Rape in medieval England is a complex and contested subject. At the centre of this complexity, as Caroline Dunn emphasises in this excellent new study of the subject, is the problem of translating the Latin verb rapere. As she makes clear, and as, indeed, other historians have noted, simply translating it as ‘rape’ in the modern sense will not do : legal documentation can claim that an individual offender ‘rapuit’ a variety of people or things. This can mean that rape in the modern sense, tha..

Sharpe, James

English

OpenEdition

 
Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History &
Societies 
Vol. 19, n°1 | 2015
Varia
Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England :
Rape, Abduction and Adultery, 1100-1500
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, xii + 261 p., ISBN 9
781107-017009
James Sharpe
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chs/1561
DOI: 10.4000/chs.1561
ISSN: 1663-4837
Publisher
Librairie Droz
Printed version
Date of publication: 1 June 2015
Number of pages: 122-124
ISBN: 978-2-600-01953-8
ISSN: 1422-0857
 
Electronic reference
James Sharpe, « Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England : Rape, Abduction and Adultery,
1100-1500 », Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies [Online], Vol. 19, n°1 | 2015, Online
since 01 June 2017, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chs/
1561  ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.1561 
This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020.
© Droz
Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in
Medieval England : Rape, Abduction and
Adultery, 1100-1500
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, xii + 261 p., ISBN 9
781107-017009
James Sharpe
REFERENCES
Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England : Rape, Abduction and Adultery, 1100-1500,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, xii + 261 p., ISBN 9 781107-017009.
1 Rape in medieval England is a complex and contested subject.  At the centre of this
complexity, as Caroline Dunn emphasises in this excellent new study of the subject, is
the problem of translating the Latin verb rapere. As she makes clear, and as, indeed,
other historians have noted, simply translating it as ‘rape’ in the modern sense will not
do :  legal  documentation can claim that  an  individual  offender  ‘rapuit’  a  variety  of
people or things. This can mean that rape in the modern sense, that a woman being
forced into non-consensual sex by a man or men is being alleged, certainty when the
documentation gives further details of intercourse. It  can also mean that there was
allegedly an abduction (rapt in French is derived from the Latin rapere). And the verb is
also  sometimes  found,  given  that  rapere  means  ‘to  take’,  in  allegations  of  theft  or
asportation : hence it was alleged at the King’s Bench that the mid-fourteenth century
northerner Robert Broun rapuit ten marks of silver. Dunn has carried out impressive
research into  legal  documentation between 1100 and 1500 (she lists  her  sources  in
Appendix II), and finds that of the 1,213 ‘ravishment’ cases she has discovered only 108
(or 9 percent) can be unequivocally regarded as rape in the modern sense. Against this
total, 556 of her cases allege abduction, and 527 are ambiguous (the remaining twenty-
two allege both rape and abduction).
Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England : Rape, Abduction and Adulter...
Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 19, n°1 | 2015
1
2 Another complication for the would-be student of medieval English rape is that the law
on the  subject  changed.  Dunn shows  how early  post-Conquest  legal  commentaries,
notably Glanvill  and Bracton,  regarded rape as non-consensual intercourse.  The big
change came with the Statutes of Westminster of 1275 and 1285, major codifications of
the English law which, inter alia, introduced the abduction of unmarried and married
women as a felony (relevant legislation, in both the original Latin or French and in
English translation, is given in Appendix I). This appears to be the law reacting to a
perceived  social  problem.  By  the  late  thirteenth  century  issues  of  landholding,
inheritance, and property in general had become major concerns for the landed elite,
and  the  abduction  of  heiresses  in  particular  was  a  cause  for  disquiet.  Rape  in  the
modern sense was still an offence, and still prosecuted : but so, now, was abduction.
Dunn, surely correctly, links the chronology of cases of ‘ravishment’ to this legislation.
In  the  thirteenth  century  there  were  twenty-eight  cases  of  rape,  forty-eight  of
abduction, and 107 ambiguous cases. In the fourteenth century there were forty-seven,
407 and 316 respectively, meaning that nearly two thirds of the ‘ravishment’ cases she
has identified fell in that century. In the fifteenth century, changing legislation and
