Page:Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies Volume II.djvu/186

Rh and going on the roads. Thus will you see them crying and screaming after all wayfarers and vilifying the same, without sparing any, whether great, middling or humble folk, of what estate soever they be. Nor do they spare,—and this is the merry part on't,—the ladies one whit neither, high-born dames or Princesses or any. Indeed in my day I did there hear of not a few fine ladies, and see them too, which would make a pretext to hie them to the fields on purpose, so as they might pass along the roads, and so hearken to this pretty talk and hear a thousand naughty conceits and lusty words. These the peasants would invent and roll off in plenty, casting up at the great ladies their naughtiness and the shameful ways they did use toward their husbands and lovers, going so far as to chide them for their shameful loves and intimacies with their own coachmen, pages, lackeys and apparitors, which were of their train. Going yet further, they would ask them right out for the courtesy of their company, saying they would assault them roundly and satisfy them better than all the others could. All this they would let out in words of a fine, natural frankness and bluntness, without any sort of glossing or disguising. The ladies had their good laugh and pastime out of the thing, and there an end, making their servants which were with them answer back in the like strain and give as good as they got. The vintage once done and over, there is truce of suchlike language till another year, else would they be brought to book and sore punished.

I am told the said custom doth still endure, and that many folk in France would fain have it observed there also at some season of the year or other, to enjoy in