¹ The Wife of Bath's Prologue, 11. 701–02; hereafter cited in the text as WBP. All textual references to the Canterbury Tales, cited parenthetically by abbreviation, are to ?. T. Donaldson, ed., Chaucer's Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Ronald, 1975).

² The MED glosses of “maistrye,” “maister,” and “maistress(e)” make it clear that in Middle English “mastery” connotes skill and the authority or control deriving from superior ability, rather than the idea of simple dominance devoid of merit or skill.

³ Eileen Power states that in 1310–11 English wool exports totaled 35,509 sacks, virtually all of raw wool, whereas in 1447–48, exports totaled 21,079 sacks, of which 13,425 were cloth (The Wool Trade in English Medieval History [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941], p. 37). A chart showing the growth in cloth exports in relation to those of raw wool for the period 1350–1540 indicates that in the last decade of the fourteenth century cloth and wool exports were equal for the first time (?. M. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, 2nd ed. [London: Methuen, 1967]).

⁴ J. M. Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (New York: Holt, 1926), p. 229.

⁵ Carus-Wilson, pp. 239–62, esp. pp. 259–60. See also Power, Wool Trade, p. 101; May McKisack, England in the Fourteenth Century (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 356–57; and T. H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 315–16. It is worth noting that by the time of Richard ii royal cloth purchases were virtually all from English clothiers dealing in English cloth, though in the reign of Edward II such purchases had been mainly of foreign-manufactured cloth. Flemish cloth, which dominated early in the century, disappeared almost completely from the royal accounts by the 1330s (Carus-Wilson, p. 242, n. 3).

⁶ Carus-Wilson, p. 262. See also Eileen Power, Medieval Women, ed. M. M. Postan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), p. 67.

⁷ Carus-Wilson, pp. 92–94. See also Power, Medieval Women, pp. 56–57, and Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1948; rpt. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 169–74.

⁸ MED, s.v. “Cloth,” def. 8(a). Manly believed that the Wife was a weaver, a member of a guild of weavers in the suburb of St. Michael's juxta Bathon ‘biside Bathe’ But Chaucer does not say that she is a weaver, let alone a guild member. Alisoun's trade follows a newer organizational pattern than the one of which Manly was apparently thinking. A cloth maker is a manufacturer of cloths, the person responsible for the production of broadcloths or half-cloths, those units of regulated size in which woolen material was produced and sold. The organization of the industry in the west counties at this time placed that responsibility in the hands of the clothier, not of the artisans who performed the various tasks leading to the final product. While it is true that the phrase “maken cloth” can be used in a restricted sense (as in Piers Plowman, B.v.215–16 and B.vi.13–14) to refer, respectively, to the activities of weaving and spinning, Langland specifies in these lines exactly which cloth-making activity he intends. When the phrase is used without such qualifiers, it refers to the general manufacture of cloth, as Chaucer makes clear by his reference to “hem of Ypres and of Gaunt,” the Flemish manufacturer-merchant-exporters whom the Wife and her peers have now surpassed. See, in addition to the citations in MED and OED, s.v. “Clothmaker,” the usages quoted by E. Lipson, A History of the Woollen and Worsted Industries (London: Black, 1921), pp. 44, 112, and by Thrupp, p. 272; and the remarks of Kenneth G. Ponting, The Woollen Industry of South-West England (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1971), pp. 19–20.

⁹ E. Lipson points out that the clothier-entrepreneur is a figure distinctive to the west-country cloth trade (A Short History of Wool and Its Manufacture [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953], pp. 68–73). CarusWilson argues that a rudimentary capitalist entrepreneurial system was a feature of English cloth production from at least the early thirteenth century, even in the cloth towns of the north and east, which were then the center of manufacture (pp. 211–38). See also E. Miller, “The Fortunes of the English Textile Industry in the Thirteenth Century,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 18 (1965–66), 64–82, and Ponting, pp. 7–20.