shifts  in legal  procedures led to a diminution of  allegations of  ‘ravishment’  coming
before the courts.
3 Dunn has therefore produced a scholarly and well-founded study which helps clarify a
complex subject. But she has also gone a lot further by providing an object lesson in the
advantages to be gained by questioning pre-modern court records and not taking the
stories they tell at face value. As Dunn points out, not all allegations referred to an
incident which actually happened, or which happened in the way the documentation
claimed it did. This becomes especially clear in her analysis of allegations of abduction.
Obviously, many of these allegations do involve cases in which an unmarried woman
was  abducted  either  to  put  pressure  on  her  parents  to  accept  a  marriage  to  her
abductor, or, indeed, so that she could be more or less forcibly married and her parents
presented with a fait  accompli.  Conversely, ‘abduction’ could comprehend a range of
other  matters.  Some abductions,  notably  that  of  Alice,  the  wife  of  Thomas,  earl  of
Lancaster  in  1317,  were  political.  Many  others  seemingly  involved  people  seeking
solutions  to  intractable  problems  of  love  and  marriage.  So  some  abductions  were
consensual, with the woman willingly leaving the parental home to marry a man she
loved, or to pressure her parents into accepting such a marriage. Others occurred when
parents ‘abducted’ their married daughters to remove them from violent or abusive
husbands. Yet others, again involving married women, occurred when, in an age when
divorce was an impossibility,  a  wife wished to leave her husband for another man,
possibly  with  the  husband’s  consent.  A  minority  at  least  of  the  ‘stolen  women’  of
medieval England were, it seems, quite happy to be stolen.
4 Rape also presents its complications. The nature of the records do not permit much by
way of  definite conclusions to be drawn, so the circumstances of  a  rape,  the social
status of the accused, and still less the social status of the victim can only rarely be
established.  Two  things,  however,  are  clear :  the  first  is  that,  for  the  victim,  the
experience of  being raped was as  harrowing in the middle  ages as  it  is  today.  The
second is that convictions for rape were very rare. As Dunn points out, the (we may
suppose)  patriarchally  inclined  men  who  served  as  judges  and  jurors  had  wives,
mothers,  and  daughters,  and  hence  probably  regarded  rape  as  a  serious  offence :
conversely, they may have felt that the blinding, castration or hanging prescribed for
Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England : Rape, Abduction and Adulter...
Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 19, n°1 | 2015
2
the convicted rapist was a little too harsh. But (as with abduction allegations) she finds
strong  suggestions  that  cases  were  being  settled  out  of  court,  before  or  after  the
acquittal of the accused, with what was in effect compensation being paid to the family
of the victim. Again as with abduction cases, Dunn is alert to the possibility of malicious
prosecutions, or prosecutions being launched as part of a feud. There is an interesting
twist here : clerics were disproportionately represented among those accused in rape
cases, and Dunn argues, persuasively, that in many cases this might be the product of
community disapprobation of clerical concubinage or other forms of consensual sexual
relations between a supposedly celibate priest and a female member of his flock.
5 Overall, then, this is a major contribution to our understanding of rape and abduction
in  medieval  England,  and  also  one  which  uses  legal  records  to  excellent  effect  in
shedding  light  on  the  sexual  and  marital  mores  of  the  period.  Dunn  shows  an
imaginative approach to her sources which is combined with first-rate scholarship, and
a level-headed and rounded approach to a topic which has, understandably, generated
strong  reactions  among  some  historians.  She  also  demonstrates  a  considerable
expertise  in  the  law,  legal  records,  and  legal  procedures  of  the  period,  with
ecclesiastical law and the possible influence of continental Roman law being considered
at appropriate points in a work based mainly on the English secular law. This is an
impressive work which deserves a wide readership.
AUTHORS
JAMES SHARPE
University of York, UK
Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England : Rape, Abduction and Adulter...
Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 19, n°1 | 2015
3


Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England : Rape, Abduction and Adultery, 1100-1500

http://journals.openedition.org/chs/pdf/1561

Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England : Rape, Abduction and Adultery, 1100-1500

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

OpenEdition