to him with solemnity. The feast, because there
was no void, empty, nor vacant place in all the calendar,
was to be celebrated jointly with, and on the same
day that had been consecrated to the goddess Jealousy.
His power and dominion should be over married folks,
especially such as had handsome wives. His sacrifices
were to be suspicion, diffidence, mistrust, a lowering
pouting sullenness, watchings, wardings, researchings,
plyings, explorations, together with the waylayings,
ambushes, narrow observations, and malicious doggings
of the husband’s scouts and espials of the most
privy actions of their wives. Herewithal every
married man was expressly and rigorously commanded
to reverence, honour, and worship him, to celebrate
and solemnize his festival with twice more respect
than that of any other saint or deity, and to immolate
unto him with all sincerity and alacrity of heart the
above-mentioned sacrifices and oblations, under pain
of severe censures, threatenings, and comminations
of these subsequent fines, mulcts, amerciaments, penalties,
and punishments to be inflicted on the delinquents:
that Monsieur Cuckoldry should never be favourable
nor propitious to them; that he should never help,
aid, supply, succour, nor grant them any subventitious
furtherance, auxiliary suffrage, or adminiculary assistance;
that he should never hold them in any reckoning, account,
or estimation; that he should never deign to enter
within their houses, neither at the doors, windows,
nor any other place thereof; that he should never
haunt nor frequent their companies or conversations,
how frequently soever they should invocate him and
call upon his name; and that not only he should leave
and abandon them to rot alone with their wives in
a sempiternal solitariness, without the benefit of
the diversion of any copes-mate or corrival at all,
but should withal shun and eschew them, fly from them,
and eternally forsake and reject them as impious heretics
and sacrilegious persons, according to the accustomed
manner of other gods towards such as are too slack
in offering up the duties and reverences which ought
to be performed respectively to their divinities—as
is evidently apparent in Bacchus towards negligent
vine-dressers; in Ceres, against idle ploughmen and
tillers of the ground; in Pomona, to unworthy fruiterers
and costard-mongers; in Neptune, towards dissolute
mariners and seafaring men, in Vulcan, towards loitering
smiths and forgemen; and so throughout the rest.
Now, on the contrary, this infallible promise was
added, that unto all those who should make a holy day
of the above-recited festival, and cease from all
manner of worldly work and negotiation, lay aside
all their own most important occasions, and to be so
retchless, heedless, and careless of what might concern
the management of their proper affairs as to mind
nothing else but a suspicious espying and prying into
the secret deportments of their wives, and how to coop,
shut up, hold at under, and deal cruelly and austerely