1. T. F. T. Plucknett, “Chaucer’s Escapade,” The Law Quarterly Review 64 (1948): 35. This epigraph has more than incidental status in framing an exploration of Chaumpaigne release. With the exception of the first sentence I quote, these words are also repeated for their authority in the standard source for the Chaumpaigne release, the Chaucer Life-Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) p. 343 (for the release) and pp. 345–46 (for Plucknett’s words).
2. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 11.
3. Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 45.
4. See Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 29–56.
5. For crucial examinations of the procedural ramifications of these statutes, see two articles by J. B. Post: “Ravishment of Women and the Statutes of Westminster,” in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), pp. 150–64 and “Sir Thomas West and the Statute of Rapes, 1382,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 53 (1980): 24–30. See also Sue Sheridan Walker, “Punishing Convicted Ravishers: Statutory Strictures and Actual Practice in Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century England,” Journal of Medieval History 13 (1987): 237–50.