If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley

during intercourse ‘a kind of sucking or drawing at the end of his yard … a woman may have conceived’. This was why Samuel Pepys was careful not to allow his many and varied mistresses to enjoy themselves, even while he insisted on taking his own pleasure. For women, another dreadful drawback to this belief was what happened in cases of rape. If a raped woman became pregnant, she must have experienced an orgasm, therefore she was not raped.
    However, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the female orgasm entered into decline, and people began to question its very existence. Physicians discovered, during the course of the Enlightenment, that orgasm is not in fact necessary forconception. As a result, the importance society attached to sexual pleasure for women plummeted. Thus we get the stereotype of the frigid Victorian age, with females frightened of sex. Victorian women were not expected to experience orgasms; the official line was that their doctors and husbands thought them incapable of it.
    This change in biological understanding had enormous implications for society. Women gradually shed their medieval stereotype as insatiable temptresses in order to become the Victorian ideal of pure, chaste, virginal angels. A society where sexual order was maintained by physical chastisement gradually began to give way to internal moral codes, where behaviour was policed by social forces such as shame and expulsion from the community for sexual transgression. Even before the end of the seventeenth century, the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes, the New England county courts which had dished out whippings and convictions in the early settler period began to lose their grip, and fines began to replace beatings. The result: less violence, but more psychological repression. So the modern mentality was born. Only when, in the later twentieth century, sex began to be considered as something pleasurable for women in its own right – not merely as wives or mistresses – did the female orgasm return to prominence in scientific and public discourse.
    Despite the earlier emphasis on female pleasure, a respectable married woman was monogamous. In the medieval and Tudor ages, the sexual urges of young men were cleverly sublimated through the cult of chivalric love: they were supposed to devote themselves to the service of ladies of superior social status, and to expect nothing physical in return. (Favours, patronage and promotion at court were all acceptable alternatives.)
    The chivalric cult had a strange parallel in the sleeping arrangement known as ‘bundling’, which was common both to rural areas of seventeenth-century Wales and to eighteenth-centuryNew England. This was likewise a non-sexual relationship, where a young man and woman passed the night alone in a bedroom together, but remained fully clothed. Sometimes they were even tied down or a board was placed down the middle of their bed. The idea was to make it through to morning without having sex, in order to find out whether they got on well enough together to marry. Until 1800, when it began to arouse a new moralistic disapproval, to ‘bundle’ was considered both chaste and sensible as it led to more successful marriages:
Cate Nance and Sue proved just and true
Tho’ bundling did practise;
But Ruth beguil’d and proved with child,
Who bundling did despise.
    The other explanation for this curious custom can be found in the architectural design of pre-modern rural cottages. Obviously, in an age when houses contained far fewer rooms than there were family members, the young people were short of private places in which to become acquainted. It was a kindness on the part of a girl’s parents to leave a young couple alone together in the upstairs bedchamber, the rest of the family gathering in the kitchen or parlour below instead. The ropes and the board assuaged the parents’ conscience, as they were responsible for finding their daughter a suitable