A distinctive and charming feature of the English landscape is the hedgerow that divides the fields and marks the course of the roadways. Nowhere but in England does the landscape present such a charming picture of "meadows trim with daisies pied," "russet lawns and fallows gray," spread out like a map, divided with irregular lines of green. Nowhere else is the traveller's path guarded on either hand with a rampart of delicate primroses, sweet-breathed violets, golden buttercups fit for fairy revels, honeysuckles in whose bells the bee rings a delighted peal, and luscious-fruited blackberry-bushes. Nowhere else is such a rampart crowned with the sweet-scented hawthorn, robed in snowy blossoms, or beaded over with scarlet berries, and with the hazel, with its gracefully pendent catkins, or nuts dear to the school-boy. It scarcely seems possible to imagine an English landscape without its flower-scented hedge-rows, and yet, when the armed knights of Edward the Third's reign rode abroad from their castles, few lofty hedges barred their progress across the country; no hazel-crowned rampart stopped the way of the Malvern monk as he took his way to the "bourne's side"; and when the ploughman "whistled o'er the furrowed land," the line of division at which he turned his back on his neighbor's acres was generally but a narrow trench instead of a ditch and hedge. Thus the covetous man confesses,
"If I yede[32] to the plow,
I pinched so narrow
That a foot land or a furrow
Fetchen I would
Of my next neighbor,
And nymen[33] of his earth.
And if I reap, overreach."
As might have been expected, the monkish dreamer, unusually liberal as he was in his views, had but a slighting opinion of women. Rarely does he refer to them except to rate them for their extravagance in dress and love of finery. The humbler class of women, he shrewdly insinuates, were fond of drink, and the husbands of such were advised to cudgel them home to their domestic duties. He credited the long-standing slander about woman's inability to keep a secret:—
"For that that women wotteth
May not well be concealed."
His opinion of the proper sphere of women in that time, and some knowledge of their ordinary feminine occupations, can be acquired from the answer made to the question of a lady as to what her sex should do:—
"Some should sew the sack, quoth Piers,
For shedding of the wheat;
And ye, lovely ladies,
With your long fingers,
That ye have silk and sendal
To sew, when time is,
Chasubles for chaplains,
Churches to honor.
Wives and widows
Wool and flax spinneth;
Make cloth, I counsel you,
And kenneth[34] so your daughters;
The needy and the naked,
Nymeth[35] heed how they lieth,
And casteth them clothes,
For so commanded Truth."
Marriage is an honorable estate, and should be entered into with proper motives, and in a decent and regular manner. It is desirable that most men should marry, for
"The wife was made the way
For to help work;
And thus was wedlock wrought
With a mean person,
First by the father's will
And the friends counsel;
And sithens[36] by assent of themselves,
As they two might accord."
This is the essentially worldly way of making marriage arrangements yet practised in some aristocratic circles, but the more democratic and natural way is to reverse the process, and commence with the agreement between the two persons most concerned. Such unequal matches as age and wealth on one side, and youth and desire of wealth on the other, bring about, are sternly reprobated.
"It is an uncomely couple,
By Christ! as me thinketh,
To give a young wench
To an old feeble,
Or wedden any widow
For wealth of her goods,
That never shall bairn bear
But if it be in her arms."