He’s gane oot unto the fauld,
He’s catched a wather by the spaul.
5.
‘I darena thrash ye, for yer kin,
But I may thrash my ain wather-skin.’
FOOTNOTES:
[90] Bace in the second copy, rightly, that is, bash, beat; bare in the first (probably mistranscribed).
[91] A merry jeste of a shrewde and curste wyfe lapped in Morrelles skin for her good behauyour. Imprinted at London in Fleetestreete, beneath the Conduite, at the signe of Saint John Euangelist, by H. Jackson; without date, but earlier than 1575, since the book was in Captain Cox’s library. Reprinted in Utterson’s Select Pieces of Early Popular Poetry, 1825, II, 169; The Old Taming of the Shrew, edited by T. Amyot for the Shakespeare Society, 1844, p. 53; W. C. Hazlitt’s Early Popular Poetry, IV, 179.
[92] These passages are worth noting:
She can carde, she can spin,