CHAUCER'S Franklin's Tale opens with a description of a marriage of apparently idyllic happiness. The marriage of Arveragus and Dorigen follows a long courtship where Arveragus served his lady Dorigen through many acts of chivalry and is to be quite different from the model of dominant husband and obedient wife adopted by Walter and Grisilde in the Clerk's Tale. Arveragus swears

That nevere in al his lyf he, day ne nyght,
Ne sholde upon hym take no maistrie
Agayn hir wyl, ne kithe hire jalousie,
But hire obeye, and folwe hir wyl in al,
As any lovere to his lady shal.(FN1)

    In return, Dorigen swears to be his "humble trewe wyf" (758). The narrator approves this as a "humble, wys accord" (791) and goes on to explain that, paradoxically, Arveragus is

... bothe in lordshipe and servage.
Servage? Nay, but in lordshipe above,
Sith he hath both his lady and his love;
His lady, certes, and his wyf also.

    (794-97)
    This arrangement has been seen as Utopian -- most famously by G. L. Kittredge, who argued that "a better has never been devised or imagined" and that it was Chaucer's own ideal.(FN2) Indeed, it leads to more than a year of marital bliss.
    However, the model contains a contradiction that is more than a mere elegant oxymoron. Although Jill Mann argues that the alternation between "lordshipe" and "servage" represents a flexible, fluctuating relationship, the fact is that Arveragus's public role is going to show no such flexibility.(FN3) While renouncing "maistrie" in private, he will retain "the name of soveraynetee... for shame of his degree" (751-52). In other words, his concern with reputation will lead him to pay lip service to an ideal of male dominance that he does not espouse in private.(FN4) At the poem's crisis, Arveragus's behavior becomes even more contradictory. He tells Dorigen that she should fulfill her adulterous promise to Aurelius, which implies that he respects her as an autonomous human being whose personal word should be honored rather than someone he owns and controls. But he then orders her to tell no one about what she is doing and threatens her with death if she does so. Arveragus has, then, both reneged on his vow to "take no maistrie" and deepened the fissure between the couple's private marital behavior (which now encompasses husband-sanctioned adultery) and the conventional face they present to the public.
    How can we account for this? In Alfred David's view, "Arveragus' insistence on keeping up the appearance while willing to suffer the fact diminishes his nobility and raises a serious question about the depth of the Franklin's conception of 'gentilesse.'"(FN5) Cynthia A. Gravlee believes that Arveragus's concern for his public image outweighs his love for Dorigen and that his apparent interest in "trouthe," which suits his image of worthy knight, is undermined by his suppression of the truth from the public.(FN6) Should we, then, consider Arveragus a hypocrite? Was he never truly committed to an equal marriage? Or was his Utopian ideal unworkably flawed from the outset; are we to believe, with Felicity Riddy and Angela Jane Weisl, that the equality he promised was never meant to be anything more than a polite fiction and that male dominance is inevitable in a medieval marriage?(FN7)
    I want to argue in this essay that none of these conclusions is justified. Rather, as Robert R. Edwards has recognized, the Franklin's Tale is a story of a loving marriage struggling to survive in a world of changing social relations, "competing ambitions and mixed practices."(FN8) I hope to show that, having established an egalitarian marriage ideal at the beginning of the Tale, Chaucer goes on to explore how such an ideal would be tested by real world circumstances. Notwithstanding the Tale's ostensibly pagan and Breton context, I will present parallels from late medieval letter collections and advice literature to suggest that Dorigen is tested in ways that would have seemed familiar and therefore meaningful to Chaucer's medieval readers; that the conception of honor and reputation portrayed in the Tale reflects the complex conception found in other contemporary sources; and that we understand Dorigen and Arveragus's divergent behavior in private and public best if we see it as related to contemporary expectations of proper behavior for married couples.
    The signal that we are to read the Tale as a test of a particular kind of marriage ideal comes at its opening, which, as Edwards has also recognized, diverges entirely from Chaucer's presumed sources -- the tale that Menedon tells as the fourth of thirteen Love questions in Boccaccio's Il Filocolo and, perhaps, Boccaccio's other version of the same story in the Decameron.(FN9) In the Decameron, the marriage is not even established as loving -- the implication of the comment that the wife "deserved to be loved greatly" by her illicit suitor is that her husband does not love her,(FN10) Chaucer, by contrast, opens with the story of the couple's romantic courtship as well as setting out in detail the kind of marriage they agree to have. This marriage ideal imports ideas from the Roman de la Rose -- that "love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye" (764) and that "wommen, of kynde, desiren libertee" (768) -- but comes to quite a different conclusion. Whereas the Roman sees marriage as destroying love, along with friendship and equality, here a model of marriage is proposed that sustains love through a combination of roles.(FN11) Each partner will serve one another, allowing each spouse to be served as lord or lady, so that Arveragus has, in Dorigen, "lady," "wyf," and "love." However, the idea that there may be a difficulty lurking within this ideal is suggested by the obtrusively complicated presentation of the "servage"/"lordshipe" paradox (quoted above) -- as several critics have noted.(FN12) Moreover, Chaucer gives us a discursus on the need for patience in marriage that will prove to be more than mere filler:

Lerneth to suffer, or elles, so moot I goon,
Ye shul it lerne, wher so ye wole or noon;
For in this world, certein, ther no wight is
That he ne dooth or seith somtyme amys.
Ire, siknesse, or constellacioun,
Wyn, wo, or chaungynge of complexioun
Causeth ful ofte to doon amys or speken.
On every wrong a man may nat be wreken.

    (777-84)
    Interestingly, this passage seems to recall the warnings given in medieval marriage sermons about the daily conflicts that marriage is likely to entail.(FN13) If the narrator's warning about the hypothetical problems married life throws up is drawn from Chaucer's immediate historical context, so too are the actual problems he creates for Dorigen and Arveragus. Chaucer alters the circumstances of his source story throughout, so that Dorigen's encounters with Aurelius occur quite differently and are presented as part of a complex, late medieval social world where personal and business relationships are intertwined and need careful negotiation if both public reputation and private virtue are to be maintained.
    We can establish this by considering evidence of how historic married couples were expected to behave, and did behave, to preserve their reputations and maintain their social connections. As in my earlier essay on the social comedy of the Shipman's Tale, I will use two main kinds of evidence: advice literature for women written in the late fourteenth century and fifteenth-century letter collections.(FN14) The usefulness of English and French advice literature as evidence for late medieval ideologies has been well established as a general principle in studies such as Diane Bornstein's The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature far Women and as a relevant context for Chaucer in essays such as Carolyn Collette's "Heeding the Counsel of Prudence: A Context for the Melibee" and Juliette Dor's "The Wife of Bath's 'Wandrynge by the Weye' and Conduct Literature for Women."(FN15) Here I will make use of Christine de Pizan's 1405 Livre des Trois Vertus, The Book of the Knight of the Tower (Caxton's fifteenth-century translation of the Chevalier de la Tour Landry's ca. 1371 original) and the Menagier de Paris, written by a Parisian bourgeois between 1392 and 1394 -- all texts that consider wives' duties in detail.(FN16) Letter collections have been less frequently used than advice literature to throw light on Chaucer, though there are several exceptions, such as Mary Carruthers' dicussion of the Paston and Stonor letters in her classic article on the Wife of Bath.(FN17) No doubt this is because the surviving collections by the Paston, Stonor, Cely, and Plumpton families are of a later date -- with the most interesting material dating from around the 1440s to the 1470s -- than the Canterbury Tales. Nevertheless, since historians of marriage have found both ideology and practice largely unchanged in that period and since the letters offer such unparalleled evidence of the actual behavior of historical couples, I will make use of their contents as interestingly extending, corroborating, and complicating the evidence of ideological guides.(FN18)

DORIGEN AND ARVERAGUS: A PORTRAIT OF A MEDIEVAL MARRIAGE
    Chaucer presents Dorigen's encounters with Aurelius in such a way as to reflect the daily life of late medieval gentlewomen. She meets him without her husband, talks with him, and makes and sets out to fulfill a contract with him in a set of circumstances that must have been intended to strike a chord with Chaucer's readers. The first similarity Dorigen and Arveragus share with real medieval married couples is their long separation, when Arveragus's need for "worshipe and honour" (811) takes him away to England to seek glory in arms. This makes a stark contrast from Boccaccio's narratives, where the husband is continually present. Arveragus's absence has a profound impact on Dorigen's behaviour. She misses him hugely:

For his absence wepeth she and siketh,
As doon thise noble wyves whan hem liketh.
She moorneth, waketh, wayleth, fasteth, pleyneth;
Desir of his presence hire so destreyneth
That al this wyde world she sette at noght.

