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"Peter was a poor man who had an unfaithful wife. She kept cheating on him (couldn’t keep her), so he had to find a way to stop her running around. His solution, fairly common in the middle ages, was a chastity belt (pumpkin shell). For those who don’t know, a chastity belt is roughly a pair of metal underwear with lock and key, so that no one could enter the private region of the woman except whoever held the key, usually her husband. And as the rhyme goes, once he put her in that belt, he kept her very well.""

"OMG, i was just about to say that, i always thought that was what that nursery rhyme meant, then again i always thought to an extent that Henry VIII was Humpty Dumpty?"

"Yes I believe it is a more of a modern myth. There is actually a book on the subject (which I haven't read) called "The medieval chastity belt. a myth-making process" by Albrecht Classen. The synopsis reads: "Conrad Kyeser was the first to present an image of a chastity belt in his illustrated book on war machinery, Bellifortis(1405), and some fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poets and artists referred to this object as well. Yet, there is no firm evidence that chastity belts were ever used in reality. By contrast, modern writers have often referred to the chastity belt as an object employed primarily in the Middle Ages in order to support a highly speculative perspective of past practices, maybe as a spurious legitimation for the use of chastity belts in the modern sex industry. Anthropologists, ethnologists, then also cultural historians, and feminist scholars have happily embraced the idea of the chastity belt because it provided them with an effective battle-cry to malign the medieval world and to project the benefits of the civilization process in the lives of modern women freed of being degrading by a chastity belt."
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