I trow I loved him beste for that he
Was of his love daungerous to me.
We women have, if that I shall not lie,
In this matter a queynte fantasy.
Wayte, what thing we may not lightly have,
Thereafter will we soonest cry and crave.
Forbid us thing, and that desire we;
Press on us fast, and thenne will we flee.
With danger outen alle we our ware;
Great press at market maketh dear chaffare.
"Daungerous" in the second line means sparing, and in the last line but one, "with danger" signifies with a scarcity. Then, says the wife of Bath, we must produce all our own wares to give in exchange. At the date of her fifth marriage she was forty and the bridegroom was only twenty. Everything is now reversed. Her first husbands had endowed her with all their property that they might buy a young wife in their old age. She, in turn, that she may procure a young husband, gives him
all the land and fee
That ever was me give therebefore;
But afterward repented me full sore.
Her aged mates had worshipped her, and she repaid them with disdain. In her mature years she is infatuated by a youth, and he, who has no relish for the homage of a matron of forty, slights her just as she had done her early husbands under similar circumstances.
[20] It would seem from Chaucer that the youth was a native of Bath, and had returned there when he had completed his education at Oxford:
He some time was a clerk of Oxenford,
And had left school, and went at home to board,
With my gossib, duelling in our town:
God have her soul, her name was Alisoun.
"My gossib" is my godmother, and the wife of Bath, whose christian name was also Alisoun, had been named after her. Pope, by turning "my gossip" into "a gossip," has done away with the special relationship, and employed the word in its modern sense of a lover of tittle-tattle.
[21] In Chaucer she adds a more powerful motive:
what wist I where my grace
Was shapen for to be, or in what place?