    (817-21)
    The second line above has been read as carrying the scornful implication that Dorigen's sorrow is no more than an aristocratic indulgence, but the evidence of letter collections argues that Chaucer's implication may be more gently humorous, portraying her behavior as predictably typical of women in her situation.(FN19) As Kathryn Jacobs notes, the practicalities of everyday gentry (and merchant) life led to many medieval couples being separated, and it is to these frequent separations that we owe the existence of the fifteenth-century letters between husbands and wives.(FN20) But just because the separations were commonplace does not mean they were not painful. Margaret Paston often reports unhappiness at being left alone and worries about her husband's welfare. In Paston letter 126 she tells John I that she has been worrying ever since she heard of his sickness and that she wants him home: "myn hert is in no grete esse, ne nowth xal be tyl I wott þat Ge ben very hol" (218). When she finds out that he will be away at Christmas, she writes in letter 153 that she will "thynke my-selfe halfe a wedowe" without him (258). In letter 169 Elizabeth Stonor is worried that her husband William will catch the pox in London and wants him to come home where he will be safe -- or if that is not possible, she will go to be with him "for in good faith I thought never so longe sith I see yow" (267). A month later in letter 173, she tells him "I longe sore ffor you" even though she understands he has been occupied with "gret besynys" (272). Anne Stonor, William's third wife, also finds his absences difficult and writes in letter 306 that it seems "long sith I saw you, and if I had knowen þat I shold hav ben this long tyme from you I wold have be moche lother then I was to have comyn into this ferre Countrey," where she is staying with friends (140).
    So, even when wives appreciate the reasons for their husbands' absence, they regret it, grieve, miss them, and worry about them, Dorigen's sorrow, then, may be predictable, but this does not make it self-indulgent: if gentry wives missed husbands who might be absent on business trips for five weeks at a time or fourteen weeks in a year, as John Paston I was, how much more distraught may we allow Dorigen to be, whose husband is absent for years, much of that time engaged in life-threatening feats of arms?(FN21)
    In order to distract herself from her sorrow, Dorigen feels obliged to agree to her friends' request to spend her time in company and attends their May gathering in the garden.(FN22) Margaret Hallissy argues that this is inappropriate behavior: the conduct books prescribe, in her view, that Dorigen should not go out when her husband is away, and it is true that Christine de Pizan advises keeping outward show to a minimum in one's husband's absence (bk. 1, ch, 13, p. 56).(FN23) However, this prohibition is not repeated in the other advice literature for women, and the Knight of the Tower sees dancing and attending festivals as generally acceptable occupations for wives, so long as they are accompanied by their friends and neighbors (ch. 24, p. 45). Moreover, it is clear that medieval wives were expected to socialize in their husbands' absence: Margaret Paston reports going to dinner with her cousin Toppys and Lady Felbrygg on St Peter's Day in Paston letter 141, and although she tells John I that they would "all a be þe meryere if ye hadde ben there" (243), this has not stopped her from going.
    It has been argued that Dorigen, in attending this party, is trying to play the role of a flirtatious courtly lady or that she sees it as an escape from reality and normal social expectations.(FN24) But Chaucer takes care to distinguish her encounter with her suitor from those of her precursors in Boccaccio. In Boccaccio's versions of the story, the suitor has already been courting the married lady for some time, and the lady - who is explicitly characterized as devious in Il Filocolo -- fixes on the idea of requesting a magical tribute in the hope of getting rid of him. Each of Boccaccio's ladies makes a show of playing along with her suitor's courtship and being willing to satisfy him if only he can provide an adequately elaborate tribute. Chaucer, by contrast, creates a situation whereby Dorigen talks to Aurelius in complete ignorance of his love for her and speaks to him at this gathering:

By cause that he was hire neighebour
And was a man of worshipe and honour,
And hadde yknowen hym of tyme yoore.

