304 Notes and Illustrations. 
corn, and, in time of need, help her husband to fill the muck-wain 
or dung-cart, drive the plough, to load hay, corn, and such other, 
to go to market and sell butter or pigs, fowls or corn,” it is to be 
presumed that he had in his view.the smallest class of yeomen, who 
had no hired servants. 
78. 5. ‘Reason their cace,” that is, gossip and argue over their 
circumstances. 
73. 8. ‘* Home is home, be it never so ill.” Ballad licensed in 
1569-70. Clarke (Pareem. 1639, p. 101) has with us, ‘home is 
home, be it never so homely.” On the other hand, Heywood, in 
his Epigrams, 1562, says: 
‘‘Home is homely, yea, and to homely sometyme, 
Where wives’ footestooles to their husbandes’ heads clime.” 
73. 13. “ Familie” =household. Compare chap. 9, st. 12. 
74. 5. “‘Maides, three a clock,” etc. Compare Romeo and 
Juliet, Act iv. sc. 4, 3— 
‘“The second cock hath crow’d, 
The curfew bell hath rung, ’tis three o’clock.” 
‘*Lay your bucks,” ze. get ready the washing tubs. Compare: 
“Throw foul linen upon him as if it were going to ducking.”— 
Shakspere, Merry Wives of Wind., Act iii. sc. 3. Buck-basket, 
the basket in which linen is carried to the wash. ‘‘ Bouck-fatt, a 
washing tub.”—Upton Inventories, p. 28. Cf. “And for I can so 
wele wasche and so wele dowke, Godde has made me his chaum- 
berere.”—The Pilgrimage of the Life of the Manhode, f. 214., MS. 
in Libr. of St. John’s Coll. Camb. ‘“‘I ducke lynen clothes to 
scoure of their fylthe and make them whyte, /e due. Bucke these 
shyrtes, for they be to foule to be wasshed by hande, dwueg ces 
chemises, car elles sont trop sallves de les lauer a sauon.’—Palsgrave. 
‘ Buée, lie wherwith clothes are scowred; also a duck of clothes; 
Buer, to wash a buck, to scowre with lie; Auandzere f., a laun- 
dresse, or buck-washer.’—Cotgrave. To duck is to cleanse clothes 
by steeping them in lye: see Buck in Webster, Nares, Wedgwood, 
etc.”—Rev. W. W. Skeat, note to P. Plowman, B. Text, xiv. 19. 
76. 1. The hours of meals varied at different dates. In the 
Myrour of Our Lady, ed. Blunt, p. 15, we read: ‘‘ At houre of tyerse 
[9 a.m. ] labourers desyre to haue theyr dyner.” 
In Chambers’s Book of Days, i. 96, we read that Gervase Mark- 
ham, in 1653, makes the ploughman have three meals, viz. break- 
fast at 6 A.M., dinner at half-past 3 p.M., and supper at 6 P.M. See 
also note to 85. 1. 
77. 8. In the Library of Caius Coll. Camb. is a volume of Tracts, 
No. 286, one of which, published in 1555, An Account of the 
Cruelties of the King of Spain, has as its motto: ‘‘ Beware of Had 
I wiste.” This is also the title of a poem in the Paradyce of 
Daynty Deuyses, 1578. It is quoted by Sir Simon D’Ewes (Diary, 
etc., ii. 366): 
