Note 566 — Chapter XII · OBLIGATORY CIVIL MARRIAGE IN THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES

See Stiles, op. cit., 51-60, for a long extract from the lively account of Peters, who says that in Connecticut bundling is "as old as the first settlement in 1634;" and that "about the year 1756 Boston, Salem, Newport, and New York, resolving to be more polite than their ancestors, forbade their daughters bundling on the bed with any young men whatever, and introduced a sofa to render courtship more palatable and Turkish;" but with more "natural consequences than all the bundling among the boors with their rurales pedantes through every village in New England besides." Of course, all this must be swallowed with a very large "grain of salt."