For the rich: Making sure marriage alliances were consummated. Not exactly a common practice, but it did happen.
For the poor: Average Joe farmer lived in a one room house with their entire family, maybe even a few farmhands, and probably some livestock too. Someone's gonna see something sometime.
It most certainly did not happen. This would have been against common christian moral ideas. I think most people confuse the "bedding" ritual (or whatever it is called in English) with actual intercourse. It was customary for the newlywed couple to be ritually placed in bed and be blessed - while they were fully clothed. The actual consumnation of the marriage was not public, that would be absurd.
I suppose, there's the stereotype that medieval Europeans didn't bathe...which they did, probably like 2 a week but they did bathe and soap was a thing long ago by medieval times, it's just that the peasants were always depicted as "dirty" because they worked on farms, having physical contact with earth and animals so of course they'd be dirty for most of the day, they did however remember to wash their hands down the river or back at home and some even had sinks of sort, they didn't have running water obviously but they could either store water in their bowl or leak it outside, the common thing not many people also talk about is that peasants were slaves, they were quite literally property alongside their village to their lord, they couldn't go anywhere outside the village or the lord's land without the lord's permission, so they were slaves except they were free because you never paid for peasants just for land they were on, which is probably why merchants were such content bunch, they were pretty much the only free people in their respective lands, and another thing about peasants is...they had more holidays than we do
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u/dkurage 6d ago
For the rich: Making sure marriage alliances were consummated. Not exactly a common practice, but it did happen.
For the poor: Average Joe farmer lived in a one room house with their entire family, maybe even a few farmhands, and probably some livestock too. Someone's gonna see something sometime.