Sancho Judges the Woman's Rape Accusation

Sancho Panza’s hearing of a woman’s accusation against a cattle dealer turns a crowded court into a test of judgment. Rather than settle the dispute through witnesses or a conventional inquiry, Sancho creates a physical comparison: the woman says she was overpowered, but then defends a purse with such force that the man cannot take it from her. He treats that contrast as decisive, returns the money to the man, and dismisses the woman. The episode presents Sancho as perceptive and commanding, while leaving the reader to see how sharply his verdict depends on a staged test rather than independent proof.

Setting and Immediate Context

The hearing takes place during Sancho’s tenure as governor of the Island of Barataria, amid a sequence of cases brought before him. The dispute arrives just after another judgment, in which he had a cane broken and ten gold crowns were found inside it. Those present had admired that decision but remained uncertain whether to regard Sancho as a fool or a man of sense. The new case therefore renews the question of what kind of judgment he possesses: his decisions may look startlingly simple, yet he attends closely to details others might overlook.

A woman enters holding tightly to a man dressed like a prosperous cattle dealer. She raises a complaint of assault, saying that he attacked her in the fields and violated the chastity she had guarded for more than twenty-three years. Her account emphasizes the duration of her claimed virtue and the injustice of its loss. Sancho does not accept her allegation merely because it is delivered with great force, but neither does he immediately dismiss it. He turns to the man and asks for his answer.

The man identifies himself as a poor pig dealer, not a cattle dealer, and explains that he had gone out to sell four pigs. After paying various charges, he says, he had little left from the sale. On his return he met the woman, paid her fairly, and was then seized by her and brought to court. He denies her accusation. The accounts thus oppose her claim of assault to his claim that money changed hands voluntarily; at this point, the scene supplies no independent witness to settle the contradiction.

The Purse as a Test

Sancho asks whether the man has silver money with him. The dealer says that he carries about twenty ducats in a leather purse against his chest. Sancho orders him to give the purse to the woman. The man obeys, trembling, and she takes it, makes elaborate gestures of gratitude to the court, and leaves in apparent triumph. Before going, she checks that the money inside is silver. That small action keeps the purse, rather than either person’s account alone, at the center of the case.

Once the woman has gone, Sancho tells the man to follow her, take the purse back even by force, and return with it. The dealer runs after her at once. The assembled onlookers wait to see what the order will establish. The two return struggling over the purse: the woman has it secured in her raised skirt, and she cries that the man is trying to take back what the governor awarded her. The dealer cannot wrench it away. When Sancho asks whether he succeeded, she insists that she would sooner lose her life than release the purse; the man concedes that he has been unable to overcome her resistance.

The test produces a visible contrast between the two disputed claims. The woman had described herself as powerless in the earlier encounter, but now resists the dealer’s efforts to recover the money with determination. Sancho treats that difference in behavior as evidence. The purse is both the disputed property and the instrument of his inquiry: first it is handed over by command, then its defense becomes the demonstration on which he bases his ruling.

Verdict and Significance

Sancho asks to see the purse, and the woman gives it to him without resistance. He returns it to the dealer and tells the woman to leave the island, warning that she faces two hundred lashes if she remains within six leagues of it. She departs subdued and downcast. The man leaves with his money, thanks the governor awkwardly, and receives Sancho’s advice to avoid becoming entangled in such a situation again. The bystanders are once more impressed by their governor’s judgment.

The resolution is decisive, but the reasoning remains a test devised by Sancho, not a separate verification of what happened in the fields. He infers from the woman’s defense of the purse that she could have resisted the man in the earlier encounter. That inference drives the verdict and converts a conflicting pair of statements into a demonstration the court can watch. The scene gives Sancho’s practical attentiveness a comic edge: an ordinary leather purse becomes a measuring device, and the difference between resistance and helplessness is judged by how firmly someone holds on to money. At the same time, the episode’s confidence in this comparison does not erase its evidentiary limits. The court hears the two accounts and sees the purse test; it is Sancho’s interpretation of that performance that settles the case.

Coming immediately after his judgment about the gold hidden in the cane, the hearing extends the portrait of Sancho as a governor whose apparent simplicity can yield sharp observations. In the earlier case, he reads a claimant’s handling of a stick as a clue to concealed money. Here, he makes the parties’ actions under his own instructions supply the crucial evidence. Both judgments turn on objects and conduct rather than lengthy argument. The crowd’s renewed admiration confirms Sancho’s growing authority in the courtroom, but the scene also distinguishes a clever inference from conclusive knowledge: the verdict rests on the test he constructs and the meaning he assigns to the woman’s response.