Legal discourse offers a rich source of cultural evidence regarding secular attitudes to rape and ravishment in medieval England. Laws, legal treatises, and in the latter part of the period, case records, can often provide insight into the social constructions of these crimes. Although the development of written law is complex and its relation to practice uncertain, it is clear that a distinctively English law of rape existed. Secular legal material indicates a consciousness of the different ramifications of rape and its counterpart, abduction, and an individuality of treatment in this period. This chapter will consider the development of a law of rape in Anglo-Saxon England, and the ways that new attitudes towards property, and the growing influence of Roman law after the Conquest, shaped an English law of raptus, which both looked back to its origins, and engaged with contemporary social, political and economic concerns.

Anglo-Saxon Laws

This is not the generalisation of a biased early historian but an assertion found in a popular history of sex published in 1997 and praised as ‘a convincing history of sexuality’ and ‘a seminal work’ by ‘a poet of prehistory’. Poetic licence has led the author unthinkingly if not wilfully to ignore the evidence offered by Anglo-Saxon writings, which demonstrate that rape was viewed as a distinct and grave crime against women with serious consequences for the offender.