endure before she suffered her sea change. In mediaeval illustrations
we see the maiden sitting demurely in company, with downcast eyes, and
hands folded modestly in her lap. This unnatural restraint was induced
by the lavish compulsion of the rod. If there was one text, above all
others, approved and acted upon by fathers and mothers of the Middle
Ages, it was that exhorting parents not to cocker their child, neither
to wink at his follies, but to beat him on the sides with a stick.
Turn to "The Lay of the Thorn," and mark the gusto with which a mother
disciplines her maid. Parents trained their children with blows.
Husbands (ah, the audacity of the mediaeval husband) scattered the
like seeds of kindness on their wives. In a book written for the
edification of his unmarried daughters, Chaucer's contemporary, the
Knight of La Tour Landry, tells the following interesting anecdote.
A man had a scolding wife, who railed ungovernably upon him before
strangers, "and he that was angry of her governance smote her with his
first down to the earth; and then with his foot he struck her on the
visage, and broke her nose; and all her life after that she had her
nose crooked, the which shent and disfigured her visage after, that
she might not for shame show her visage, it was so foul blemished. And
this she had for her evil and great language that she was wont to say
to her husband. And therefore the wife ought to suffer, and let the
husband have the words, and to be master." May I give yet another
illustration before we pass from the subject. This time it is taken
not from a French knight, but from a sermon of the great Italian
preacher, St. Bernardino of Siena. "There are men who can bear more
patiently with a hen that lays a fresh egg every day than with their
own wives; and sometimes when the hen breaks a pipkin or a cup he
will spare it a beating, simply for love of the fresh egg which he
is unwilling to lose. Oh, raving madmen! who cannot bear a word from
their own wives, though they bear them such fair fruit; but when the