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 _? 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,
Frenche men synne yn lecherye
And Englys men yn enuye,
let him read the astounding revelation made of the state of the early
French mind by the tales in the 3rd and 4th vols. of Barbazan's
Fabliaux, ed. 1808.)
The second story, told by Lydgate, is as follows:--A prioress is wooed
by "a yonng knyght, a parson of a paryche, and a burges of a borrow."
She promises herself to the first if he will lie for a night in a chapel
sewn up in a sheet like a corpse; to the second, if he will perform the
funeral service over the knight, and bury him; to the third, if he will
dress up like a devil, and frighten both parson and knight.
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