy and elsewhere, imposed on their subjects marriage taxes, to be paid sometimes once and for all, sometimes at fixed intervals (year, week) for the entire duration of the marriage: taxes which have left down to our own days some faint trace in the custom of certain regions, even in Italy.
In these one should not see the price of redemption from a hypothetical i. p. n., and perhaps not even a transformation of the Germanic purchase of the bride; but rather, and more simply, the compensation for the consent given by the lord to the marriage; all the more so since in the Middle Ages a similar tax was often levied by ecclesiastical authority for dispensation from the obligation imposed on spouses to preserve chastity during the first or the first three nights of marriage.