"The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer, Words of the Host to the Monk

“Go on!” she screams—and it’s a caterwaul—
“You kill those dogs! Break back and bones and all!”

“You wretched coward,” she cries, “avenge your wife!
By corpus bones,” she says, “give me your knife
And you shall have my distaff and go spin!”

There was fine pasturage where you were sent,
You’re nothing like a ghost or penitent!

You are no novice, cloistered in retreat

Damnation take me, but if I were Pope,
Not only you but many a mighty man
Going about the world with tonsured pan
Should have a wife

Religion has got hold of all the corn
Of procreation, laymen are but shrimps.

That’s what skimps
Our heirs and children, makes them all so slender
And feeble that they hardly can engender.

That’s what skimps
Our heirs and children, makes them all so slender
And feeble that they hardly can engender.

And that’s what makes our wives so apt to cope
Religious people; there they have some hope
Of honest coin to pay the debts of Venus

As old books tell, of those who fell from glory,
People that stood in great prosperity
And were cast down out of their high degree
Into calamity, and so they died.