Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post
Oh, for heaven's sake. As noted in the second sentence of the wiki article about Droit de seigneur (the French equivalent of Latin ius primae noctis):

There is no historical evidence that such a right ever existed.

The article goes on to explain that the widespread belief in such a law may have started with the Greek historian Herodotus, who claimed it was an exotic custom of a "barbarian" tribe in Libya. (In other words, Herodotus was quite possibly repeating a "those wacky foreigners" Urban Legend he'd heard secondhand from Greek travelers.) Much later, Voltaire popularized the concept as part of his satires against the ruling classes, and people took Voltaire as gospel.

P.S. In Latin, noctum is the genitive plural form of nox (night). So prima noctum is ungrammatical, but you could say primarum noctum, which equals первых ночей ("of the first nights"). Or, better yet, just say "the alleged right of a king/lord to deflower his subordinates' brides", in plain English.
I won't spend much time on this. Три маленькие вещи.

First, you're right. That was the point I was trying to make. Judge a book by its cover? Make sure you got the right dust jacket on. If we were to judge the character of England - even at that time - based on things that were only talked about, and never became fact, like p.n., it wouldn't be very accurate. About the p.n. itself - like most people I don't know much about it, and always assumed it to be far-fetched, because only Hollywood ever made reference to it in my experience.

Second, in poor form, I didn't even look up the phrase's correct Latin declension, and I well knew I should have. But I just didn't care. Take that, Mr. Bailey, my high school Latin teacher.

Third - there was a tribe like that, or so I heard.. but I'm not sure if I've got them confused with the other tribe whose husbands had to sleep together before they were allowed to marry the women in the tribe. Something like that. Тема неинтересно, и не гляжу. )