58 pages • 1-hour read
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide features discussion of animal death, death, and bullying.
Animals
Throughout the novel, animals symbolize hope and potential. Alice, the shepherdess, views one particular sheep, Jilly, as a sister. When Jilly nearly dies in lambing, Alice desperately attempts to help the sheep survive by singing to her all night. Her efforts are successful, and the narrative ends with the hopeful image of the recovered sheep eating grass. Similarly, Mogg’s narrative focuses on tricking the lord in order to avoid losing their prized cow, which they have named Paradise. Mogg praises the cow as “[s]weet-breathed, sweet-tempered, and bonny” and states that “her body was warm and her dung patched the roof” (25), listing many other benefits as well. After their father’s death, the cow represents the best source of financial hope for the family, and they engage in a desperate act of deceit to keep their hard-earned livestock, whose name suggests that she provides them with everything they need to make their own lives a relative “paradise” on earth.
Clothing
Clothing functions as a motif throughout the novel, and its role is closely connected with class concerns. Isobel’s narrative is heavily focused on clothing, for as one of the wealthier characters, she has the privilege and leisure to worry about such superficial concerns when others must focus on their daily survival. Isobel’s stained dress therefore symbolizes the intrusion of the lower class into her rarified world. The mark of her status is literally marred by muck, and Isobel thinks about the stain in detail. She asserts that she “cannot take / the stain from my gown / or the thought from my mind: They hate me” (43).
Clothing also appears in Mogg’s narrative, but in this context, the girl notes the irony of someone as poorly dressed as her mother getting the better of the richly dressed lord. As she states, “There’s Mother, so see, and blind in one eye, / her hair falling out, and her shift full of holes— / making a fool of his lordship” (26). In this narrative, clothing reflects class status, but it doesn’t tell the whole story, as Mogg and her family are able to act decisively to ensure that the lord does not take their prized cow, Paradise.
Holy Sites and Religious Relics
Religious relics function as a motif in the book. They appear primarily in Constance and Giles’s narratives, and these two contexts contrast significantly. Whereas Constance believes wholeheartedly that she will be cured by visiting the site of a saint’s martyrdom, Giles’s father is a “peddler” and a “dealer in relics” who advertises them by yelling, “Ten pence for a thread from Saint Margaret’s veil! / Who covets the thumbnail of Martin of Tours? / Or this—better still—even this can be yours!” (80). While Constance reveres the very idea of holy sites and relics, Giles’s father callously creates his own “relics” and sells them to others for a profit. The difference between these two narratives suggests that a relic’s only worth lies in an individual’s perception of its value.
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