Jus Primae Noctis

The castle, a perfects square of thick and solid walls of gray stones with blue shades, was right in front of the only pass in the whole northern boundary of the fiefdom, a narrow gap between two high, steep, impenetrable mountain ridges. The barbaric neighbors had tried many times to pass the gap and conquer the castle and the region, in order to march beyond and reach the capital of the fiefdom, but they had always gained only widows and orphans from that.

The man who was looking at the region and the pass from the main tower at the northern corner of the castle, as he did every morning, was slowly getting old, but he remembered well the last of those unfortunate raids. Unfortunate for the enemy, of course. He was the young heir of the fiefdom then, at his first really manlike test. And he had passed the test well, with a victory that gained him the respect of the old companions and men-at-arms of his father, who knew him since he was a kid. Then they definitely started treating him as a man, a real lord, to which they could be proud to obey. And they never ceased.

He gained the respect of the people too, taking care of the widows and the orphans that the raid had left on his side of the pass. Many of those little orphans now were healthy, strong and loyal young men, the main part of his little army. Such a loyal and well trained force could be used not only against the enemy from the north, but also against rebels and troublemakers in the fiefdom. And everybody knew that.

Of course, men-at-arms are never plaster saints. Sometimes they kept drinking and shouting all night in the taverns, toasting in all sincerity their lord, master and commander, and sometimes they tried to subjugate some girls, with more or less success. Usually they were content with the scullery maids of the tavern, the girls who watched the pigs or other kinds of women normally associated with these needs. Occasionally they had some very happy moments in some barn with young peasant girls who knew what happened between the animals and wanted to try by themselves. And if these teaching events had some serious consequences, the parents of the girl and the lord himself exerted discrete pressures in order to make things end up as they had to end up: in the church.

Just one time, a stupid soldier had harassed (seriously harassed) a too young girl, absolutely without her consent. And he had been punished by the lord himself. Punished to the extreme consequences. High justice. It was part of his rights. And of his duties.

As a matter of fact, there had been never a rebellion, and not only because of the deterent of those fine young men. Unlike many of his peers, the lord used to renounce parts of his rights (on the harvests, the lumbers, etc.) when things went wrong for the peasants: floods, famines, etc. In the worst cases, he had put a part of the food reserves of the castle at their disposal, though his men-at-arms had strictly managed the distribution of those aids, to avoid disorders and abuses. And the peasants had taken note of all that. Even people from out of the fiefdom had asked to live there.

The loyalty of the lord's family to the overlord in the capital and the strategic importance of the castle, which required a huge workforce for the production and maintenance of war machines and fortifications, and a strong garrison to man them, had suggested the overlord to concede him the right to host those runaway families. Although the other vassals could dislike it. But he lord had the right to ban and expell the newcomers too, at his own will.

Of course, the happy newcomers avoided with care any conduct that could create problems for the lord and the residents. A complaint could cost dearly. And even the residents had something to remind them how lucky they were to live there.

The lord came down from the tower and started his normal working day. The hearings to solve disputes among the peasants, the visit to the cellars of the castle to take a look at the provisions, and in the afternoon, a visit to the dean. The dean held the registers where he signed the baptisms, the marriages and the funerals he had ministered, or had to minister soon. And he told the lord that the next day there would be another marriage. He said who the bride was, something about her good family and where she lived. But the lord already knew everything.

The dean knew that the lord did not manage the fiefdom as humanely as he did just to save his own soul, or at least, not only for that. The lord genuinely thought that the place of the peasants was over the land, to work it, and not below it, for as long as it was possible. A riot is a bad deal even if you get to quell it. Dead men, maybe women and kids, lost harvests, houses and maybe mills and stores destroyed, and worse of all, sorrow, hate, rush of revenge... Of course, sometimes you cannot do without it. But if you can avoid it simply by renouncing some luxury or giving the peasants what they need instead of leaving it to rats and kitchen thieves, it is better that way. On the other hand, better off to have men-at-arms who have reasons to be loyal to you than to hire mercenaries ready to create problems and run when you need them most. If those men-at-arms are from the same quite satisfied family they have to look after, well, even better... They can be your eyes and ears...

