bundling

(communications) The provision of a combination of services, such as cable television and telephone service, over a single communications system.

Packaging several related banking services as a single account, for which the customer pays an annual fee or monthly fee, plus applicable monthly service charges.

Bundling was a mode of courtship during the colonial period. According to this practice, a young couple would go to bed together, either fully dressed or partially dressed, with a "bundling board," or long wooden slab, between them. Sometimes the woman's legs were bound in a tightly fitting "bundling stocking." This custom, inherited from Europe, apparently originated as a matter of convenience and necessity where space and heat were lacking. It became most prevalent in New England, where Puritan parents tried to provide young couples opportunities to court freely while still supervising their conduct. Bundling seems to have declined in the late eighteenth century.

Bibliography

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Thompson, Roger. Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649–1699. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

—Hugh T. Lefler/S. B.