¹⁰ Carus-Wilson, pp. 4–9, and Power, Wool Trade, p. 47. The factors that led to the change from urban- to rural-dominated cloth manufacture in England are examined in Miller and in Carus-Wilson (pp. 183210). On Bristol as a fourteenth-century port, preeminent in the wool trade at mid-century, third behind London and Southampton at its end, see J. W. Sherborne, The Port of Bristol in the Middle Ages (Bristol: Historical Association, 1965), pp. 9–11. Ponting suggests that in the late fourteenth century much westcountry cloth was shipped from London, Bristol never regaining the domination it had enjoyed earlier (pp. 15–16).

¹¹ Theodore F. T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 5th ed. (London: Butterworth, 1956), p. 313. On the trading rights of married women see Mary Bateson, Borough Customs, Selden Society Publications, xviii (London: Selden Society, 1904), 227–28. A representative entry is the following from Torksey, dated 1345: “Item dicunt quod mulier mercatrix respondebit cuicunque et debet responded sine viro suo et potest amittere et recuperare.” Accounts of these rights are given in A. Abram, “Women Traders in Medieval London,” Economic Journal, 26 (1916), 276–85, and in Power, Medieval Women, pp. 53–59. Margery Kempe describes her ventures in the brewing and milling trades, undertaken with her own money and against her husband's wishes (S. B. Meech, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe, Early English Text Society, OS 212 [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1940], pp. 9–10). On the property rights of bourgeois married women, see Mary Bateson, Borough Customs, Selden Society Publications, xxi (London: Selden Society, 1906), pp. 102–08. In 1327, the mayor and bailiffs of Oxford wrote to the mayor and bailiffs of London for their confirmation of a judgment that recognized a wife's right “to give and sell to whom she will” of her own property. In 1419 a London customal states, “ne le baroun ne poet my deviser les tenements de droit de sa femme, ne lez tenements queux le baroun et sa femme ount joynetement purchacés.” John Kempe exacts a promise from his wife, Margery, to pay off all his debts before he will agree to a vow of connubial chastity, this incident strongly suggests that he had no right to use her property as he chose (Book, pp. 24–25).

¹² In one interesting case from 1389, the Court of Common Pleas bowed to local custom in ruling that a husband was not liable for the debts of his wife incurred during her trading (Plucknett, pp. 313–14). On the respect of common law for local custom, see N. Neilson, “Custom and the Common Law in Kent,” Harvard Law Review, 38 (1924), 482–98.

¹³ See H. S. Bennett, The Postons and Their England (1922; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 59. See also Fifty Earliest English Wills, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, OS 78 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1882), esp. the following, from a codicil to the will of Stephen Thomas of Lee (1417): “More wryt y nough[t] vnto yow, bot be holy trinite kepe yow now, dere and trusty wyf … wer-for I pray gow, as my trust es hely in sow, ouer aile obère creatures, bat this last will be fulfyllet, and all oatre that I ordeynd atte home, for all be loue bat euer was betwen man and woman” (pp. 40–41).

¹⁴ Plucknett, pp. 566–68. See also Cécile S. Margulies, “The Marriages and the Wealth of the Wife of Bath,” Mediaeval Studies, 24 (1962), 210–16. Unfortunately, Margulies confined her argument to dower right under the common and canon law only and overlooked the crucial area of town and village customary laws. A similar argument (and error) was made by Thomas A. Reisner in “The Wife of Bath's Dower: A Legal Interpretation,” Modern Philology, 71 (197374), 301–02.

¹⁵ Plucknett, pp. 568, 586. The importance of jointure to a woman's security in all classes may be judged by Margaret Paston's continuing efforts to marry her daughters or, failing that, to introduce them into worthy households; “for I wuld be right glad,” she writes of one of them, “and she myght be proferrid be mariage or be servyce so bat it myght be to here wurchep and profight.” (Norman Davis, ed., Paston Letters and Papers, Vol. i [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971], No. 186 [30 June 1465]). The Pastons belong to a different class of the newly rich than does Alisoun, for their wealth was in manorial land rather than in trade. Agnes married William Paston i (1378–1444) in 1420 and died in 1478; Margaret married John Paston i (1421–66) in 1440 and died in 1484. Though one must evidently exercise caution in using the Paston letters as evidence of the customs and opinions that prevailed more than seventy years earlier, there is no reason to dispense entirely with the rich picture of marriage they furnish, provided that their contents can be corroborated by evidence contemporary with Chaucer. For the reader's convenience I have provided the dates of probable composition assigned by Davis to each of the letters I quote. A recent analysis of some of the Paston material is Ann Haskell's “The Paston Women on Marriage in Fifteenth-Century England,” Viator, 4 (1973), 459–71.