    (961-63)
    Aurelius is a respectable neighbor whom Dorigen ought to be able to trust. As such, he is the kind of person whom a medieval wife would be expected to maintain as part of a social/business network in her husband's absence. As Jennifer C. Ward writes, for the medieval English noblewoman "social activities undoubtedly provided enjoyment, but also had deeper significance," and while husbands were away, their wives would be expected to keep friendship networks going for the practical advantages they could provide.(FN25) Dorigen encounters Aurelius only in public. Unlike Boccaccio's characters, who meet according to their own initiative at one another's houses, Aurelius accosts Dorigen at events that she feels obliged to attend: first at this dance, then at the temple, and lastly when she is walking in the street after he has been spying on her. Their meetings all arise as a consequence of the commitments that Dorigen, like any medieval wife who is obliged to operate independently of her absent husband, must fulfill: to maintain social bonds, to attend worship, to honor a contract. At the same time, Dorigen's rash promise to Aurelius arises out of her love for Arveragus and desire to protect him, thus implicitly reasserting her married status even as she jokingly promises to be Aurelius's "love" (990).
    The obligation to honor contracts brings us to another reality for medieval wives whose husbands are away: they must carry out business, whether on their husbands' behalf or semi autonomously. This requires them, as mentioned above, to converse with their male acquaintances, as Dorigen does with Aurelius. There is plentiful evidence of this in the Paston letters: for example, in letter 624, John, Prior of Bromholm, mentions to John I that he has been speaking to Margaret about his dealings with another clergyman; in letter 636 William Lomnor explains that he has told her about the disposition of the Earl of Norfolk's men. Second, wives frequently make business arrangements and conclude agreements in a way that goes far beyond keeping the household ticking over in their husbands' absence. Margaret Paston's activities include arranging a commission to appoint a new parson to Drayton church (letter 183); speaking to the sheriff and having him send out writs (letter 192); extracting a promise from Lord Moleyns's men that they will not harm John Paston I's men (letter 131); and renting some property in the pretence that she is keeping her husband in the dark about what she is doing, securing a good deal for herself in the process (letter 147).
    Although Margaret is frequently operating under John I's instructions, this does not appear to be the case in any of the above situations, and she is clearly able to do business even when she is explicitly claiming that her husband is unaware of what she is doing, as in the rental agreement. This supports Richard Firth Green's view that, on a day-to-day basis, medieval married women were able to contract independently of their husbands.(FN26) The expectation that a wife would honor her personal "trouthe" would have been a necessary part of daily business, so when it comes to Dorigen's promise to Aurelius, his attempt to enforce it and Arveragus's respect for her word seem more reasonable than "unrealistic."(FN27) Moreover, even though Dorigen makes her vow "in pley" (988), she surrounds it with a straightforward honesty about her real intentions and a matter-of-fact attitude to the bargain that may well have reflected real medieval practice. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to see a similarity to Margaret Paston's frankness in her dealings with Lord Moleyns's men, mentioned above. Margaret has a confrontation with them when Lord Moleyns had already seized Paston properties, and Margaret reports to John I that she told Lord Moleyns's men that she did not trust their words and would not be inviting them into the house where she was staying (letter 131); Dorigen tells Aurelius to give
    up his "folies" (1002) and reminds him that she is the wife of another man "that hath hir body whan so that hym liketh" (1005).(FN28)
    Finally Dorigen has in common with these fifteenth-century wives a preference for consulting her husband when things become difficult. Dorigen waits for Arveragus to return before deciding how to deal with Aurelius, unlike Boccaccio's women whose husbands force an explanation of what is going on out of them. David Aers thinks Dorigen acts submissively and dependently by turning to Arveragus in her crisis, but if this is true, it is true of several other medieval wives.(FN29) Elizabeth Stonor's desire for her husband to return in Stonor letter 169, mentioned above, is partly motivated by the difficult week she has had, full of various problems: she tells him, "1 wot will that ye coulde an answeryd in certayn maters better pen I" (267). Margaret Paston pleads with John I in Paston letter 188 to do something to protect his servants who are being attacked at Hellesdon: she says, "to my powere I wyl do as I can or may in yowre materys," but she leaves it to him to "seke a meen" for his servants to be at peace (310). These requests for help and advice would have been approved by the author of the Menagier de Paris, who recommends that wives check different courses of action with their husbands wherever possible rather than making their own decisions (bk. 1, art. 6, p. 89).

