But it may not be, for these children hold more dear the company of strangers, who think and care for them, than that of their kinsfolk, who have no care of them.  Then the parents lament and weep and say that these same women have bewitched their children and that they are spellbound and cannot leave, but are never easy save when they are with their enchantresses.  But whatever may be said of it, it is no witchcraft, but it by reason of the love, the care, the intimacies, joys and pleasures, which these women do in all ways unto the lads, and on my soul there is no other enchantment....  Wherefore, dear sister, I pray you thus to bewitch and bewitch again your husband, and beware of dripping roof and smoking fire, and scold him not, but be unto him gentle and amiable and peaceable.  Be careful that in winter he has good fire without smoke, and let him rest well and be well covered between your breasts and thus bewitch him....  And thus you shall preserve and guard him from all discomforts and give him all the ease that you can, and serve him and cause him to be well served in your house; and you shall look to him for outside things, for if he be a good man he will take even more care and trouble over them than you wish, and by doing as I have said, you will make him always miss you and have his heart with you and with your loving service, and he will shun all other houses, all other women, all other services and households; all will be naught to him save you alone, if you think of him as aforesaid....  And so on the road, husbands will think of their wives, and no trouble will be a burden to them for the hope and love they will have of their wives, whom they will long to see, even as poor hermits, penitents and fasting monks long to see the face of Christ Jesus; and husbands served thus will never desire to abide elsewhere or in other company but will withhold, withdraw and abstain themselves there-from; all the rest will seem to them but a bed of stones compared with their home.[12]

Enough has perhaps been quoted to show the Menagier’s idea of a perfect wife; his idea of the perfect housewife is contained in a mass of instructions which make excellently entertaining reading.  So modern in tone is his section on the management of servants, both in his account of their ways and in his advice upon dealing with them, that one often rubs one’s eyes to be sure that what one is reading is really a book written over five centuries ago by an old burgess of Paris.  The Menagier evidently had a fairly large household, and he probably owned a country as well as a town house, for he speaks several times of overseeing the farm-hands ‘when you are in the village’.  To assist his wife in superintending this large staff he has a maitre d’hotel, called Master John the Steward (le despensier) and a duenna, half housekeeper and half chaperon, for her young mistress, called Dame Agnes la beguine[G] and a bailiff or foreman to look after the farm.