¹⁶ WBP, 11. 415–18. The OED, s.v. “Ransom,” indicates that the word during this period always carried the meaning of a money or a property fine, except in the specific context of Christ's ransom (his life) for the redemption of humankind. Chaucer uses the word six times; once in the Parson's Tale to mean Christ's sacrifice and elsewhere to mean a monetary fine, as it does in each of its four occurrences in the Knight's Tale and as it does here in the Wife's prologue. Alisoun exacts a fine from her husbands for their freedom of access to her body.

¹⁷ Recent criticism has at last rescued the Wife from charges of religious heresy in regard to her frank admission of pleasure in married sex. Among medieval pastoral theologians a majority opinion held that pleasure in married sex was at worst a venial sin, and a minority even considered that it was no sin at all; the canonists believed that it was possible to contract a valid marriage from the motive of fulfilling sexual desire as long as no effort was made to prevent conception. This theological background has been examined most recently by Henry A. Kelley in Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), esp. pp. 245–61. See also ?. T. Donaldson, “Medieval Poetry and Medieval Sin,” Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 164–74. On the orthodoxy of the Wife's theology, see Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), pp. 248–51.

¹⁸ Indeed Jerome did “not condemn even octogamy” twice in his writings: Adversus Jovinianum, i, 15 (Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina [hereafter, PL], ed. J. P. Migne [Paris: 1844–64], xxiii, 234) and Epistola XLVIII seu liber apologeticus ad Pammachium, pro libris contra Jovinianum, Ch. ix (PL, xxii, 499).

¹⁹ On the controversy during which Jerome was nearly condemned for heresy because of what he appeared to be saying about marriage in the Adversus Jovinianum, see the biography by Jean Steinmann, St. Jerome, trans. R. Matthews (London: Chapman, 1959), pp. 216–27. Anne Kernan refers to this controversy in relation to the Wife of Bath (“The Archwife and the Eunuch,” ELH, 41 [1974], 1–25). See also the remarks of ?. T. Donaldson, “Designing a Camel,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 22 (1977), 1–16.

²⁰ Epistola XLIX ad Pammachium, Ch. ii (PL, xxil, 511).

²¹ Eileen Power details the sources of this material (Medieval People, 8th ed. [London: Methuen, 1946], p. 184). An example in English verse is “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” in The Babees Book, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, OS 32 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1868), pp. 3647.

²² The Book of the Knight of LaTour-Landry, ed. Thomas Wright, Early English Text Society, OS 33 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1906). All my references to this work are to this edition. Le Ménagier de Paris, ed. J. Pichon (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles Français, 1846). All references are to the English language version, The Goodman of Paris, trans. Eileen Power (New York: Harcourt, 1928).

²³ Sir John Maclean, ed., John Smyth's Lives of the Berkeleys, ii (Gloucester: Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 1833), 62–63. Lady Isabel was the eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Mowbray; the letter was written in 1447.

²⁴ James Gairdner, ed., The Paston Letters (1904; rpt. New York: AMS, 1965), i, 155. The quotation is from a letter of Scrope, part of a collection in the British Museum relating to Sir John Fastolf, Scrape's stepfather and Paston's benefactor.

²⁵ The arrangements are described by Elizabeth Clere, Agnes Paston's niece (Davis, Vol. 11, No. 446 [no later than 29 June 1449]). Cf. Agnes' own thoughts on the subject, written to her son John with a warning for haste, because “Ser Herry Ynglows is ryjth besy a-bowt Schrowpe fore on of his dozthteres” (Davis, Vol. i, No. 18 [no later than 1449]).

