But for speken of hir conscience (he says)
She was so charitable and so pitous,

and then, as we are waiting to hear of her almsgiving to the poor—­that she would weep over a mouse in a trap, or a beaten puppy, says Chaucer.  A good ruler of her house? again, doubtless.  But when Chaucer met her the house was ruling itself somewhere at the ‘shire’s ende’.  The world was full of fish out of water in the fourteenth century, and, by seynt Loy, said Madame Eglentyne, swearing her greatest oath, like Chaucer’s monk, she held that famous text not worth an oyster.  So we take our leave of her, characteristically on the road to Canterbury.

CHAPTER V

The Menagier’s Wife

A PARIS HOUSEWIFE IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

The sphere of woman is the home.
—­Homo Sapiens

The men of the middle, as indeed of all ages, including our own, were very fond of writing books of deportment telling women how they ought to behave in all the circumstances of their existence, but more particularly in their relations with their husbands.  Many of these books have survived, and among them one which is of particular interest, because of the robust good sense of its writer and the intimate and lively picture which it gives of a bourgeois home.  Most books of deportment were written, so to speak, in the air, for women in general, but this was written by a particular husband for a particular wife, and thus is drawn from life and full of detail, showing throughout an individuality which its compeers too often lack.  If a parallel be sought to it, it is perhaps to be found not in any other medieval treatise but in those passages of Xenophon’s Economist, in which Isomachus describes to Socrates the training of a perfect Greek wife.

The Menagier de Paris (the Householder or Goodman of Paris, as we might say) wrote this book for the instruction of his young wife between 1392 and 1394.  He was a wealthy man, not without learning and of great experience in affairs, obviously a member of that solid and enlightened haute bourgeoisie, upon which the French monarchy was coming to lean with ever-increasing confidence.  When he wrote he must have been approaching old age, and he was certainly over sixty, but he had recently married a young wife of higher birth than himself, an orphan from a different province.  He speaks several times of her ’very great youth’, and kept a sort of duenna-housekeeper with her to help and direct her in the management of his house; and indeed, like the wife of Isomachus, she was only fifteen years old when he married her.  Modern opinion is shocked by a discrepancy in age between husband and wife, with which the Middle Ages, a time of menages de convenance, was more familiar.  ‘Seldom,’ the Menagier says, ’will you see ever so old a man who will not marry a young woman.’