r burgher's,
we all still had our work to do!

A thousand years ago, had one gone to some great dame, questioning her
why she did not go out a-hunting or a-fighting, or enter the great hall
to dispense justice and confer upon the making of laws, she would have
answered: "Am I a fool that you put to me such questions? Have I not a
hundred maidens to keep at work at spinning-wheels and needles? With my
own hands daily do I not dispense bread to over a hundred folk? In the
great hall go and see the tapestries I with my maidens have created by
the labour of years, and which we shall labour over for twenty more,
that my children's children may see recorded the great deeds of their
forefathers. In my store-room are there not salves and simples, that my
own hands have prepared for the healing of my household and the sick in
the country round? Ill would it go indeed, if when the folk came home
from war and the chase of wild beasts, weary or wounded, they found all
the womenfolk gone out a-hunting and a-fighting, and none there to dress
their wounds, or prepare their meat, or guide and rule the household!
Better far might my lord and his followers come and help us with our
work, than that we should go to help them! You are surely bereft of all
wit. What becomes of the country if the women forsake their toil?"

And the burgher's wife, asked why she did not go to labour in her
husband's workshop, or away into the market-place, or go a-trading to
foreign countries, would certainly have answered: "I am too busy to
speak with such as you! The bread is in the oven (already I smell it
a-burning), the winter is coming on, and my children lack good woollen
hose and my husband needs a warm coat. I have six vats of ale all
a-brewing, and I have daughters whom I must teach to spin and sew, and
the babies are clinging round my knees. And you ask me why I do not go
abroad to seek for new labours! Godsooth! Would you have me to leave my
household to starve in summer and die of cold in winter, and my children
to go untrained, while I gad about to seek for other work? A man must
have his belly full and his back covered before all things in life. Who,
think you, would spin and bake and brew, and rear and train my babes,
if I went abroad? New labour, indeed, when the days are not long enough,
and I have to toil far into the night! I have no time to talk with
fools! Who will rear and shape the nation if I do not?"

And the young maiden at the cot