²⁶ Scrope himself had been bartered shockingly by his stepfather; see Gairdner, Vol. ii, No. 97. On the practice of selling marriage rights, see Bennett, pp. 28–29; it is condemned in Piers Plowman, ed. Walter W. Skeat (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1886), C.xi.25657: “for thei zeueth here children / For couetise of catel and conynge chapmen.”

²⁷ Manly says they are old-fashioned (p. 230). D. E. Wretlind has argued, however, that hats with large kerchiefs were making a comeback at Queen Anne's court (“The Wife of Bath's Hat,” Modern Language Notes, 63 [1948], 381–82), but Howard points out that large hats were the contemporary rural fashion (p. 105, n. 32).

²⁸ OED, s.v. “Scarlet,” and see Carus-Wilson, p. 218, n. 4; scarlet may often have been dyed red, but the word at this time was a technical term for a type of fine cloth of any color.

²⁹ LaTour-Landry would have approved: “a good woman shulde arraie her after her husbandes pusaunce and hers, in suche wise as it might endure and be meinteyned” (p. 67).

³⁰ Davis, Vol. I, No. 398. Ecclesiastical easiness concerning the remarriage of widows is attested by a letter of the late fourteenth century from Roger Kegworthe, a London draper, to Robert Hallum, one of the most distinguished churchmen and canonists of the period. Kegworthe asks Hallum to help him arrange a marriage with an eligible widow, “de bone conversacioun et poet ore bien expendre par an quarrant marcz,” who is being actively courted also by the Marshall of the Hall of the Archbishop of Canterbury (M. D. Legge, ed., Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions, Anglo-Norman Text Society, iii [Oxford: Blackwell, 1941], 118–19).

³¹ Two commonly held assumptions about the Wife of Bath deserve comment, because they have crept into the realm of “facts” about her without a shred of evidence to support either one. The first is that she is childless, the second that she is “oversexed”; indeed the first has led to the second, for, being childless (so the argument runs), she has no right to any sexual encounter, and therefore any sex is “oversex” for her. But we do not know whether or not the Wife has children; we know only that she does not say so. There is no reason to attribute any significance to her silence. Chaucer's concern is wifehood, not motherhood. Wifehood and motherhood were not linked concepts at this time, as they are today, for wives had little to do with the nurture of their children (see, e.g., Bennett, pp. 71–86). The books of deportment, while covering every conceivable concern of wifehood, never mention the bearing or nurturing of children. The “problem” of the Wife of Bath's children is of exactly the same sort as the most famous of literary nonproblems: “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” and it deserves to be consigned to the wastebasket of critical inquiry for the same reasons. It is simply not a question we can legitimately ask of this text, because the text provides us with no basis for an answer.

³² Twenty was a common age for marrying. Margery Kempe was twenty “or sumdele mor” when she married (Book, p. 6) ; the daughter in the Reeve's Tale is twenty; Elizabeth Paston (born c. 1429) was nearly twenty when her mother began to bargain in earnest for her marriage. The ménagier's wife, however, was only fifteen when he wrote his treatise for her, and Thrupp says that the daughters of London merchants in this period usually married at about seventeen (p. 196).

³³ Charles E. Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford (1924; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), i, 151–52. Mallet suggests that university undergraduates could be as young as fourteen; in 1386, however, Oxford petitioned to have the minimum age raised to sixteen (J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1974], p. 72, n. 2). The arts course leading to the bachelor's degree took at least four years to complete, but many students took longer. See representative careers cataloged in A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to 1500 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957–59), passim.

³⁴ The title “magister” was used for a master of arts or a doctor in another faculty or—grudgingly, especially at Oxford—for a bachelor of arts (Emden, I, xvxvi). By my rough count in the Register, there were at least a dozen married arts masters at Oxford in the last half of the fourteenth century; there were married physicians and a few married bachelors of civil law who also held Oxford degrees. Edmund Stonor reported, c. 1380, that his nephew was studying grammar in the establishment of a married master at Oxford (“magister et ejus uxor”) (Charles L. Kingsford, ed., The Stonor Letters and Papers [London: Camden Society, 1919], I, 21 [Camden Society Publications, 3rd ser., vols. 29–30] ).

