, 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 r