Content warning for discussion of non-consensual sex and abduction.

I’m not terribly familiar with Eleanor of Aquitaine specifically, but I’ve done a fair amount of work on women and abduction in medieval England, so can provide some information from that perspective. I’d certainly be open to more information from someone who can explain how Eleanor fits into this general discussion.

I’ll quickly start with the second half of your question, because (as you rightly imply!) it’s important for understanding abduction. By the late twelfth century, the medieval church (most clearly Pope Alexander III in the papal decretal Veniens ad nos) had asserted full control over marriage and its creation. According to canon law, marriages could only be created by the freely given consent of the couple involved – there was a bit more to it than that, but for the purposes of discussing abduction, that’s the most important piece of information. That means that a woman’s father or family could not marry her off without her permission. Arranged marriages were certainly the norm, but such marriages could not be concluded without the couple’s consent.

There’s a pretty substantial body of literature on abduction in medieval England. It’s been well demonstrated that unmarried women of means were vulnerable to abduction by nefarious men looking for an easy path to wealth. One of the women I’ve looked at closely, Alice de Lacy, countess of Lancaster (and Leicester, Lincoln and Salisbury), was actually abducted twice. As the number of titles she held suggests, she was both wealthy and influential, so it’s easy to see what the attraction was. Such women, including Alice (in the second instance – in the first she was actually already married), did often end up married to their abductors, for a variety of reasons. A woman who was violently abducted and forced to marry her abductor would certainly be able to sue for an annulment on the grounds that she had not freely given consent. Some women chose to do this, with varying levels of success. Some did not. Why on earth would a woman agree to marry, or remain married to, her abductor? There are three major reasons.

• First, medieval society essentially understood girls and women to be property. More specifically, it understood their sexuality, their reproductive potential, to be property. Particularly among the landed classes, where property was inherited by the oldest son, this control over women’s sexuality ensured the child who inherited was the legitimate son of his father. This helps to explain why virginity was so prized (though other factors, particularly religious ones, were at play here). In medieval society, to be abducted was to be sexually active, whether that activity actually occurred and whether it was consensual or not. If a woman was abducted, it was assumed that she was no longer sexually pure. Her reproductive potential was essentially 'soiled goods' and her value on the marriage market was greatly diminished. Under these circumstances, it might be easier for the woman to remain married to her abductor than to become a social outcast. In fact, in rape cases, a rapist might be encouraged to marry his victim as ‘punishment’ (yes, really) for his crime, in order to make good. The fact that women did agree to these marriages speaks to the enormous social pressure on women’s sexuality.

• Secondly, abduction might be difficult to prove. Medieval canon law required that the couple exchange freely given consent to the marriage; it did not require witnesses. If a couple of teenagers alone in a hay byre agreed to marry each other in the heat of passion, that was it. In the eyes of the church, they were married. What was to stop a wily abductor from claiming that this was exactly what happened? He could easily claim that they had run away together, consented to the marriage and that it was only afterwards that she got cold feet and claimed abduction. At that point, it became a classic ‘he said, she said’ situation. In these circumstances, a woman might reasonably determine that it was better to remain married to her abductor than risk the trauma and uncertain outcome of a public trial.

• These first two reasons lead us to the final reason: instances of ‘abduction’ in medieval documents are not always actually abduction. The words for ‘rape’ and ‘abduction’ in medieval Latin, rapere and abducere, have a number of meanings ranging from ‘seduce’, to ‘ravish’, to ‘carry away’, to ‘rape’. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the medieval mind was incapable of differentiating between consensual and nonconsenual sex – they absolutely understood what rape was and they did not think it was OK. The confusion is that when these terms appear in the legal record, it’s not always clear what they’re referring to. It was far from unheard-of for a couple who were being prevented from marrying (a woman couldn’t be forced to marry against her will, but she could certainly be prevented from seeing her boyfriend!) to run away together and marry in secret. When they returned home, they could present the marriage to their families as a fait accompli. Even if this was entirely consensual, under English law this could be considered abduction. The woman’s father or guardian could sue her now-husband (ostensibly on her behalf, but really in this case he would mostly be seeking compensation for the loss of her reproductive potential – the marriage would still stand).

What does this mean for Eleanor of Aquitaine? Well, as one of the most sought-after heiresses of her time, she would certainly have been a target to men hoping to make some serious cash and/or leapfrog up the social ladder. But, bearing in mind reason 3, above, Eleanor may not have only been protected against threats from the outside. She may also have been prevented from making independent decisions about when and whom to marry.

A couple quick caveats before some sources:

• I have referred to potential rapists throughout as ‘he’ and his victim as ‘she’. Today we know that people of all genders can be both rapists and victims. In the medieval mind, sex, consensual or not, was something that a man did to a woman. It was inconceivable that the roles might be reversed. Ruth Mazo Karras’s Sex and Sexuality in Medieval Europe is the go-to source for further discussion on this point.

• Laws on marriage, rape and abduction were constantly shifting throughout this period – canon law on marriage actually changed during Eleanor of Aquitaine’s lifetime. What I’ve written above is our general understanding for most of the later Middle Ages, but there were absolutely variations throughout.

Sources:

James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe

Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England

Barbara A. Hanawalt, 'Whose Story was This? Rape Narratives in Medieval English Courts'

Ruth Mazo Karras, Doing Unto Others: Sex and Sexuality in Medieval Europe

Kim M. Phillips, 'Written on the Body: Reading Rape from the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries'

Elizabeth Robertson, 'Public Bodies and Psychic Domains: Rape, Consent, and Female Subjectivity in Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde’

Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, ‘Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature’

Corinne Saunders, 'A Matter of Consent: Middle English Romance and the Law of Raptus'