HONOR AND HYPOCRISY
    Thus far, then, Dorigen's circumstances seem to be suggestively similar to those of real medieval wives and dissimilar to those of her literary predecessors. Can the same be said of the sometimes conflicting values of public reputation, honor, truth, secrecy, and private egalitarianism that she and Arveragus hold?
    Any accusation of Arveragus's hypocrisy must hinge on his determination to keep the "name of soveraynetee" in public while renouncing "maistrie" in private. However, this appears to reflect a medieval pattern of husbands expecting a show of obedience in public while adopting a far less domineering and more egalitarian mode of behavior to their wives in private. There are signs of this even in the advice literature prescribing ideal marital behavior. While Christine de Pizan's Livre des trois vertus, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, and Le Menagier de Paris all emphasize that a wife should obey her husband, they make exceptions to this; when the couple is in private. The Knight of the Tower repeatedly condemns arguing with or contradicting a husband "shamefully to fore the peple," but he sees a wife who reprehends her husband in private as doing "her parte" (ch. 17, p. 35; ch. 75, p. 106; and chs. 95-96, pp. 128-29), A substantial section of Le Menagier de Paris is devoted to obedience, but the author also suggests that wives may ask for an explanation of their husband's behavior (bk. 1, art. 6, p. 79) or reprehend them in private (bk. 1, art. 9, p. 113). Christine de Pizan recommends that the wife should obey her husband in general (bk. 1, ch. 13, p. 53), but suggests that some commands should be carefully considered before they are followed (bk. 1, ch. 11, p. 44) and that a wife may need to admonish her husband (bk. 1, ch. 13, p. 55). She even suggests that a wife may wish to involve her husband's confessor and some other "bonnes gens" to help correct him. This does not, I think, imply that she will be seen to be correcting her husband by the court at large, undermining her public deference. Rather, it implies that trusted friends would happily accept the notion that a wife might play a slightly different role in private.(FN30)
    The motivation for this split between private and public behavior is explained as follows in Le Menagier de Paris: a wife must "monstrer son obeissance" (show her obedience; my emphasis) lest people suspect the husband is under her thumb, which would be extremely shameful to her and damaging to her husband: "Ce que femme ne doit pas vouloir que l'en apparçoive; car en tel cas elles se demonstrent comme maistresses et dames, et a elles mesmes feroient grant blasme, et grant vilenie a leurs mariz" (the wife should not want this to be perceived; for in such cases they show themselves to be mistresses and ruling ladies, and cause great blame for themselves and great shame for their husbands; bk. 1, art. 6, p. 77). It does not seem to occur to this author or his contemporaries that there is anything inconsistent or shameful about behaving differently in private.
    The Paston wives follow a similar pattern of greater deference in public. They normally address their husbands as "worshipful husband" or "master" at the opening of letters and on the dorse. The address written on the dorse would have been the only public-facing part of the letter, visible to the messenger carrying it and anyone else who handled it but did not break the seal.(FN31) The opening of the letter would have been visible only to its reader but was usually formulaic and thus formalized in a deferential mode.(FN32) However, the substance of the letters is often less obedient.(FN33) Margaret writes to John Paston I in letter 154 -- which, as usual, is addressed outside and at the beginning of the letter to her "ryth worchepfull husband" -- that she is not going to follow his request to speak to an unnamed person about some secret matter, because "me semyth he is to yonge" and "he schall neuer loue feythfully the todyr man" on whose behalf he would be working (258-59). She has made her own judgment of the situation and decided to disobey him for their common good. She makes no apology -- nor does she in letter 138 where she also disobeys him on a business matter. In letter 418, Margery uses the formal "mayster" for the dorse of her letter to her husband John III (665) but begins the letter itself with the more equal and loving "myne owyn swete hert" (though she reverts to a more respectful mode of address subsequently) and dares to make a complaint: "I mervell sore that I haue no letter from you."(FN34)
