Lady Beranger
A marriage made in medieval heaven: a lord who can’t afford to pay off his debt offers his daughter to the loanshark’s son. The shiftless son is made a knight in name, but in spirit he remains a shiftless loanshark’s son. The daughter, meanwhile, grows into Lady Beranger, spending the next decade waiting patiently for her husband to start acting like a knight. Her henpecking directly leads to consequences proving her husband is an idiot and if living in today’s world, she’d be either a spoiled heiress or successful femdom or even, possibly, both.
“The Snow Baby”
The title character of this story is the illegitimate offspring of an unfaithful merchant’s wife and the young lover she takes while her husband is abroad. Upon his return to the shocking sight of a baby he could possibly have conceived, he is told a fantastical tale: the baby was the product of his wife swallowing a snowflake at the exact moment she was longingly thinking of her husband and missing her terribly. Fifteen years later, the husband enjoys a strangely and rather irrationally misplaced revenge by selling the boy into slavery in Italy and explaining his absence to his mother by remarking that snowflakes tend to melt in hot climates.
“Brunain, the Priest’s Cow”
In truth, the cow is not that much of a character and it is important more for the way things turn out than for any personality it may possess. Brunaine is merely a pawn in the mechanics of an ironic satirical proverbial story about being careful what advice you hand out to others designed merely to benefit yourself as it may boomerang back upon you. In the end, Brunain is no longer the priest’s cow; that is the lesson.
“The Butcher of Abbeville”
The title character is a butcher who fails to procure a sheep through honest payment and so resorts to thievery as an act of vengeance against a most un-Christlike priest. The clever fellow manages through this simple act of theft to benefit himself at the expense of the priest, his servant girl, and priest’s mistress. All in all, the stolen sheep pays off far more than its worth for the butcher and, as an added cherry on top, not only gets away with his deception but leaves his victims engaged in conflict to battle things out.
