Iii 
118 
and 
Grotcfque 
CHAPTER 
VIII. 
CARICATURES OF DOMESTIC LIFE.-STATE OF DOMESTIC LIFE IN THE 
MIDDLE AGES.-EXAMPLES OF DOMESTIC CARICATURE FROM THE 
CARVINGS OF THE MISERERES.iKITCI-IEN SCENES.iDOMESTIC 
BRAWLS.lTI-IE FIGHT I-"OR THE BREECHES.-THE JUDICIAL DUEL 
BETWEEN MAN AND WIFE AMONG THE  TO 
W]TCHCRAFT.?SATIRES ON THE TRADES; THE BAKER, THE MILLER, 
THE WINE-PEDLAR AND TAVERN-KEEPER, THE ALE-WIFE, ETC. 
THE influence of the jougleurs over people's minds generally, with 
their Iiories and fatirical pieces, their grimaces, their pofiures, and 
their wonderful performances, was very confiderable, and may be eafily 
traced in mediaeval manners and fentiments. This influence would 
naturally be exerted upon inventive art, and when a painter had to adorn 
the margin of a book, or the fculptor to decorate the ornamental parts of 
a building, we might expecft the ideas which would firtt prefent themfelves 
to him to be thofe fuggeited by the jougleur's performance, for the fame 
tatte had to be indulged in the one as in the other. The fame wit or 
fatire would pervade them both. 
Among the moft popular fubjeets of fatire during the middle ages, 
were clorneitic fcenes. Dometlic life at that period appears to have been 
in its general charaeter coarfe, turbulent, and, I ihould fay, anything 
but happy. In all its points of view, it prefented abundant fubjeets for 
ieti and burlefque. There is little room for doubt that the Rornith 
Church, as it exiited in the middle ages, was extremely hoitile to 
domefcic happinefs among the middle and lower claifes, and that the 
interference of the priett in the family was only a fource of domeftic 
trouble. The fatirical writings of the period, the popular tales, the 
difcourfes of thofe who fought reform, even the piritures in the 
manufcripts