Meanwhile he has not forgotten her request that he would teach and correct her in private, and so he writes a little book (but it was a big book before he had finished) to show her how to comport herself; for he is sorry for this child, who has for long had neither father nor mother, and who is far from kinswomen who might counsel her, having ‘me only’ he says, ’for whom you have been taken from your kinsfolk and from the land of your birth.’  He has often deliberated the matter and now here is ’an easy general introduction’ to the whole art of being a wife, a housewife, and a perfect lady.  One characteristic reason, apart from his desire to help her and to be comfortable himself (for he was set in his ways), he gives for his trouble and recurs to from time to time, surely the strangest ever given by a husband for instructing his wife.  He is old, he says, and must die before her, and it is positively essential that she should do him credit with her second husband.  What a reflection upon him if she accompanied his successor to Mass with the collar of her cotte crumpled, or if she knew not how to keep fleas from the blankets, or how to order a supper for twelve in Lent!  It is characteristic of the Menagier’s reasonableness and solid sense that he regards his young wife’s second marriage with equanimity.  One of his sections is headed, ’That you should be loving to your husband (whether myself or another), by the example of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel.’  How different from those husbands (dog-in-the-manger, or anxious for the future of their children under a possibly harsh stepfather) whose wills so often reveal them trying to bind their wives to perpetual celibacy after their deaths, such husbands as William, Earl of Pembroke, who died in 1469, admonishing his lady:  ’And wyfe, ye remember your promise to me to take the ordere of wydowhood, as ye may be the better mastre of your owne to performe my wylle.’

The plan of the book ’in three sections, containing nineteen principal articles’, is most exhaustive.  The first section deals with religious and moral duties.  In the words of the Menagier, ’the first section is necessary to gain for you the love of God and the salvation of your soul, and also to win for you the love of your husband and to give you in this world that peace which ought to be had in marriage.  And because these two things, to wit the salvation of your soul and the comfort of your husband, are the two things most chiefly necessary, therefore are they here placed first.’  Then follows a series of articles telling the lady how to say her morning prayer when she rises, how to bear herself at Mass, and in what form to make her confession to the priest, together with a long and somewhat alarming discursus upon the seven deadly sins, which it assuredly never entered into her sleek little head to commit, and another, on the corresponding virtues.[2] But the greater part of the section deals with the all-important subject of the wife’s duty to her husband.