For instance, in the 17th century, teen couples interested in spending the night together were wrapped in burlap sacks and left to lie next to each other. Known as "bundling," this practice was incredibly popular in rural areas of England and Wales. It worked like so: When a teenage couple were to spend the night together, the girl would have a sack tied around her waist in order to ward off any intruders. The dehornified couple would then be tucked into bed, and just to make sure that no nonsense happened, they were separated further by a wooden plank.
Have they met a teenage boy? They would fuck through that.
The objective wasn't all-out psychological warfare (although that was a bonus). It afforded the couple a chance to spend the night together whilst simultaneously allowing the parents to spend the night without worrying they'd have another mouth to feed in nine months. It was kind of sweet, in a way -- one of the first steps toward allowing young people to pick their own partners rather than have them thrust upon them.
Bundling proved such a successful method of boner-foiling that it soon made its way to New England, where the situation reportedly got even weirder. Supposedly, if a passing traveler needed a bed for the night, the wife and daughter(s) of the house might be bundled and made to share a bed with them. Whether this is merely a prurient rumor or not is a little hard to say, but bed-sharing did happen a lot more back then, and craftsman were selling beds with built-in bundling boards. So it's possible. And certainly one way to boost your Yelp reviews.
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