It may surprise some of you that similar discussions were had ... by actual medieval nobles!
The salient points here:
- It is true that we have a really hard time imagining the brutality not just of war but of everyday life in the middle ages. There is a reason why one of the seminal books on the subject is called 'the calamitous 14th Century.' Not the 'mostly pretty bad' - but calamity. Disaster. Oh !@#$ bad.
- Nobles would be hardened to this kind of thing in wartime, and to some extent even women, at least the ones who went along for long campaigns - but 'hardened to' doesn't mean 'accepting.' Chivalry regulated the behavior of nobles, not your regular guy in the army, and for the bulk of the middle ages armies were not professional soldiers with discipline but levies. One of the unwritten rewards for going on campaign was that you could help yourself to whatever loot and ladies you could get. 'Sacking a city' meant 'stealing everything that wasn't bolted down, kidnapping or at least borrowing all the womenfolk, and burning part or all of it down.'
- Some resistance to this sort of thing is not ahistorical. Henry V famously forbade his army from this kind of thing, but it was a really big deal that he did and that he was able to enforce it. Shakespeare mentions this in the arc between Henry IV and Henry V when then-Prince Hal has a bunch of unsavory drinking buddies who go on campaign with him to France in Henry V as soldiers. One of them does 'loot'. Prior to that:
(Henry IV Act I. ii)
FALSTAFF: Yea, and so used it that were it not here apparent
that thou art heir apparent--But, I prithee, sweet
wag, shall there be gallows standing in England when
thou art king? and resolution thus fobbed as it is
with the rusty curb of old father antic the law? Do
not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief.
PRINCE HENRY: No; thou shalt.
This is interpreted (by Falstaff) as a big joke, like 'you'll be in charge of hanging thieves,' but the double entendre is that Falstaff will himself be hanged as a thief, which (** SHAKESPEARE SPOILERS **) is exactly what happens - in France while on campaign.
The repugnance of the issue is not new. Nobles that were inclined to do it would probably be more likely to do it at home with the villager's daughter than on the warpath - remember that peasants were 'dirty' so it's not like other nobles would high five you for running around the city you'd just sacked and helping yourself, though I'm sure there were exceptions as chivalry was hardly universal. Particularly the Albigensian Crusade where you had French people killing other French people, women and children included - if you were going to burn them at the stake anyway, probably your usual social mores might get suspended, since the guys doing the killing in that one were not your Round Table types.
I thought that Jenred went about this the right way on the FEI. He presented it as a question of self-interest: anything that damaged food production damaged the realm - somebody's realm - so by burning farmland or bushels you might be hurting yourself (and this idea was helped by a long starvation period).
One issue with BM's implementation of this is that the motivation for letting your soldiers get away with that stuff isn't present in BM. If you were a 12th century noble with a thousand guys under your command and you were five hundred miles from home, you had better be paying them a lot (unlikely) or else giving them a lot of distractions, of which this was one. BM's 'troop morale' sort of takes this into account but even being the historical nut that I am I would have a hard time writing code for 'push rape button, get morale bonus.' And I'm fine with that disconnect.
My only complaint on the subject is when people write RPs about it involving their nobles. Not that it couldn't happen because it certainly could, but because frankly we're just not good enough writers to address that kind of thing and have the result be anything other than vulgar. RP can do a lot of things - it can narrate a story, enhance a setting, or reveal something about a character or characters that is applicable somehow to the game. Rape is just one of the third rails of writing fiction and I have never, ever seen it employed to good effect in BM. It's tough to make policy based on that idea but if it were up to me, I'd just have it on the list of things you probably just shouldn't RP, ever.
