Advice to Jealous Wives

Please don't read any further if you don't like 'rude' words. Mediaeval poets were far less inhibited than some of us are in the twenty-first century.

 

Advice to Jealous Wives

I Wragedd Eiddigeddus

 

What a way to carry on!

You can have no conception

How daft it looks, nor how men

Think it vice, to drone and moan

On in this way, you scorned wives

Whose wild, jealous frowns cause wars.

Good women, I ask you this:

What, in nature, makes you thus?

Gwenllian, that old wanton -

Once a very wild woman -

Says it is not love to laze

Jealous of the golden days

Now gone. It’s always a shock:

What women want is good cock.

 

I ought to know! (There’s no man,

Well hung or not, who’s not mine

For the taking.) Silly girls,

You’ll not give, for any gold,

Your husbands’ pricks, though you can’t

Prevent them from chasing cunt.

You’ll clench it in your cold hand,

That cock, and not loose your hold

For anything, and you’ll squeal,

“Adultery? There’s no deal!”

 

Have you no shame? Is it right

That girls learn, as if by rote,

That their kin aren’t worth a peck

Beside a big, throbbing prick?

Of her family, she’d kill eight,

Her dad included – no debate –

And, no doubt, her poor mother,

And her nice, noble brothers,

And her cousins (yes, by Christ!):

All relations worth the cost

Of her husband’s cock. How dense!

Cocks deprive us of all sense!

 

Gossip makes a girl nervy.

Here’s what causes it: envy.

There is nowhere in all Wales

Where jealousy never weighs

Heavy on woman. Her face

Is grim in the marketplace,

Brooding violently on cock.

I swear, if pressed, she would hock

Eighteen cows, a team of strong

Oxen, and the sheep, ere long,

And though she’s shapely, she’d give

All her buildings, a whole grove,

And her very cunt. She’d mock

The world, ere she gave her cock!

Before she loosed her long man

She’d chuck out trivet, frying pan,

Her whole kitchen, her hat, furs,

So long as the prick is hers!

 

Girls, my satire won’t apply

To you, by God - not if I

Advise you forget his shlong:

Get yourself one twice as long!

 

Poem by Gwerful Mechain (15th Century Welsh), paraphrased by Giles Watson, 2012. It is testimony to Gwerful’s rhetorical skills that she is able to combine in one poem a satire on the phenomenon of marital jealousy between women, a reminder that the ‘Jealous Husband’ scenario so common in the works of her male contemporaries is only one side of the coin, and a vigorous affirmation of female sexuality.

 

The picture shows a Sheela-na-Gig being approached by a man with a rampant member in a carving on the tower of Whittlesford Church, Cambridgeshire.

Done