| Sumario: | This article uses quantitative and linguistic methodologies to explore how sexual violations to the female body were understood and subsequently adjudicated in Anglo-Saxon England, using Alfred's domboc, or "judgement book," as primary evidence. While the specificity with which Alfred considered rape from other forms of sexual misconduct has been noted before, the true severity of this crime during his reign, as well as the ways in which conventional systems of retribution were restructured in order to grant an equal level of protection to all classes of women, has never before been considered. By first quantifying the number of rape clauses, then analysing the shifting scales of retribution in relation to a woman's body worth and finally assessing the lexical complexity of these clauses, this paper uses a new system of law-code analysis to argue that Alfred's treatment of rape was unique among Anglo-Saxon rulers. As these methodological approaches to the domboc demonstrate, these crimes merited a particularly harsh form of retribution in comparison to the sex-related laws of both his predecessors and successors.
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