For all the rest, and the dean knew that too, the lord was a sinner as any other man. And surely he had some intentions about the new bride. But so went the things in the world. He had the right to have those intentions, and to follow them. The best thing was to pretend nothing was happening. Don't ask, don't tell. The dean did not ask the lord what was he going to do, and the lord did not tell him about that. They took their leave, and the lord went away.

The same evening, two men-at-arms carried the girl to where lord was waiting. The girl had a hood on the head, but was not handcuffed or bound. They got her at her house, and her parents knew what was going on, and what was going to happen. There had been no resistence. When the lord took away the hood, the girls looked into his eyes showing neither fear nor shame. The lord ordered his men to leave the room and they got out, mumbling a praising comment about the buttocks of the girl.

The lord shook his head. Boys...

"Did they hurt you?" he asked, looking at the girl. She shook her head no. "Did they offended you?" he asked again.

The girl shook her head again. Some saucy words, even the girls exchanged them, especially when one of them was going to know the male, in the biblical meaning of the word. But as for the rest, touching, groping, raping... No, nothing to say.

The lord examined the girl, as if she were a mare. The face, the arms... No bruises, she had told the truth. And she was nice. He looked in her eyes again.

"Are you scared?"

The girl gave no answer. She was not facing a monster. She was facing a man, not too old, not too ugly, not too rude. A strong, virile man. Surely, he had something quite strong and virile between his legs. And soon that same "something" would have been entering her... He did not need to rape her, she did not intended to resist him, but if her body resisted, even unwillingly, out of instinctive fear, well, all the worse on her, she knew... Any virgin girl would have been quite scared... The lord knew that. He smiled.

"If you want, you can leave. Wait for a while, then I will call my men and they will escort you to your home."

The girl thought for a moment, then shook her head again. Of course. The men-at-arms? No. They did not give her any instruction. Not they, nor the parents... He hugged her, without undressing her a bit. She let him do, answering his hug, and when he wanted to kiss her, she, obedient (or so she could say to be: only "obedient"), opened her lips and let him kiss her, deeply and for quite a long time.

"You are beautiful," breathed the lord when their lips parted. She was panting too, but she smiled and let him kiss her again while his hands started to undress her. She accepted it , passively, keeping on hugging him. It was nice to hug a man, such a man... She felt his strength. He could rape her at will, but he did not want to. He did not want a victim. And she did not feel a victim. Of course, the lord has the right to sleep with her, to deflorate her. The fact that he did it before the marriage and not after was nothing,a detail, a technicality. Her "virtue", her maidenhead, belonged to him anyway. And she was happy that he wanted to take it that way, as a man, not as a bandit. She was not yet ready to host his "something" maybe, but she trusted him now. He knew what he was doing.

When he laid her on the bed, she was naked and he was still half-dressed, but this did not disturb her. She saw his chest, his belly, thick and solid. A warrior, a healthy man. She let him lay over her. He started kissing her from her mouth down, and this relaxed and soothed her even more. She had a good, warm smell, and the lord liked that. A healthy peasant girl. Not scared, not timid. Her husband will be a lucky man. And of course, he would have never looked for any more after the bridal rite. But for now she belonged to him, and seemed quite happy of it.

The girl felt the kisses of the lord coming closer and closer to her pubes. She was embarrassed for a while, but the lord did not give her the time to decide. He simply widened up her legs and started kissing her sex. She winced, but let him do. He was doing what he wanted, and so it had to be, she had no responsability... And his kisses on her live flesh were like bolts sparked from her sex to her brains, one after the other. The strongest, best sensation she had ever felt. So strong that she felt herself fainting. But some part of her remained conscious. And that part saw the lord raising over her, over her abandoned body, between her wide open legs, and...

