Punishing convicted ravishers: statutory strictures and actual practice in thirteenth and fourteenth-century England

Several thirteenth-century English statutes provided increasing sanctions for ravishment or abduction of wards and wives. The penalty for conviction as a ravisher came to include a term of “penal servitude”, as well as the payment of damages to the plaintiff and an amercement to the crown. The evidence of the cases decided in the common law courts indicates that the payment of damages precluded penal servitude and that arrangements to pay made while in jail effected the prisoner's release before the term ended. Disregard of the ‘penal’ provisions and the continued use of jail or its threat to ‘coerce’ a defendant into compliance with the award of the court illustrate the disjunction between legislation and legal practice. That statutes about ravishment cannot be taken as self-enforcing contributes to the growing body of scholarship reminding us that history cannot be written from the statute books alone.