Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape Read Online Free PDF Page A

twelfth century and beyond, but on matters pertaining to women this strict constructionist was of ten overruled by other rabbis. It is a little-known fact that in addition to his other accomplishments, the great Maimonides was the author of a slen der sex manual that had quite a vogue in its day. Women figure hardly at all in his little book, which is mainly about food. Not to put too fine a point on it, Maimonides' manual is a collection of recipes guaranteed by the author to sustain an erection.
    .24 AGMNST OUR WILL
    wondrous maze of contradictory approaches reflecting a gradual humanization of jurisprudence in general, and in particular, man's eternal confusion, never quite resolved, as to whether the crime was a crime against a woman's body or a crime against his own estate.
    Before the Norman Conquest of 1066 the penalty for rape was
    death and dismemberment, but this stern justice pertained exclu sively to the man who raped a highborn, propertied virgin who lived under the protection of a powerful lord. Feudalism took root in the early Middle Ages as ownership of land became an inherited right, "the lands passing by immemorial custom from father to son . . . maintained, among other ways by the system of wardship and marriage." Since females were allowed to inherit property, a matter of necessity if there were no extant male heirs, "trading in marriages," to borrow a telling phrase from G. G. Coulton, was a lucrative enterprise among the nobility, practiced in much the same manner ''as men trade in shares and investments today." For obvious economic reasons a landed heiress could not marry without permission of her overlord, under penalty of losing her inherited fortune. Yet once the nuptials had taken place, their legal and churchly sanctity could not be challenged, and so the custom of "stealing an heiress" by forcible abduction and marriage became a routine method of acquiring property by adventurous, upward mobile knights. As a matter of record, not until a fif teenth-century edict of Henry VII was heiress-stealing ruled a felony unto itself .
    Gothic literature has made heiress-stealing a subject of great romance, replete with midnight assignations, loyal maidservants and a great thundering of horses' hooves, but in actuality it was predicated on the desire for land, not love. If a captured virgin managed to escape before her forced marriage, or if an errant knave had merely taken her on the spot, she could attempt to seek redress in the court of her lord's manor. Trial for capital crime in those days was by physical ordeal, and grueling tests by water and hot irons were probably employed to arrive at the "truth."
    Henry of Bratton ( Bracton ) , who lived and wrote in the thir teenth century, is our best authority for these ancient Saxon times, accepted by Coke, Hale and Blackstone, the later giants of English jurisprudence. Bracton informs us that during the tenth-century rule of King Athelstan, if a man were to throw a virgin to the
    ji j ground against her will, "he forfeits the King's grace; if he shame-

    l l\
    IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE LAW I 2 5
    lessly disrobes her and places himself upon her, he incurs the loss of all his possessions; and if he lies with her, he incurs the loss of his life and members." Vengeance did not stop at death, for, Bracton continued, "even his horse shall to his ignomy be put to shame upon its scrotum and tail, which shall be cut off as close as possible to the buttocks." A similar fate awaited the rapist's dog, and if he happened to own a hawk, "Let it lose its beak, its claws and its tail."
    Af ter his animals were cropped and his own human life was taken, a rapist's land and money were supposed to be given to the ravished virgin. But one manner of redemption was possible. As a benevolent way of saving him from terrible death, a raped virgin might be permitted by King and Church to accept her ravisher in marriage. Since consolidation of property was uppermost in the minds of men, we