Randle Holme gives a drawing of a heckle.

The lines through the _h_'s in the MS. are not, I believe, marks of
contraction. There are no insettings of the third lines, or spaces on
changes of subject, in the MS.

For reference to two analogous stories to that of the Poem, I am
indebted to Mr Thomas Wright. The first is that of _Constant Duhamel_ in
the third volume of Barbazan, and the second that of the Prioress and
her three Suitors in the Minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate, published by
the Percy Society, ed. Halliwell.

In the Barbazan tale "the wife is violently solicited by three suitors,
the priest, the provost, and the forester, who on her refusal persecute
her husband. To stop their attacks she gives them appointments at her
house immediately after one another, so that when one is there and
stripped for the bath, another comes, and, pretending it is her husband,
she conceals them one after another in a large tub full of feathers, out
of which they can see all that is going on in the room. She then sends
successively for their three wives to come and bathe with her, the bath
being still in the same room, and as each is stripped naked in the bath,
she introduces her own husband, who dishonours them one after another,
one _à l'enverse_, with rather aggravating circumstances, and all in
view of their three husbands. Finally the latter are turned out of the
house naked, or rather well feathered, then hunted by the whole town and
their dogs, well bitten and beaten."

(If any one wants to see a justification of the former half of the
proverb quoted by Roberd of Brunne,