The Latin phrase jus primae noctis means right of the first night. It refers to an old belief, probably myth, that a lord had the right to have sex with a married woman on the first night of her marriage (i.e., before her husband). In the context of 1984, the phrase is used in a children's history book disseminated by the Party that Winston reads. According to the book, this was one of the many ways in which the capitalists exploited the workers before the revolution that brought the Party to power:
There was also something called the jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.
Winston is reflecting on the many horrors catalogued in the book, and he is conscious...
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that most of them, including the alleged right of primae noctis held by the capitalists, are probably fabrications. This is actually one of the central themes in the book: the notion that the Party controls the present by controlling what people know about the past. By constructing a dark, backward past full of abuses, the Party claims more legitimacy for itself. In fact, a major source of the Party's strength lay in the fact that people could never really know what was true and what was not:
It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
So whether abuses such as the jus primae noctis ever existed during the pre-Party era has become impossible to know under Party rule.
References
At least legally, it is said that medieval lords had the right to sleep with any woman on their lands on her wedding night. In other words, when one of "their" people got married, they had the right to have her sleep with them, not their husbands, on the first night. We do not know for sure that this really happened.
In 1984, we see this referred to as one of the ways in which things were terrible before the revolution. Winston knows that, supposedly, capitalists had this right (this is in Chapter 7). However, according to Party propaganda, the right was not limited to the wedding night. Instead:
It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.