Chapter 45 - Household and Home

Summary

The chapter begins with some etymological discussions of the meaning of the words ‘household’, ‘home’ and ‘family’, and concentrates – but not to the exclusion of those social ranks below and above – on the urban bourgeoisie, from among whom Chaucer himself came, and from members of whom his audience was, probably, mostly drawn. It then goes on to consider servants and apprentices, as inevitable accompaniments of this rank, and also looks at the relations between husband and wife, including the roles of wives and widows, and the architecture of urban bourgeois homes. It concludes by looking at those above and below this rank, particularly the nobility, whose ‘great households’ have left considerable evidence of their organisation, but also includes the humbler households, about whom we can say comparatively little, because of the limitations of the evidence.