Margaret Mikulska wrote:

>Anne Ozorio wrote:
>
>>As Steve says, the Count uses his power in society to manipulate and harass
>>-  so it ever was and alas, shall be.  Droit du seigneur was a
>>medieval custom, certainly not common in the eighteenth century.
>
>"Droit du seigneur" didn't exist - it was an 18th-century notion,
>symbolizing the power of aristocrats.  It's a bit like with the alleged
>bra-burning in the 1960s: a journalist used it as a metaphor, and next
>thing you heard were people claiming that it actually happened.  Except
>that the 18th-century philosophes invented it knowing it didn't exist.

To venture away from music, except to the extent that the question of
whether the ius primae noctis, or droit du seigneur, ever existed affects
the story line of Figaro, there used to be a little known form of tenancy
in the common law of real property known as an estate in Borough English,
in which the estate passed not to the oldest son but to the youngest,
unless there was only one, in which case it passed to him.  I heard that
the origins of that estate was the droit du seigneur under which the
paternity of the oldest son might be in doubt.  If there was only one
son, one made the best of the situation.  If Margaret is right, the
tenancy must have had some other source.

Walter Meyer