Braveheart made it the ultimate villain move: a feudal lord invoking his legal right to a peasant's bride on her wedding night. This episode digs through legal histories and archives to show that the so-called right of the first night, known as ius primae noctis or droit du seigneur, never existed as a law anywhere in medieval Europe, and traces how a misread tax record and an Enlightenment comedy turned it into accepted fact.

The story begins in antiquity, where the Epic of Gilgamesh, Herodotus, the Etruscan revolt at Volsinii and the Babylonian Talmud all treat the practice as the mark of a tyrant rather than a functioning statute. It then explains how the merchet, a marriage fee compensating a lord for lost labor, and the church's three-night Tobias waiting period were misinterpreted by Montesquieu in 1748, how Scottish historian Hector  ...