A new era dawns?
There’s an old New England ballad called “The New Bundling Song,” about the custom of “bundling” a young couple side-by-side in bed before marriage. The aim was to afford potential spouses a night together that would test their compatibility, but not their chastity. By the seventeenth century, however, bundling regulations among the Puritans of America had evidently grown lax enough to offend the sensibilities of rigorous moralists. The balladeer notes with stern displeasure that lovers may be wrapped up to the navel in bedclothes and separated by a wooden board, but they still enjoy plenty of leeway for heavy petting: “she is modest, also chaste / While only bare from neck to waist, / And he of boasted freedom sings, / Of all above her apron strings.”
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