"Home is homely, yea, and to homely sometyme,
Where wives' footestooles to their husbandes' heads clime."
[E432] "Familie" = household. Compare [chap. 9, st. 12].
[E433] "Maides, three a clock," etc. Compare Romeo and Juliet, Act iv. sc. 4, 3—
"The second cock hath crow'd,
The curfew bell hath rung, 'tis three o'clock."
[E434] "Lay your bucks," i.e. get ready the washing tubs. Compare: "Throw foul linen upon him as if it were going to bucking."—Shakspere, Merry Wives of Wind., Act iii. sc. 3. Buck-basket, the basket in which linen is carried to the wash. "Bouck-fatt, a washing tub."—Upton Inventories, p. 28. Cf. "And for I can so wele wasche and so wele bowke, Godde has made me his chaumberere."—The Pilgrimage of the Life of the Manhode, f. 21b., MS. in Libr. of St. John's Coll. Camb. 'I bucke lynen clothes to scoure of their fylthe and make them whyte, Ie bue. Bucke these shyrtes, for they be to foule to be wasshed by hande, buez ces chemises, car elles sont trop sallies de les lauer a sauon.'—Palsgrave. 'Buée, lie wherwith clothes are scowred; also a buck of clothes; Buer, to wash a buck, to scowre with lie; Buandiere f., a laundresse, or buck-washer.'—Cotgrave. To buck is to cleanse clothes by steeping them in lye: see Buck in Webster, Nares, Wedgwood, etc."—Rev. W. W. Skeat, note to P. Plowman, B. Text, xiv. 19.
[E435] The hours of meals varied at different dates. In the Myrour of Our Lady, ed. Blunt, p. 15, we read: "At houre of tyerse [9 a.m.] labourers desyre to haue theyr dyner."
In Chambers's Book of Days, i. 96, we read that Gervase Markham, in 1653, makes the ploughman have three meals, viz. breakfast at 6 a.m., dinner at half-past 3 p.m., and supper at 6 p.m. See also note [E444].
[E436] In the Library of Caius Coll. Camb. is a volume of Tracts, No. 286, one of which, published in 1555, An Account of the Cruelties of the King of Spain, has as its motto: "Beware of Had I wiste." This is also the title of a poem in the Paradyce of Daynty Deuyses, 1578. It is quoted by Sir Simon D'Ewes (Diary, etc., ii. 366):
"Telle neuere the more thoug thou myche heere,
And euere be waare of had-y-wist."
—Babees Book, ed. Furnivall, p. 264, l. 72.