The lord pulled out of the girl while she had the eyes closed yet. She was panting, started moving slowly her knees to the left, then to the right, then she opened her eyes. The lord was there, looking at her.

"Did you get very hurt?" he asked. A bit more of tenderness than that he would have used with a wounded soldier, but the same respect. She shook her head. It had been not painless, but she was expecting something worse. She felt a bit of blood dripping down between her thighs (she thought it was blood, and it was), but she had taken it for granted. All in all, she was relaxed, with the strange feeling of having her belly still filled by... No reason to hate that man. In fact, the way round...

"There is a vat with some water down there, if you want," the lord said, pointing at a tent hanging by a rope. She nodded. He helped her to stand up, then she went beyond the tent on her own. When both of them was dressed up again, the lord went to call his men. Maybe they were listening and laughing behind the doors, but when the lord opened it, they were straight as piles at attention.

"Escort her to her home And woe to you if you disrespect her." the lord said. The men-at-arms nodded. "Disrespect her" meant "rape her", "possess her". When a loaf has been cut, you don't mind if it misses a slice, but... No, the lord had forbidden it, better off do nothing...

The lord went to his apartments. All this had happened in a small room close to the castle's mews. And all had been fine, after all. Just the same, strange, sensation. Of course, the lord liked to possess the peasant girls. He was a man, sure, and those girls were nice, healthy, with a good smell of fertility, of good earth, of good fruits... wonders of creations, born to love and be loved, to give birth to children... And he did not feel guilty at all: he had the right to do what he did, as did all his peers. He tried to do it without humiliating anybody. That's why he possessed the maidens the night before the wedding, and not after that, in the daylight facing the groom and the people. Some other lords did it that way, to affirm their power. Useless: power is a serious thing, people have to know you have it without such trivial shows. Everybody knew he used his "droit de seigneur" on the peasant girls, and nobody complained about it, or the way he used it. The people accepted it as a reasonable price to live there, as with the other "corvées", the compulsory services he ordered and enforced, as did any other lord. Sometimes he had possessed a girl who had lost her "virtue" already, who knows where and with whom. It happens, and it was better HE had discovered it. The husband of the girl would have never known her fault, of course...

No, the strange thing was not that he possessed the girls: this was the law. The strange things was, he felt that the girls LIKED to be possessed by him. To be DEFLORATED by him. Maybe the first one, many years ago, was not fully agreeable, but the others, ALL the others...

Why did it happen? The women talk, quite a lot, everybody knows that. Especially to the other women... Was he so handy in bed? Who knows... He tried not to be rude, not to hurt them, if possible to make them enjoy the thing. And he succeeded, it seemed.

Surely, the guys who were going to marry those girls loved them, most of the time. They were likely ready to die for them. But the first time is special for a woman. How would have they acted? Clumsily, roughly, hastly, hands everywhere, ripping the dresses. Or all the way round, too gently, timidly, as if in fear of breaking the girls in two... No in-between... Too bad... Too young...

He recalled a girl, some months before. She had asked him to undress fully before taking her. He had complied. Surely she had no dagger with her. The idea of the dagger made him recall when he had seen the girl before: she was the girl who always looked at his face when he rode in the town with his escort. And she looked at him with desire. She was just a peasant girl and he was the lord, no hope of a serious relationship, and she did not want to lose her honor by simply giving herself to him. But when her family found a boy for her, and the army men took her at the castle, she was ready to belong to him. She just wanted him to be naked like her. She had dreamed of that moment many times. Why do not please her?

The lady of the castle, the wife of the lord, was waiting for him along the stairway that led to their apartments. She was a beautiful woman, with a stern, almost nunlike face that could mislead about her sweet and sensual character, but compelled people to respect her. She knew what her husband had just done, and she knew he had the right to do it. She knew it from when she came to the castle some years before. She could not complain about him: he respected her, surely did not consider her just a broodmare, as happened to many other women, princesses or peasant girls. But surely she was not enthusiastic about what he did.

