The Map→Folk Rite & Fertility→Caru yn y Gwely — Bundling & the Love Spoon

Folk Rite & Fertility · St Fagans, Cardiff (museum); custom pan-North-Wales, Denbighshire/Gwynedd (custom); Cardiff (collection)

Caru yn y Gwely — Bundling & the Love Spoon

Courting couples were sent to bed together — clothed, a bolster between them — while the suitor whittled a spoon to prove he was husband material.

StatusDocumented history

Date17th–19th century (custom); love spoon dated 1667

The peopleTrefor M. Owen (folklorist, 'Welsh Folk Customs')

The siteSt Fagans National Museum of History (Sain Ffagan), holder of the oldest dated Welsh love spoon (1667); tradition documented across rural North Wales

Coordinates51.48690, -3.27180 (confidence 4/5)

Evidence note. 'Caru yn y gwely' (courting in bed / bundling) is documented folk custom persisting in North Wales into the late 19th century; the love spoon (llwy garu) is a material-culture tradition.

The story

Most of what circulates about Welsh "bundling" is actually American. The board down the middle of the bed, the girl sewn into a bundling sack, the tied legs — these belong largely to New England, or to English travel-writers touring Wales to be shocked. The genuinely Welsh custom, caru yn y gwely ("loving in the bed"; strictly caru ar y gwely, "on the bed"), was simpler: a young man came after dark and knocked at the woman's window with pebbles (cnoco), and a courting couple might spend the night together, clothed, sometimes with a bolster between them, under the parents' roof. It existed because farms were far apart, houses had no private space, and it saved fuel and candles. The practitioners considered it neither immoral nor indecent; an 1834 inquiry called it the immemorial way courtship was done.

The Welsh Nonconformist chapels campaigned against it, disciplining members through the seiat for fornication, and the 1847 "Blue Books" — compiled by three English commissioners (Lingen, Symons and Vaughan Johnson) who spoke no Welsh — declared unchastity "the scandal of the Principality." That was moral panic, not measurement. In fact no reliable figure exists for Welsh bridal pregnancy: historian Angela Muir has shown the calculation can't be done from Welsh registers, because patronymic surnames make it impossible to match baptisms to marriages. The famous "a third of brides were pregnant" is an English and New England figure, not a Welsh one.

The love spoon (llwy garu) is the courtship object that really was elaborate. The oldest dated Welsh example (1667) is at St Fagans. Carved by a young man from a single piece of wood, it demonstrated patience and skill — a job application in wood, submitted to the girl and her father. Symbols acquired meanings: hearts for love, keys and keyholes for a home, chain-links for faithfulness, a wheel for hard work, anchors for sailors, and loose balls in a carved cage for the number of children hoped for. And "spooning"? Despite the charming story, the OED traces the verb to "spoon" meaning a sentimental fool — not to the love spoon at all.

More stories at this spot

Knocking up, literally

The courtship began with cnoco — the young man throwing small stones at the woman's window after dark to be let in, also called cnoco lan, "knocking up." The phrase has since travelled a long way and acquired a very different meaning, but in rural Wales it meant only the polite, gravel-rattling opening move of a night's supervised courting.

The spoon that became a soup spoon again

The earliest love spoons were working utensils, given as tokens but still used to eat cawl. Only over generations did the carving grow so elaborate that the spoon lost its function entirely and moved to the wall as pure decoration. The love spoon's history is a small parable of a practical object slowly consumed by its own symbolism.

A custom Nonconformity could not quite kill

Even as chapel elders denounced night-courting, Welsh love songs kept singing about it, some in frank sexual metaphor. The custom lingered in rural areas into the late nineteenth century, outlasting decades of pulpit disapproval — proof that a warm bed on a cold night is a more persuasive preacher than any minister of the seiat.

Sources

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