SOURCE: Robertson, D. W., Jr. “‘And for My Land thus Hastow Mordred Me?’: Land Tenure, the Cloth Industry, and the Wife of Bath.”¹ Chaucer Review 14, no. 4 (spring 1980): 403-20.

In the following essay, Robertson attempts to properly define the Wife of Bath's financial and occupational positions in regards to her landholdings, class standing, education, and marriageability.

Embedded in the Wife's Prologue are various statements concerning transfers of land and wealth that may be indicative of her legal status. She is sometimes thought of as a freeholder under the common law, or, alternatively, as a borough tenant. I should like to suggest here that she was probably thought of in Chaucer's time as a rural clothier, and that her Prologue may indicate further that she was a bondwoman. Although the social distinction between freeholders and villeins was disappearing in the later fourteenth century when social status in rural communities depended...