While I was working on the documentation for my latest art work which contains an embroidered timeline of women’s rights, I was sure that in Spain and France during Medieval times there was an unwritten law that the lord of the land could rape the newlywed woman on the night of her marriage.
Turns out, because it was an unwritten law, it is contested by historians as hearsay and not an actual custom. They claim the law was to pay a money tax to the lord in order to get married and nothing else.
The only written document about this was a law given by the first king of Spain saying that lords were not allowed to rape newlywed peasant women. Apparently, the lords of the time claimed they never did that.
Three things:
- Women were not allowed education and the only ones who knew how to write, if any, were noble women or nuns. Therefore, anything which happened to women was transmitted orally.
- All Catholic female saints are part of stories of them running away from lords trying to rape them.
- Powerful men almost always abuse women. Proof the Epstein files which are being erased and burried under the ww3 as we speak.
Even if there was any written proof at the time, that can be easily destroied. What cannot be destroyed as easily is the collective oral memory, but in our current times it is being disregarded as unscientific, so there isn’t really a need to destroy it anyway…
L.E. : There is also the argument that the church controled everything in the Middle Ages so sex out of marriagr was forbidden, but that isn’t true. The Catholic Church only mananged to make church marriage with a priest a sacrement and indispensable in 1563 at the Council of Trent. That is already into Reneissance. The church had very little to say regarding marriage for the first 1000 and so years of it’s existance. Before that time there was only and administrative paper signed by two prople who lived together and had sex. Virginity in the sense we understand it today wa also not a big deal in most of the Medieval Europe or before, except the late Roman Empire, but that is a different story…
The joy of creating 