It was common for the burgher class to ape gentility, even among people of a lower order; for the great merchant was often superior in education and in intelligence, as he was in wealth, to the great majority of the aristocratic class. In Chaucer, even the wife of the miller aspired to the aristocratic title of madame--
_Ther durste no wight clepe_ (call) _hir but madame_. --Cant. Tales, l. 3954.
And in speaking of the wives of various burghers who joined in the pilgrimage, the poet remarks--
_It is right fair for to be clept_ (called) _madame_. --Ibid., l. 378.
The burghers also cherished a number of servants and followers in their household, or _mesnie_. In the fabliau of “La Borgoise d’Orliens,” the mesnie of the burgher, who is not represented as a person of wealth or distinction, consists of two nephews, a lad who carried water, three chamber-maidens, a niece, two pautoniers, and a ribald, and these were all harboured in the hall. The pautonier was only another name for the ribald, or perhaps it was a sub-class or division of the infamous class who lived parasitically upon the society of the middle ages. Even the ordinary agriculturist had his _mesnie_.
What I have said of the great dissoluteness and immorality of the aristocratic class applies more especially to the households of the greater barons, though the same spirit must have spread itself far through the whole class. The aristocratic class was itself divided into two classes, or rather two ranks,--the great barons, and the knights and lesser landholders, and the division between these two classes became wider, and the latter more absolutely independent, as the power of feudalism declined. These latter were the origin of that class which in more modern times has been known by the title of the old country gentleman. As far as we can judge from what we know of them, I am led to think that this class was the most truly dignified, and in general the most moral, portion of mediæval society. There is abundant evidence that the tone of morality in the burgher and agricultural classes was not high; and the whole tenor of mediæval popular and historical literature can leave no doubt on our minds that in the middle ages the clergy were the great corruptors of domestic virtue among both these classes. The character of the women, as described in the old satirists and story-tellers, as well as in records of a still more strictly truthful character, was very low, and, in the towns especially, they are described as spending much of their time in the taverns, drinking and gossiping. Of course there were everywhere--and, it is to be trusted, not a few--bright exceptions to this general character.