This subject is so vast that we must restrict ourselves to a few documents which may supply some real historical background for Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale and for Piers Plowman.

Léopold Delisle, in his exhaustive Condition de la Classe Agricole en Normandie au Moyen-Age, laments that France possesses no such medieval treatises on rural economy as we possessed already in the 13th century. Perhaps the best of these is Fleta, edited by John Selden in 1647, from which the following extracts are translated: similar matter may be found in Walter of Henley (ed. Lamond and Cunningham, 1890) and in the Bibliothèque de l'École des Charles, 1856, pp. 123 ff. The author of Fleta describes the model servant in the same Utopian spirit in which monastic custumaries sometimes describe the ideal of a conventual administrator. A duchess of the Ancien Régime is said to have replied to a friend who besought her to procure a chef answering to a long list of transcendental qualities; “My dear, if I could ever find a man like that, I would marry him!” Her ancestress of the 13th century might almost have said the same of Fleta's Seneschal, or Steward. The reader will hardly need to be reminded that Malvolio was Olivia's seneschal.