A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [144]
Let noon humilitee your tonge naille …
Ne suffreth nat that men yow doon offence …
Ne dreed hem nat, do hem no reverence …
Be ay of chere as light as leefe on linde,
And lat him care and wepe and wringe and waille!
Married love, despite the formula of courtly romance, was still a desired goal to be achieved after, rather than before, the tying of the knot. The task devolved upon the wife, whose duty was to earn her husband’s love and “gain in this world that peace which may be in marriage,” by constant attention, good care, amiability, docility, acquiescence, patience, and no nagging. All the Ménagier’s wise counsels on this matter can be rolled into one: “No man can be better bewitched than by giving him what pleaseth him.” If the Third Estate, which he represented, laid greater stress on married love than did the nobility, it was doubtless because the more continuous proximity of a bourgeois husband and wife made amiable relations desirable. In England connubial contentment could win the Dunmow Flitch—a side, or flitch, of bacon awarded to any couple who could come to Dunmow in Essex after a year of marriage and truthfully swear that they never quarreled and did not regret the marriage and would do it over again if given the chance.
While the cult of courtly love supposedly raised the standing of noble ladies, the fervid adoration of the Virgin, which developed as a cult at the same time, left little deposit on the status of women as a whole. Women were criticized for gossip and chatter, for craving sympathy, for being coquettish, sentimental, over-imaginative, and over-responsive to wandering students and other beggars. They were scolded for bustling in church, sprinkling themselves with holy water at every turn, saying prayers aloud, kneeling at every shrine, paying attention to anything but the sermon. Cloistered nuns were said to be melancholy and irritable, “like dogs who are chained up too much.” Nunneries were a refuge from the world for some, the fate of others whose families offered them as gifts to the Church, the choice of a few with a religious calling, but generally available only to those who came with ample endowment.
Evidence from poll and hearth taxes indicates that women’s death rate was higher than men’s between the ages of twenty and forty, presumably from childbearing and greater vulnerability to disease. After forty the death rate was reversed, and women, once widowed, were allowed to choose for themselves whether to remarry or not.
In everyday life women of noble as well as non-noble class found equality of function, if not of status, thrust on them by circumstance. Peasant women could hold tenancies and in that capacity rendered the same kinds of service for their holdings as men, although they earned less for the same work. Peasant households depended on their earnings. In the guilds, women had monopolies of certain trades, usually spinning and ale-making and some of the food and textile trades. Certain crafts excluded females except for a member’s wife or daughter; in others they worked equally with men. Management of a merchant’s household—of his town house, his country estate, his business when he was absent—in addition to maternal duties gave his wife anything but a leisured life. She supervised sewing, weaving, brewing, candle-making, marketing, alms-giving, directed the indoor and outdoor servants, exercised some skills in medicine and surgery, kept accounts, and might conduct a separate business as femme sole.
Some women practiced as professors or doctors even if unlicensed. In Paris in 1322 a certain Jacoba Felicie was prosecuted by the medical faculty of the University for practicing without their degree or the Chancellor’s license.