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

the ground of an omission made in the appeal. . . . Many other matters may constitute exceptions though I do not now call them to mind.

    Despite a spirited defense, the male justices who heard the case might sometimes decide they had to convict, and then our victim- · prosecutrix* would be given her old option of marrying her rapist as a benevolent way of saving him from gruesome mutilation.
    Bracton allowed that this time-honored custom of redeeming a rapist through marriage could cause considerable mischief to the social structure, for "a common person might bring perpetual dis grace upon a woman of nobility and good family by a single act of defilement and take her to wife to the disgrace of her family." On the other hand, "But suppose that the ravisher is a nobleman and the woman raped a common person; will it be for the defiled person to exercise a choice and decide whether she will marry the nobleman or not?"
    Apparently this was to be-if the nobleman valued his sight and his testicles-but the chance that a man of nobility might be convicted of raping a commoner would have been slight. "As a rule," Sidney Painter writes in his History of the M iddle Ages, "the nobleman's crime was blamed on his men." Pain ter reports on one case in which a young girl was abducted on the highway, taken to a knight's house, and raped by the knight and his men: "The court solemnly accepted the statement of the knight that he was horri fied to hear that she had not been in his house of her own free will . . . . Even in England," he continues, "if a member of the feudal class committed his crimes against anyone other than the king or a great lord, he was fairly safe from prosecution, or at least from punishment."
    ( "Even in England" is an important qualifying phrase, for while the Middle Ages was a time of savage wife beating, Court

    * The term "prosecutrix" stems from this time in English history when a female had the burden of instituting a civil suit in order for a rape trial to take place. Today, of course, it is the state, not the woman, that prosecutes for rape, yet "prosecutrix" continues to appear with regularity in appellate briefs that are written by rapists' defense attorneys, where it is used interchangeably with "complainant" and "alleged victim." Much of legal language is archaic, but in this instance it is hard not to conclude that the word is favored for the harsh, vindictive quality of personal prosecution that it plainly connotes.

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    28 I AGAINST OUR WILL
    prostitution, and general all-around lawlessness and feudal oppres sion, things seemed to be far worse for women on the Continent. The jus primae noctis, right of the first night or droit du seigneur, the custom of giving the manorial lord the right to take the virginity of the bride of any one of his vassals or serfs unless the bride and bridegroom paid a specific amount of produce in redemption dues
    -certainly a form of rape-appears to have been enforced irregu larly in certain parts of Germany, France, Italy and Poland but not, however, in England. Still, it cannot be overstressed that "even in England" the law that evolved was feudal class law, designed to protect the nobleman's interest. Although it took place much later, the celebrated eighteenth-century trial and acquittal of Frederick Calvert, the seventh and last Lord Baltimore, for a rape upon the body of Sarah Woodcock, a milliner, is a case in point. Baltimore had the twenty-nine-year-old virgin hat-maker abducted and he kept her a virtual prisoner for more than a week. At the trial he claimed consent and pleaded, "Libertine as I am represented, I am sure I have sufficiently atoned for every indiscretion, which a weak attach ment to this unworthy woman may have led me into, by having suffered the disgrace of being exposed as a criminal at the bar." Apparently the judge and jury agreed. The wonder of Lord Balti more's case is that it came to trial at all.)

    How was justice