³⁵ The conclusion that many who entered Oxford did so without expecting to pursue clerical careers is supported from a number of sources. A count based on Emden's Register of students and masters between 1350 and 1410 reveals a steady thirty percent who did not proceed to orders; this percentage is undoubtedly too low, since most of the sparse records containing information about the subsequent careers of Oxford graduates are ecclesiastical. As Emden observes, “Even more elusive, of course, are the many hundreds of Oxford clerks who never qualified for a degree at all, and who passed from Oxford into secular as well as into clerical employment. The exceptionally full records of New College point to the conclusion that at all times during the medieval period the number of undergraduates who never proceeded to any degree was large” (i, xviii). Sylvia Thrupp points out that London merchants of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were ambitious to achieve educational polish through university training (pp. 159–61). The paternal concern of Clement Paston (d. 1419) is typical: a “good pleyn husband” himself (according to a fifteenth-century biographical account; see Davis, I, xli-xlii), he sent his son William (b. 1378) to university, thereby starting his family's fortunate rise, and succeeding generations of Pastons followed his example. One of Richard FitzRalph's charges against the friars (made in a sermon of 1357) was that “very many of the common people” feared that the friars at Oxford were taking advantage of youthful students and pressing them too soon into orders; see Mallet, I, 75, n. 2, which also refers to a university ordinance of 1358 forbidding the friars from admitting students under eighteen. The concern of the common people in 1357 is echoed a century later by Margaret Paston, who cautions her son Walter, a clerk at Oxford, “that he benot to hasty of takyng of orderes bat schuld bynd hym till bat he be of xxiiij yere of agee or more. ... I will loue hym bettere to be a good seculare man ban to be a lewit prest” (Davis, Vol. i, No. 220 [probably 18 Jan. 1473]).

³⁶ The pun on “hende” is noted by ?. T. Donaldson in “Idiom of Popular Poetry in the Miller's Tale,” Speaking of Chaucer, p. 17.

³⁷ The custom of paying mourners to ensure a good turnout at one's funeral is amply attested in contemporary wills. Alisoun may not have wasted money on a fancy tomb, but both her honor and her estate would have required a decent funeral for her husband.

³⁸ Alisoun calls the book a “book of wikked wives,” but this is yet another instance of Chaucer's standard joke, wherein books of good behavior are perceived to be books of wicked behavior, because they are more often crowded with examples of the awful ends of evildoers than with the rewards of the just. The classic examples are the Man of Law's remarks on Gower and the exchange between Alcestis, the God of Love, and the poet in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Robert A. Pratt has demonstrated the accessibility at Oxford of the sources of Jankyn's book; one would expect an inexperienced young man whose head is still full of the university to draw on just such bookish stuff in seeking to counsel his wife (“Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves,” Animale Mediaevale, 3 [1962], 5–27).

³⁹ WBP, 1. 620. Francis L. Utley reminds us that the Wife's use of the word “love” in this proverb “must not be shrugged aside as mere ignorance or bias”; indeed it makes the proverb in her mouth a complex and ironic statement different in meaning and emphasis from the traditional sentiment, attributed by medieval preachers to the laity, that “lechery is no sin” (“Chaucer's Way with a Proverb: ‘Allas! alias! that evere love was synne,‘” North Carolina Folklore, 21 [1973], 98104).

⁴⁰ Both the ménagier and the Knight of LaTourLandry tell versions of the same cautionary story about gossip, a story as intriguing in its own way as that of Midas' ears. “Wol ye heere the tale?” A squire tells his wife that he has laid two eggs, enjoins her to secrecy, and by the time the tale has made its way back to his ears, he is supposed to have laid a whole basketful (LaTour-Landry, pp. 96–97, and Goodman, pp. 182–83).

⁴¹ An interesting analysis of class consciousness in the Wife's tale has been made by Dorothy Colmer in “Character and Class in the Wife of Bath's Tale,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 72 (1973), 329–39.

⁴² B. F. Huppé, A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1964), p. 127.