the woman was robust, as the men often complained, and she did not greatly resent being treated as a man.  Sometimes the husband beat her, dragged her about by the hair, locked her up in the house; but he was quite conscious that she always got even with him in the end.  As a matter of fact, probably she got more than even.  On this point, history, legend, poetry, romance, and especially the popular fabliaux—­invented to amuse the gross tastes of the coarser class—­ are all agreed, and one could give scores of volumes illustrating it.  The greatest men illustrate it best, as one might show almost at hazard.  The greatest men of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were William the Norman; his great grandson Henry ii Plantagenet; Saint Louis of France; and, if a fourth be needed, Richard Coeur-de-Lion.  Notoriously all these men had as much difficulty as Louis XIV himself with the women of their family.  Tradition exaggerates everything it touches, but shows, at the same time, what is passing in the minds of the society which tradites.  In Normandy, the people of Caen have kept a tradition, told elsewhere in other forms, that one day, Duke William,—­the Conqueror,—­ exasperated by having his bastardy constantly thrown in his face by the Duchess Matilda, dragged her by the hair, tied to his horse’s tail, as far as the suburb of Vaucelles; and this legend accounts for the splendour of the Abbaye-aux-Dames, because William, the common people believed, afterwards regretted the impropriety, and atoned for it by giving her money to build the abbey.  The story betrays the man’s weakness.  The Abbaye-aux-Dames stands in the same relation to the Abbaye-aux-Hommes that Matilda took towards William.  Inferiority there was none; on the contrary, the woman was socially the superior, and William was probably more afraid of her than she of him, if Mr. Freeman is right in insisting that he married her in spite of her having a husband living, and certainly two children.  If William was the strongest man in the eleventh century, his great-grandson, Henry ii of England, was the strongest man of the twelfth; but the history of the time resounds with the noise of his battles with Queen Eleanor whom he, at last, held in prison for fourteen years.  Prisoner as she was, she broke him down in the end.  One is tempted to suspect that, had her husband and children been guided by her, and by her policy as peacemaker for the good of Guienne, most of the disasters of England and France might have been postponed for the time; but we can never know the truth, for monks and historians abhor emancipated women,—­with good reason, since such women are apt to abhor them,—­and the quarrel can never be pacified.  Historians have commonly shown fear of women without admitting it, but the man of the Middle Ages knew at least why he feared the woman, and told it openly, not to say brutally.  Long after Eleanor and Blanche were dead, Chaucer brought the Wife of Bath on his Shakespearean stage, to explain the woman, and as usual he touched masculine frailty with caustic, while seeming to laugh at woman and man alike:—­