Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/301

 and Sentiments. 281 It was common for the burgher clafs to ape gentility, even among people of a lower order j for the great merchant was often fuperior in education and in intelligence, as he was in wealth, to the great majority of the ariftocratic clafs. In Chaucer, even the wife of the miller afpired to the ariftocratic title of madame — Ther durfte no iv'ight clepe (call) hir hut madame. — Cant. Tales, 1. 3954. And in fpeaking of the wives of various burghers who joined in the pilgrimage, the poet remarks — It h right fair for to he clept (called) madame. —Ibid., I. 37S. The burghers alfo cherillied a number of fervants and followers in their houfehold, or mefnie. In the fabliau of "La Borgoife d'Orliens," the mefnie of the burgher, who is not reprefented as a perfon of wealth or diftinftion, confifts of two nephews, a lad who carried ^^'ater, three chamber-maidens, a niece, two pautoniers, and a ribald, and thefe were all harboured in the hall. The pautonier was only another name for the ribald, or perhaps it was a fub-clafs or divilion of the infamous clafs who lived parafitically upon the fociety of the middle ages. Even the ordinary agriculturift had his mefnie. What I have faid of'the great diflblutenefs and immorality of the ariftocratic clafs applies more efpecially to the houfeholds of the greater barons, though the lame fpirit muft have fpread itfelf far through the whole clafs. The ariftocratic clafs was itfelf divided into two clalfes, or rather two ranks, — the great barons, and the knights and leiTer landholders, and the divifton between thefe two claifes became wider, and the latter more abfolutely independent, as the power of feudalifm declined. Thefe latter were the origin of that clafs wdiich in more modern times has been known by the title of the old country gentleman. As far as w^e can judge from what we know of them, I am led to think that this clafs was the moft truly dignified, and in general the moft moral, portion of mediaeval fociety. There is abundant evidence that the tone of morality in the burgher and agricultural clafles was not high ; and the whole tenor of mediaeval popular and hiftorical literature can leave no doubt on o o our