Definition
A term of art in criminal pleading, historically required in any valid indictment for rape. In common-law practice, a rape indictment was formally defective unless it charged the defendant with having "feloniously ravished" the prosecutrix. The word carried a specific legal freight that no circumlocution or synonym could supply: it imported both the act of sexual violation and the use of force. No other word or phrase was accepted as a substitute in strict pleading.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simple past and past participle of "ravish." In modern general usage, "ravish" can mean to seize and carry off by force, to violate sexually, or — more loosely and often in literary or romantic contexts — to fill with delight or rapture.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Ravish" carried meanings of forcible abduction or carrying away, forcible sexual violation, and transport with delight or ecstasy. The violent and the pleasurable senses coexisted in nineteenth-century usage.
The gap matters for corpus researchers: In legal documents, "ravished" is never used in its softer, literary sense. Its appearance in a criminal pleading is a precise technical signal, and its absence — replaced by even close synonyms — was historically grounds to challenge an indictment's validity. Readers encountering the word in historical indictments, court records, or treatise discussions should treat it as a term of art, not descriptive language.
Common Confusion
Do not confuse the technical pleading requirement for the word "ravished" with a substantive element of the crime of rape itself. The force and violation that "ravished" imported in an indictment tracked the underlying common-law elements of rape, but the word's legal significance was primarily procedural — it was a pleading requirement, not a self-contained definition of the offense. Historical sources sometimes blur this distinction by treating the indispensability of the word as if it defined what rape was, rather than what a valid charge of rape had to say.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in historical criminal law records — particularly indictments, court rolls, and plea records from the colonial period through the nineteenth century — will encounter "ravished" as a formulaic term rather than a descriptive word. Its presence is a marker of proper form; its absence in a document purporting to charge rape may signal a defective indictment, an amended charge, or a different offense entirely.
Several research traps follow from this:
First, the strict pleading rule was a common-law requirement that eroded with codification. As American states adopted statutory rape definitions and reformed criminal procedure codes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the technical indispensability of "ravished" faded. Indictments under modern codes rarely use the term at all. A researcher comparing historical and modern charging documents should not assume continuity of practice.
Second, the word's dual common meaning — violent violation and rapturous delight — creates an interpretive hazard in non-legal historical sources that may bleed into legal commentary. In any criminal law document, context resolves the ambiguity instantly, but researchers mining literary, ecclesiastical, or mixed-genre historical sources should be alert to the distinction.
Third, the pleading requirement was itself contested in some jurisdictions and periods. Not all courts were equally strict about demanding "ravished" versus accepting "carnally knew and abused" or similar phrases. Treatise writers disagreed, and case law was not uniform. Corpus searches on "ravished" in legal databases will surface both the strict-pleading cases and the reform-era critiques.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core point: "ravished" was a material and indispensable word in rape indictments. Black's (both editions) and Burrill all cite Wharton's Criminal Law for this proposition. Bouvier goes furthest in elaborating the pleading rule, citing Bacon's Abridgment, Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown, Coke's Institutes, and East's Pleas of the Crown to show that "feloniously ravished" was the required formulation and that no other word or circumlocution would answer. Rapalje & Lawrence adds the specific gloss that the word "imports the use of force," citing an 1856 Massachusetts case.
What the historical dictionaries collectively omit is any treatment of how this rule fared under statutory reform. They present the pleading requirement as settled doctrine without flagging that it was already under pressure from codification movements contemporaneous with their publication. Researchers should not treat these entries as a complete account of nineteenth-century practice; they reflect the common-law baseline, not the full landscape of statutory variation.
Jurisdictional Note
The strict requirement that "ravished" appear in a rape indictment was a feature of common-law pleading and carried into American jurisdictions that preserved common-law forms. As states enacted criminal codes, many abolished the technical word-specific requirement. Modern American jurisdictions do not require the term in sexual assault or rape charges. English practice similarly moved away from strict formulaic pleading. Historical research must be situated in the specific jurisdiction and period to determine whether the rule applied.