dresses and furs and for preserving them from moths, and instructions for removing stains and grease spots.  The Menagier gives seven recipes for taking out grease spots, but he is rather sceptical about one or two of them, which he has evidently copied from a book without trying them for himself.  ’To get rid of stains on a dress of silk, satin, camlet, damask cloth or another,’ runs one of these, ’dip and wash the stain in verjuice and the stain will go; even if the dress be faded, it will regain its colour. This I do not believe’.  The chief impression left, however, is that the medieval housewife was engaged in a constant warfare against fleas.  One of the Menagier’s infallible rules for keeping a husband happy at home is to give him a good fire in the winter and keep his bed free from fleas in the summer.  He gives six recipes for getting rid of such small livestock, which must indeed have been a very common trial to our forefathers: 

In summer take heed that there be no fleas in your chamber nor in your bed, which you may do in six ways, as I have heard tell.  For I have heard from several persons that if the room be scattered with alder leaves the fleas will get caught therein.  Item, I have heard tell that if you have at night one or two trenchers of bread covered with birdlime or turpentine and put about the room with a lighted candle set in the midst of each trencher, they will come and get stuck thereto.  Another way which I have found and which is true:  take a rough cloth and spread it about your room and over your bed and all the fleas who may hop on to it will be caught, so that you can carry them out with the cloth wheresoever you will.  Item, sheepskins.  Item, I have seen blankets placed on the straw and on the bed and when the black fleas jumped upon them they were the sooner found and killed upon the white.  But the best way is to guard oneself against those which are within the coverlets and furs and the stuff of the dresses wherewith one is covered.  For know that I have tried this, and when the coverlets, furs or dresses in which there be fleas are folded and shut tightly up, in a chest straitly bound with straps or in a bag well tied up and pressed, or otherwise compressed so that the said fleas are without light and air and kept imprisoned, then they will perish and die at once.[17]

A similar war had also to be waged against flies and mosquitoes, which rendered summer miserable.  “I have sometimes,” says the Menagier, “seen in several chambers that when one has gone to bed in them, they were full of mosquitoes, which at the smoke of the breath came to sit on the faces of those who slept and sting them so that they were fain to get up and light a fire of hay to smoke them off.”  Against such pests he has also six infallible recipes—­to wit, a mosquito net over the bed; sprigs of fern hung up for the flies to settle on; a bowl filled with a mixture of milk and hare’s gall, or with the juice of raw onions, which will kill them; a bottle containing a rag dipped in honey, or else a string dipped in honey to hang up; fly whisks to drive them away; and closing up windows with oiled cloth or parchment.[18]