Copy 1, Volume 1
Essays on subjects connected with the literature, popular superstitions, and history of England in the Middle Ages / By Thomas Wright.
- Thomas Wright
- Date:
- 1846
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Essays on subjects connected with the literature, popular superstitions, and history of England in the Middle Ages / By Thomas Wright. Source: Wellcome Collection.
58/324 page 42
![supposed to have made to the East, eagerly seized upon, as the most convenient medium for telling a pleasant joke—a joke which, a little later, might have been more appropri- ately formed into a fabliau. In like manner, at an early period, the name of Tristram was adopted, and the story of his amour with the fair Isoude, perhaps, invented, to give occasion for telling the stratagems of a venturous and love-sick knight to possess the person of his mistress. The worthy “‘laureate’’ and satirist of the sixteenth cen- tury, John Skelton, of whose collected works an edition has been given by Mr. Dyce, reduces the tale of Tristram’s love for Isoude to its true dignity, if robbed of its details, when he talks of having read “ Of Tristram and kyng Marke, And al the whole warke [work] Of bele Isold his wife, For whom was much strife : Some say she was lyght, And made her husband knyghte Of the common hal That cuckoldes men cal.” There is, indeed, something rather disgusting than pleasing in the story of a man who lived in a constant and adulter- ous intercourse, and that not over-secretly, with the wife of his own uncle. But the age which witnessed the forma- tion of such a story was one in which the moral rights of property were not much considered—in which the abstract criminality of such an intercourse was not looked upon as greatly deepened because it came under the title of adul- tery, so long as the perpetrator could either brave the power or escape the eye of the party who was injured. At the same time, the incident of the love-potion which rendered](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33097963_0001_0058.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
