To an extraordinary degree, powerful lords sequestered young women inside the walls of their castles, plucking them from their homesteads to work as maids and attendants. There is abundant evidence that these lords mated prolifically with harems of these women, often siring dozens of illegitimate children. In some cases, they prevented these women from marrying other men; in others, they sequestered them as virgins, and then married them off after they had had a child with the castle lord.

Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evoluti…, loc. 699