We have seen in Chapter 3 that Perceforest's law against rape had the effect of establishing love in England, and that from the advent of love flowed all the blessings of civilisation. Love inspires heroic exploits and courtly refinements and, in Perceforest, nearly always leads to marriage and the continuation of noble lineage. Ostensibly enacted for the protection and empowerment of women – virtually by popular demand – Perceforest's law is a mainstay of his own royal power. The prohibition of rape creates a knighthood, bound to the king in part through his power to approve marriages, and eager to win their brides by performing valiant deeds in battle or, failing that, in the court festivities through which Perceforest's kingship is staged and reconfirmed. And it creates ladyhood, a class of aristocratic women devoted to the improvement of the kingdom through a cultivation of domestic arts, landscaping, and the production of an opulent courtly splendour that, once again, publicly stages the cultural pre-eminence of the kingdom and its rulers.

Perceforest's law also defines the resistant clan members as outlaws. By condemning the lignaige Darnant as rapists whose access to women is fundamentally illegitimate, Perceforest emasculates his indigenous rivals, curbs their prolific reproduction – when he was killed by Perceforest, Darnant alone had well over a hundred sons and nearly as many grandsons – and establishes a legal basis for the systematic extermination of the clansmen. Imperial conquest – a process all too easily represented through the metaphor of rape – is thus recast as sexual salvation, with sexual violence and ‘perversity’ projected onto the native male rulers about to be supplanted.