Droit du seigneur

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Droit du seigneur, literally "the lord's right", also known as ius primae noctis ("right of the first night") and other names, is an alleged legal right that the lord of medieval estates or fiefdoms has to take the virginity of his serfs' maiden daughters. There isn't compelling evidence this actually happened though. Usually invoked by the Feudal Overlord as one of his many Kick the Dog moments. May involve The Dragon.

Subtrope of I Have You Now, My Pretty and a way to establish that Aristocrats Are Evil.

No real life examples, please; first, this is a rape trope, and All The Tropes does not care to squick its readers. Secondly, there is no evidence that this was an actual formalized practice in any culture in history.

Examples of Droit du seigneur include:

Film

• In Braveheart, Evil Overlord Edward "Longshanks" grants ius prima noctis to English lords, granting them the sexual right to take any Scottish girl for himself on her wedding night. He figures with this in place, some of his lords will both be more eager to rule in Scotland, and more thoroughly keep the Scots under their thumb. We witness this happen at one wedding, where Morrison's wife is carried off by Lord Bottoms to be raped. When Morrison comes across Bottoms during William Wallace's attack on the English garrison, Morrison makes his grievance with him felt in no uncertain terms:

Lord Bottoms: I never did her any harm. It was my right! Morrison: Your right? Well, I am here to claim the right of a husband! [Morrison kills Lord Bottoms]

• Pretty much the entire plot of the Charlton Heston film The Warlord, where the knight protagonist falls in love with a peasant woman and uses droit de seigneur to claim her on her wedding night. It was based on the Leslie Stevens play The Lovers.
• The title character of Caligula exercises his droit du seigneur by raping both Proculus and his new wife, widely considered his most sickening act of the movie.
• The Gothic horror film And Now The Screaming Starts has a family of British nobles suffering from a curse brought about as punishment for an ancestor's presumptuous invocation of prima noctis.
• In Avengers: Age of Ultron, during a game of trying to lift Thor's hammer Mjolnir, Tony Stark half-jokes that, since lifting the hammer may entitle you to be a prince of Asgard, the first thing he would do in that situation would be to immediately restitute the "Prima Nocta" tradition. Given that Mjolnir is an Empathic Weapon who only reacts to the "worthy", predictably it doesn't moves one iota.

Literature

• In A Song of Ice and Fire, some lords still practice it. Roose Bolton acknowledges that he raped a maid who had married without letting him, as her liege lord, invoke his right of "first night." The product of this union was Ramsay Snow. Also, in an attempt to to present his fellow Northern Lords as Not So Different from him, Bolton claims that Umber lords also practice it.
• A rare modern example occurs in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which "the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories" is an element of the Party's propaganda. Whether it's true or not is up to interpretation.
• Played for laughs in the Discworld novel Wyrd Sisters. Duke Felmet would like to exercise his Droit du Seigneur, but nobody cares to explain him what this thing is about. As a result, he imagines it to be some kind of large hairy dog.
• The famous Italian novel, The Betrothed, starts when the priest refuses to let Renzo and Lucia marry because the local nobleman, Don Rodrigo, has his eye on her.
• Mentioned in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland as one of the things that bad Aristocratic Feudalists like to get up to when oppressing the peasantry.
• This comes up in John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows series. Main character Mike is reluctant (you don't have sex with the brides of men who have guns at your back), but is eventually convinced to accept it by the village elders. A few books later, he figures out the real reason for it and refuses to do it again.
• In the prologue to Frank Yerby's The Saracen Blade, the local count remarks that Donato's bride-to-be is so pretty that he's tempted to invoke this. After an appalled priest explains to Donato what the term means, Donato and his bride flee the count's lands. Their son Pietro is the book's main character. The count years later indicates that he was only or mostly joking about taking the girl, and either way is ashamed of himself for saying it.
• Given a twist in a series of short stories by Edward P. Hughes, set in Ireland after World War III. The local "lord," a former British Army sergeant whose authority allegedly comes from a Challenger tank he swiped when civilization broke down, is actually a figurehead compelled by the village council to boink girls on their wedding nights -- because something used in the war seems to have rendered all men but him sterile. He seriously dislikes his position as breeding stock. Added Squick comes in a generation, when girls who don't know they're his daughters are now ready to get married.
• In Leslie Barringer's Low Fantasy Gerfalcon, Baron Raoul of Marckmont is informed that one of his serf girls has married recently, and "awaits your pleasure" because her husband can't pay the "marriage-due." His pleasure is to have her given a gold coin and sent back to her husband; "the due is remitted." Raoul's secretary comments it seems likely the girl will be disappointed about this, because her husband isn't very attractive, while Raoul is both good-looking and already, at eighteen, a Badass Famed in Story.
• Mentioned in Oscar's patchwork fantasy trope "What did I want?" rant from Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein.

Live-Action TV

• In the Merlin episode "Queen Of Hearts", Prince Arthur and Guinevere (the maid of Arthur's stepsister Morgana) tried to keep their romance secret as Uther would not allow such a match to happen. However, he caught them on a secret picnic, but at first assumed that Arthur was just exercising his droit du seigneur.

New Media

• A husband and wife were disappointed that The Lord of Darkwood does not exercise the lord's right. The abusive Lord of Crimson Peak exercised it.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

• Older Than Dirt: The titular protagonist of the Epic of Gilgamesh did this, necessitating the creation of Enkidu in response to the prayers of the women who wanted Gilgamesh stopped. It may be worth noting that this was just something Gilgamesh did, not something that he was allowed to do - Gilgamesh was a king who raped women before they married their husbands, but considering the gods taking action to stop Gilgamesh, this wasn't a right or privilege, but an abuse of office.
• Droit du seigneur is brought up in The Wooing of Emer when Bricriu of the Venomous Tongue declares that Conchobar doesn't have the right to sleep with Emer before Cu Chulainn (the guy who killed hundreds of men for the privilege of marrying her), so much as he has a legal obligation to. Being rightfully scared shitless of what Cu Chulainn would do to him if he did, but also reluctant to lose his authority if he didn't, Conchobar gets around it by "sleeping with" Emer in only the most literal sense.

Theatre

• This is one of the major plot points in The Marriage of Figaro, with Count Almaviva wanting to seduce Susanna and threatening to reinstate this feudal custom.

Western Animation

• The Family Guy episode "Brothers & Sisters," has an English "local nobleman" attempting to invoke his right of "prima noctus" on Lois' sister after she agrees to a date with Mayor West.