Rule of Six

The Rule of Six was a common-law limit on a husband’s right to chastise an adulterous wife, established by Queen Rhaenys Targaryen after a case of lethal domestic violence at the Aegonfort. Its ruling accepted the prevailing claim that an adulterous wife could be punished, but placed a numerical boundary on that punishment: six blows were lawful; further blows were an offense against gods and men.

The case at the Aegonfort

A man brought before Queen Rhaenys had beaten his wife to death. Her brothers demanded punishment, while the husband argued that he had acted within his lawful rights because he had found her abed with another man. The right of a husband to chastise an erring wife was well established throughout the Seven Kingdoms, except in Dorne. As evidence, he produced the rod he had used and pointed out that it was no thicker than his thumb, invoking the separate limitation later known as the Rule of Thumb.

The question of the rod’s size did not settle how many times he had struck. When Rhaenys asked, the husband could not answer; the dead woman’s brothers insisted that the beating had consisted of a hundred blows. Rhaenys consulted her maesters and septons before delivering her decision, making the case not simply a dispute over the instrument but over the extent of a husband’s claimed authority.

The ruling and its logic

Rhaenys’s judgment accepted that an adulterous wife had offended the Seven, who had created women to be faithful and obedient to their husbands, and that she could therefore be chastised. But the queen set a limit through religious numerology: as God had seven faces, punishment should comprise six blows, while the seventh belonged to the Stranger, the face of death. The first six blows the husband had struck were therefore deemed lawful; the remaining ninety-four were not.

The rule thus distinguished the permitted chastisement from the excessive violence that followed it. It did not invalidate the husband’s claimed right to punish his wife, but confined that right to six blows and treated each blow beyond the limit as an offense requiring punishment in kind.

Enforcement and legal legacy

The husband was taken to the foot of the Hill of Rhaenys, where the dead woman’s brothers gave him ninety-four blows with rods of lawful size. The sentence mirrored the number of blows that had exceeded the limit: after the first six had been treated as lawful, the other ninety-four were answered with ninety-four blows against him.

From that day, the Rule of Six became part of the common law alongside the Rule of Thumb. The paired rules placed limits on two different features of the same asserted power: the thickness of the rod and the number of blows. The ruling’s restraint was consequently narrow. It punished the husband for exceeding a recognized authority rather than rejecting the underlying custom, and its final enforcement returned the violence to the victim’s brothers.