We do not know how many of Livland’s peasants began their sexual life before getting married. According to demographic studies, 8 to 11% of brides in Estonia in the 18th century were pregnant at the time of their wedding ceremony. On average, two percent of children in Estonian rural congregations in the 18th century were illegitimate children. While historical demography is laconic, folklore and ethnology have provided more of an ideal picture of the beginning of sexual relations in premodern peasant society as opposed to the actual situation. Court records, on the other hand, do not corroborate the descriptions found in folklore of how decorous and decent the custom of ehalkäimine (night courtship, sometimes referred to as bundling, Kiltgang in German) was in 18th-century Livland. Plenty of examples can be found from court records where both the boy and the girl had many irons in the fire before getting married. The premarital attitudes and relations of Livland’s peasantry were far from steadfast monogamy. August Wilhelm Hupel (1737–1819), the pastor of Põltsamaa’s church and one of the more renowned disseminators of Enlightenment ideas in the Baltic lands, presented the claim in his article ‘Ueber den Werth der Jungfrauschaft unter Ehsten und Letten’ (On the value of virginity among Estonians and Latvians), which was published in 1791, that preserving virginity was not all that valued among the peasantry because Estonians and Latvians had no idea whatsoever of virginity. If we prefer, Hupel’s ‘discovery’ can be interpreted as a reference to the peasantry’s low level of education and culture. Yet greater sexual freedom and the absence of taboos, which other estates of society could not allow for themselves, compensated for that.

Court records corroborate that village society related understandingly to premarital intercourse, provided that it took place after the couple had agreed to marry and that it remained monogamous. It was not unconditionally necessary that a woman enter into marriage as a virgin, yet it was expected that she would only be involved in the kinds of sexual relations that would later be legitimised by entering into marriage. Even the mere suspicion that one’s bride might have conceived a child with some other man was sufficient grounds for terminating their engagement or refusal to marry.

While village society already considered the bride and bridegroom to be a married couple after the marriage proposal ceremonies (kosjad, Ansprache in German) had been performed, the church admonished the bride and bridegroom to avoid initiating sexual relations before the church marriage ceremony had been completed. There is not a single archival source that affirms that couples would have unconditionally waited until their wedding day before engaging in sexual relations. Considering the customs and mentality of the peasantry of that time, there was also no reason for such restraint.

The wedding celebration was accompanied by the wedding night – the definitive confirmation of marriage. The wedding customs of the Estonian peasantry pay almost no attention to the wedding night. There is also minimal eroticism in the wedding songs found in Estonian folklore collections. Historical sources do not corroborate the much talked about ius primae noctis (right of the first night). Not only the laws of that time, but also the fact that the ‘first night’ had already happened for a substantial proportion of brides before they reached the altar ruled out ius primae noctis in 18th-century Livland.