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When Betzig turned her attention to medieval Christendom, she discovered that the phenomenon of monogamous marriage and polygamous mating was so entrenched that it required some disinterring. Polygamy became more secret, but it did not expire. In medieval times, the census shows a sex ratio in the countryside that was heavily male-biased because so many women were ‘employed’ in the castles and monasteries. Their jobs were those of serving maids of various kinds but they formed a loose sort of ‘harem’, whose size depended clearly on the wealth and power of the castle’s owner. In some cases, historians and authors were more or less explicit in admitting that castles contained ‘gynoeciums’, where lived the owner’s harem in secluded luxury.

Count Baudouin, patron of a literary cleric named Lambert, ‘was buried with twenty-three bastards in attendance as well as ten legitimate daughters and sons’. ‘His bedchamber had access to the servant girls’ quarters, and to the rooms of adolescent girls upstairs. It had access, too, to the warming room, “a veritable incubator for suckling infants”.’ Meanwhile many medieval peasant men were lucky to marry before middle age and had few opportunities for fornication.44

The Rewards of Violence

If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been a frequent cause, and reward, of violence.45

Consider the case of the Pitcairn Islanders. In 1790, nine mutineers from HMS Bounty landed on Pitcairn along with six male and thirteen female Polynesians. Thousands of miles from the nearest habitation, unknown to the world, they set about building a life on the little island. Notice the imbalance: fifteen men and thirteen women. When the colony was discovered eighteen years later, ten of the women had survived and only one of the men. Of the other men, one had committed suicide, one had died and twelve had been murdered. The survivor was simply the last man left standing in an orgy of violence motivated entirely by sexual competition. He promptly underwent a conversion to Christianity and prescribed monogamy for Pitcairn society. Until the 1930s the colony prospered and good genealogical records were kept. Studies of these show that the prescription worked. Apart from rare and occasional adultery, the Pitcairners were and remain monogamous.46

Monogamy, enforced by law, religion or sanction, does seem to reduce murderous competition between men. According to Tacitus, the Germanic tribes that so frustrated several Roman emperors attributed their success partly to the fact that they were a monogamous society and therefore able to direct their aggression outwards (though no such explanation applied to the polygamous and successful Romans). No man was allowed more than one wife, so no man had an incentive to kill a fellow tribesman to take his wife. Not that socially imposed monogamy need extend to captive slaves. In the nineteenth century in Borneo, one tribe, the Iban, dominated the tribal wars of the island. Unlike their neighbours, the Iban were monogamous, which both prevented the accumulation of sullen bachelors in their ranks and motivated them to feats of great daring with the prize of foreign girl slaves as reward.47

One of the legacies of being an ape is intergroup violence. Until the 1970s, primatologists were busy confirming our prejudices about peaceable apes living in non-violent societies. Then they began to observe the rare but more sinister side of chimpanzee life. The males of a chimpanzee ‘tribe’ sometimes conduct violent campaigns against the males of another tribe, seeking out and killing their enemies. This habit is very different from the territoriality of many animals, who are content to expel intruders. The prize may be to seize the enemy territory, but that is a small reward for so dangerous a business. A far richer reward awaits the successful male alliance: young females of the defeated group join the