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Robertus de Vallibus debet quinque optimos palafredos, ut rex taceret de uxore Henrici Pinel. The wife of Hugh do Nevil fined in two hundred hens, that she might lie with, her husband for one night; another, that he might rise from, his infirmity; a third, that he might eat. For some particulars of the condition of the English of this time, vide Eadmer, p. 110.
But though such occasional exclamations of impatience or regret more especially when in a comic vein may receive pardon, or even provoke amusement, yet a serious and sustained poetic version of Sterne's "sum multum fatigatus de uxore mea" would be unbearable in any writer of self-respect, and wholly out of character in Chaucer.
"Creditum," he continues, "potionatus a Cæsonia uxore, amatorio quodam medicamento, sed quod furorem verterit." "It is thought that his wife Cæsonia administered to him a love-potion, which threw him into a phrensy." It is in allusion to this that Juvenal writes "Tamen hoc tolerabile, si non Et furere incipias, ut avunculus ille Neronis Cui totam tremuli frontem Cæsonia pulli Infudit."
There are many other things in these books which have a sound more familiar to us than any sense which they really convey. Here the saint blesses the store of a "homo plebeius cum uxore et filiis" a poor man with a wife and family a term expressively known in this day among all who have to deal with the condition of their fellow-men, from the chancellor of the exchequer to the relieving-officer.
Filia atque uxore superstitibus, potest videri etiam beatus; incolumi dignitate, florente fama, salvis affinitatibus et amicitiis, futura effugisse.
The sentence, with its subtle Virgilian echoes, in which he laments his own and his wife's absence from Agricola's death-bed omnia sine dubio, optime parentum, adsidente amantissima uxore superfuere honori tuo; paucioribus tamen lacrimis comploratus es, et novissima in luce desideraverunt aliquid oculi tui shows a new and strange power in Latin.
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