of this, the busy one gathers together Dame Agnes and her maids, and they sit under the carved beams of the hall mending his mastership’s doublet, embroidering a vestment for the priest at his family chantry, or a tapestry hanging for the bedchamber.  Or perhaps they simply spin (since, in the words of the Wife of Bath, God has given women three talents—­deceit, weeping, and spinning!); and all the while she awes them with that tale of Griselda, her voice rising and falling to the steady hum of the wheels.

At last it is evening, and back comes the lord and master.  What a bustle and a pother this home-coming meant we know well, since we know what he expected.  Such a running and fetching of bowls of warm water to wash his feet, and comfortable shoes to ease him; such a hanging on his words and admiring of his labours.  Then comes supper, with a bevy of guests, or themselves all alone in the westering sunlight, while he smacks connoisseur’s lips over the roast crane and the blankmanger, and she nibbles her sweet wafers.  Afterwards an hour of twilight, when she tells him how she has passed the day, and asks him what she shall do with the silly young housemaid, whom she caught talking to the tailor’s ’prentice through that low window which looks upon the road.  There is warm affection in the look she turns up to him, her round little face puckered with anxiety over the housemaid, dimpling into a smile when he commends her; and there is warm affection and pride too in the look the old man turns down upon her.  So the night falls, and they go round the house together, locking all the doors and seeing that the servants are safe abed, for our ancestors were more sparing of candlelight than we.  And so to bed.

We may take our leave of the couple here.  The Menagier’s wife evidently had a full life.

Some respit to husbands the weather may send,
But huswiues affaires haue neuer an end.

There was no room in it for the idleness of those lovely ladies, with their long fingers, whom Langland admonished to sew for the poor.  Moreover, exaggerated as some of her husband’s ideas upon wifely submission appear today, the book leaves a strong impression of good sense and of respect as well as love for her.  The Menagier does not want his wife to be on a pedestal, like the troubadour’s lady, nor licking his shoes like Griselda; he wants a helpmeet, for, as Chaucer said, ’If that wommen were nat goode and hir conseils goode and profitable, oure Lord God of hevene wolde never han wroght hem, ne called hem “help” of man, but rather confusioun of man.’[23] Ecclesiastical Jeremiahs were often wont to use the characteristically medieval argument that if God had meant woman for a position of superiority He would have taken her from Adam’s head rather than his side; but the Menagier would have agreed with the more logical Peter Lombard, who observed that she was not taken from Adam’s head, because she was not intended to be his ruler, nor from his feet either, because she