"Did you do it?" she asked.

"Yes." the lord said. No need for more words. She turned and went without haste to their rooms. He followed her. She would have made no complaint, he knew that. She knew how the things went, and and how they had to go. She had a beautiful body, he noticed once again. Even after two pregnancies. And her sex had nothing to envy those of the girls. Not so tight, maybe, but warm and deep...

They entered their bedroom. In the lord's family, wife and husband always shared the same bed, unlike in some other traditions. In that room, they had entered as courteous strangers after their wedding, of course accompanied by their parents to assist to the blessing of the bed officiated by the old dean. And on that bed they had become lovers, friends, mother and father. There they had decided who would have been the husband of their daughter and the wife of their son, and other questions about their little but strategic dominion. He valued her opinion, her way of thinking to solve problems as he gave her the points to ponder, to elaborate. There was no matter he thought could be too important, too complicated to be discussed with her. War, food supplies, politics, moral and religious issues. Everything. Now, as every other time he possessed some peasant girl, he was uneasy, side by side with her. He looked at her, and she looked at the ceiling. She had a nice profile too, he thought. He became conscious of the fact he desired her, there, in that moment. But he did nothing. Not with the smell and the sweat of another woman on his skin. Sweat of love, sweat of sex... His wife would have repelled him and with good reasons. Or maybe she would have let him do, only as a conjugal duty. And that would have been ever worse...

"Was she nice?" she asked.

"More or less like the other ones," he answered. That meant "yes", and she knew that. She could handle the truth. She deserved it. She wanted it.

"And... did you have had to force her?"

"More or less like the other ones." That means "no", and she knew that too. Her first bridal night had been so. She had slipped into that bed where she lay now, naked, frightened, dreaming of being still safe in the nunnery where they had educated her. She thought to have to bear the unbearable, the brute force of the male, the member, the horror of the penetration... Nothing of that. He had wanted to have a bath before taking her. She had heard him talking with the handmaid they had assigned to her, while she washed him. They knew each other, of course. She was talking with him with the respect due to the lord, but with some confidence too. Then the handmaid took her leave. He got out of the bath with a towel on his shoulder, and told her to get out of the bed. She obeyed, covering herself with a shawl. He just hugged her, kissing and smelling her hair, her neck... Besides those kisses, it was just a hug, like those she remembered fron her childhood, the hugs of her father, great, strong, careful... She let the shawl drop down from her body, and felt the kisses go down, her shoulders, her breast, her nipples...

Then she felt dizzy. His tongues was soft, but the feelings it gave her were strong, powerful. She lay on the bed and let him mount over her. He kept kissing her down her breast, to the bosom and below... yes, right to that unmentionable place... But he was her husband, her lord, she could not rebel against him. So she had been instructed, and she did not rebel... And if his kisses on her breast had stunned her, his kisses between her legs were rapture. She thought she was in heaven, or some place very similar... Just then, he penetrated her with his so feared member, but she was so elated by those feelings, so abandoned, that she hardly noticed as she became a woman. Yes, he was strong, as a man, a warrior, a lord had to be. Strong body, strong hands, and strong member... Oh, so strong... But it was a strenght made to protect her, not to hurt her, to abuse her... And, yes, to give new sons and daughters to Our Lord, through her... And she was ready to give many, many, many of them...

Yes, maybe she could understand it, even during the nuptial procession. All the women were smiling. Smiling at her. And they were sincere smiles, from woman to woman. She was going to know the male, surely, but not a male as anybody, and not only because he was "the lord"... They had explained here, with embarrassed faces, what was the "jus primae noctis": the lord had the right to be the first male of all the girls of the fiefdom. So her future husband had possessed all those women, at least the younger ones. They all had something in common wih her: him. They all had become women under him. And they were happy for it. And happy for her. Now it whas her turn. They have had him once, she would have had him for a lifetime, lucky woman... But they were not envious: she was the newcomer. It was proper to be gentle...