The Wife of Bath

 Chaucer's Wife of Bath is easily one of the most arresting figures among the pilgrims. As is often the case, Chaucer mingles literary model with social reality: she is only partly an imitation of the description of La Vieille in the Roman de la Rose. Many of her characteristics could be traced back to the fact that she was born when Taurus was in the ascendant and Mars and Venus in conjunction in that sign of the zodiac. This accounts for her sexual appetite and refusal to be dominated by men in marriage. She may thus be a successor to an earlier type of the heroic woman, the Amazon located now in a middle-class milieu where martial qualities were expressed in the domestic world of gender relations. Among her personal traits, which have prompted critics to identify her, are her love of travel, her rather unfashionable dress and equipment, and the fact that she was deaf and her teeth were set wide apart. Chaucer also gives an accurate statement as to the locality of Bath from which she came. 'Beside Bathe' doubtless refers to the suburban parish of 'St. Michael's juxta Bathon.'

Since the reputation of the cloth woven at Bath was not of the best, Chaucer's claim that she surpassed the Dutch weavers of Ypres and Ghent in weaving is ironic. Ypres and Ghent were important centres of the Flemish wool trade and Flemish weavers emigrated to England in Iarge numbers in the fourteenth century. It is generally believed that the development of the rural cloth industry was due to Edward III's invitation to these Flemish weavers. But actually the water-power for running fulling-mills was largely available in the Cotswolds, the Pennines, and the Lake District, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century the cloth industry started moving to these districts. The unorganised village cloth-workers accepted lower wages than their urban counterparts and their cloth was therefore cheaper.

Like the yeoman, the Wife of Bath is very efficiently and neatly dressed. On Sundays at home she may wear a ten-pound 'coverchief' (a head covering somewhat like a turban, worn only by the provincial in late fourteenth-century England). On the pilgrimage she has put on a very broad hat and her hair is neatly covered by a wimple worn underneath the hat. She wore a protective skirt about her ample hips to guard against splashes of mud, her hose were tightly and neatly drawn, her shoes were of expensive soft leather and her spurs sharp.

The Wife took so much pride in her skill in weaving that she demanded first place in making the offering on Sundays, for the order in which parishioners went up to the altar to offer alms and oblations was determined by importance in the community. Such pride was only too common and the Parson specifically preaches against it, The pride is redeemed by boldness, frankness and vitality in the Wife's portrait. Mixing easily in male company, she was skilled in the arts of love, for she knew all the cures of love (which are listed in Ovid's Remedia Amoris). She was a widely-experienced + pilgrim who has been thrice to Jerusalem, to Rome and to other shrines on the continent. These long pilgrimages were undertaken primarily for pleasure and as such neither unusual nor inconsistent with her character. They guaranteed safety and 1 comfort to travellers much in the way modem conducted tours do. But they were condemned for the temptations they offered to vice. The wife has had five husbands , at the church door. The celebration of marriage at church door was common from the tenth to the sixteenth century. The service was in two parts, the marriage proper and the nuptial mass, celebrated afterward at the altar.