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

may assume that a violated virgin was encour aged or not encouraged toward matrimony depending on which arrangement of the land was most beneficial, or least inconvenien t, to the domain of Church and King.

    Punishmen t for raping a virgin of property was thoughtfully reduced to castration and the loss of both eyes by William the Conqueror. The mode of trial under William also switched from ordeal to combat, so we may assume that u nless the stakes were high, few virgins were actually championed by their chivalrous kin. Speaking to this point, the English legal historians Pollock and Maitland remark, "In one respect a woman's capacity of suing was curtailed by her inability to fight."

    Castration and blinding was still the appropriate penalty for raping a virgin in Bracton's day and he explained the law's intent "member for member"-with these words: "Let him lose his eyes which gave him sight of the virgin's beauty for which he coveted her. And let him lose as well the testicles which excited his hot lust."
    King Henry II, the Plantagenet who married Eleanor of Aqui taine, brought the principles of Frankish law to England during his twelfth-century reign. If a raped virgin filed a civil suit or "appeal" and an indictment was obtained, the resulting trial was by jury in the king's assize instead of by combat or duel. This was clearly an advance in procedures. Bracton was most meticulous as to the proper form the suit should take. He entitled his instructions "An appeal concerning the rape of virgins." An appeal concerning the
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    rape of nonvirgins does not appear anywhere in his compendium, for Bracton was describing the king's jurisdiction, which by this time included murder, mayhem and major thef t. "Minor" offenses were still being handled by the manorial courts. In fact, Bracton tells us that a raped virgin's appeal and a wife's appeal in the matter of a husband "slain within her arms" were the only suits a woman could bring to the courts of the king. The procedure a raped virgin was to follow went like this:

    She must go at once and while the deed is newly done, with the hue and cry, to the neighboring townships and there show the in
    jury done to her to men of good repute, the blood and her clothingstained with blood, and her torn garments. And in the same way

    she ought to go to the reeve of the hundred, the king's serjeant, the coroners and the sheriff. And let her make her appeal at the first county court, unless she can at once make her complaint directly to the lord king or his justices, where she will be told to sue at the county court. Let her appeal be enrolled in the coroners' rolls, every word of the appeal, exactly as she makes it, and the year and day on which she makes it. A day will be given her at the coming of the jus tices, at which let her again put forward her appeal before them, in the same words as she made it in the county court, from which she is not permitted to depart lest the appeal fall because of the vari-ance . . .

    If the man whom our raped virgin accused protested his mno cence,. "Let the truth be ascertained by an examination of her body, made by four law-abiding women sworn to tell the truth as to whether she is a virgin or defiled." If she proved to be defiled, the trial might continue; if she proved a virgin still, the case was dismissed and the false accuser was thrown into custody.

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    The man accused, Bracton writes, had several possible de fenses. He might say
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    that he had her as his concubine and amica before the day and the year mentioned in the appeal . . . or that he had her and defiled her with her consent and not against her will, and that if she now ap peals him it is in hatred of another woman whom he has as his con cubine, or whom he has married, or that it is at the instigation of one of her kinsmen. He may also except that on the year and day the deed was supposed to be done he was elsewhere, outside the realm.
    . Or he may also except on