Reply #53: More Likely Senile Dementia or Droit de Seigneur

[Demeter]

"Did the droit du seigneur exist elsewhere in the world? Possibly in some primitive societies. But most of the evidence for this is pathetically lame--unreliable travelers' accounts and so on.

A few holdouts claim we don't have any definite evidence that the right of the first night didn't exist. But I'd say most reputable historians today would agree that the jus primae noctis, in Europe anyway, was strictly a male fantasy.

None of this is to suggest that men in power didn't or don't use their positions to extort sex from women. But since when did some creep with a sword (gun, fancy office, drill sergeant's stripes) figure he needed a law to justify rape? "

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1139/did-medieval-lords-have-right-of-the-first-night-with-the-local-brides

OTHER OPINIONS:

http://www.snopes.com/weddings/customs/droit.asp

Of all the historical forms of "first night" practices, the droit du seigneur is the most familiar in popular culture, and it is often cited as not just a widely-practiced custom, but as a codified part of medieval law. Both the prevalance of the practice and its legal status in medieval Europe are highly questionable, however.

The Encylopedia Britannica, for example, notes:
The droit du seigneur is paralleled in various primitive societies, but the evidence of its existence in Europe is almost all indirect, involving records of the redemption dues paid by the vassal to avoid enforcement, not of actual enforcement. Many intellectual investigations have been devoted to the problem, but, although it seems possible that such a custom may have existed for a short time at a very early date in parts of France and Italy, it certainly never existed elsewhere.1

The historical record shows far more resistance to the droit du seigneur than evidence of its occurrence, which might indicate that it was primarily a concept employed as a means of extorting money from vassals rather than an actual practice. Alain Boureau argues that the droit du seigneur was largely a myth perpetuated for political reasons (e.g., monarchists in the late Middle Ages cited the droit du seigneur to rally public opinion against local lords; partisans of the French Revolution used it as proof of the corruption and depravity of the Ancien Régime). Wendy Doniger writes that we might regard the droit du seigneur "in which the king controls the sexuality of his female subjects, as merely the extreme political form of the much more common practice of arranged marriages, in which the father controls the sexuality of his daughter," a myth which dramatizes "the tension between duty, in which women had little choice, and desire, in which they had some choice." In conclusion, she notes that although the specifics of the "first night" myths may be exaggerated or false, the broader concept — the historical use political power used for sexual purposes — still holds true:

Surely the use of political power to secure sexual favors is ancient and widespread. The droit du seigneur in the broadest sense — political pressure for sexual favors, what we now call sexual harrassment — must have been invoked informally all the time but was formalized in the myths as if it were a kind of unofficial law or right, one that was, from the start, intolerable. It may never, or seldom, have been technically legal, but it was not "just a myth."3

Sources:

1. Encyclopedia Britannica.
15th ed., 10.610 (unsigned article).

Boureau, Alain. The Lord's First Night: The Myth of the Droit De Cuissage.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 0-226-06743-2.

2. Doniger, Wendy. The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex & Masquerade.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-15642-7 (pp. 271-273).

3. Panati, Charles. Sexy Origins and Intimate Things.
New York: Penguin Books, 1998. ISBN 0-14-027144-9 (pp. 84-87).