    For their part, the Paston men are far from domineering. In letter 77 John I calls Margaret his "owne dere souereyn lady" (140), implying that he is subservient to her rather than vice versa. In more public letters -- those addressed simultaneously to Margaret and their servants-he favors the respectful form "maistresse" for his wife, perhaps in order to emphasize Margaret's status relative to their servants. But if writing to her alone, he uses "cosyn," a term that implies a relationship of equality. As well as giving their wives instructions about business matters, both John I and John III ask their advice on some questions (for example, in letter 389 John III wants medical advice) and leave others to their wives' discretion (in letter 76, for example, where John I leaves his wife to decide how enquiries into the payments made to the farmers of Akthorp since Sir John Fastolf's death should be made). It is true that none of these sources contains anything as radically unmasterful as the marriage in the Franklin's Tale, but the hints they offer of marriage as partnership rather than hierarchy and of greater wifely deference in public suggest that Dorigen and Arveragus's marriage would have struck Chaucer's audience as a more pronounced version of something quite familiar.(FN35)
    If Arveragus and Dorigen's decision to behave differently in public and private might have seemed perfectly normal to a medieval audience, what of their concern with worldly reputation and secrecy? Arveragus's desire to keep the nature of his marriage quiet comes after Dorigen decides "pryvely" to marry him (741), and this emphasis on keeping the details of their married life, and threats to it, private continues throughout the Tale.(FN36) Dorigen's friends are ignorant of what has passed between her and Aurelius in the garden (1014); Dorigen goes on to tell no one when Aurelius announces that he has kept to his side of the bargain (1350); then, at the story's crisis, Arveragus tells Dorigen to "make no contenance of hevynesse" (1485) that might lead anyone to suspect Dorigen, having forbidden her ever to tell what has happened "up peyne of deeth" (1481). It is true that the husband in Il Filocolo tells his wife to fulfil her promise in secret, but this isolated comment is quite different in force from Dorigen and Arveragus's painstaking discretion.
    Chaucer's approach seems, again, to be bringing his narrative closer to late medieval practice in England and France, where discretion and secrecy formed an important part of the medieval marriage ideal. Le Menagier de Paris recommends that wives should keep their husbands' secrets (bk. 1, art. 8, pp. 105-6), and an extended treatment of the ideal through a series of exemplary stories about Cato and his son forms the final section of the Book of the Knight of the Tower. Christine de Pizan extends this ideal of discretion to unhappy marriages; if a husband is treating his wife unlovingly or is unfaithful, she is to give no indication of it and to contradict anyone who speaks ill of him (bk. 1, ch, 13, 55). Margaret Paston's letters give us a number of examples of her withholding what appears to be personal or sensitive information from letters that might fall into the wrong hands and were in any case dictated to scribes. She prefers to tell her husband about such matters in private: so, in letter 190, she promises to explain to her husband why she is at Caister when she sees him, and in letter 126 she makes a cryptic reference to a token that they have already discussed in private: "I xal sende my moder a tokyn bat sche toke me, for I sopose be tyme is cum bat I xulde sendeth here yf I kepe þe behest þat I have made -- I sopose I have tolde yow wat it was" (218). Davis's suggestion that this refers to her pregnancy seems eminently plausible, but for our purposes it is more interesting that she chooses not to write openly about whatever it is.
    In both the Franklin's Tale and our other sources, secrecy is found alongside a preoccupation with honor, which, again, is given more weight than it was by Boccaccio. Honor has two conflicting associations in the Franklin's Tale. First, it is connected with "trouthe." This is brought into play when Dorigen swears her "trouthe" (998) to Aurelius in a far more formal manner (even though it is "in pley" [988]) than in the corresponding episode in Il Filocolo. When Arveragus comes to hear about this, he responds as follows:

Ye shul youre trouthe holden, by my fay!
For God so wisly have mercy upon me,
I hadde wel levere ystiked for to be
For verray love which that I to yow have,
But if ye sholde youre trouthe kepe and save.
Trouthe is the hyest thyng that man may kepe.

    (1474-79)
    This take on the issue is quite different from that of his precursors in Boccaccio: in the Decameron, the husband tells his wife to try to get out of the promise, and in Il Filocolo, he tells her to keep the promise because Tarolfo has earned his reward reasonably. Here, Arveragus's reason for wanting his wife to keep her promise is his regard for her personal "trouthe" in both its legal and ethical senses. For Arveragus, "trouthe" appears to carry both the narrow sense of an oath and agreement and the broader sense of integrity and fidelity to one's word-essentially, the same kind of "trawpe" that proves to be at issue in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.(FN37) In the Italian analogues the idea of a gentlewoman's word being her oath occurs only to the suitor in the Decameron, who hopes it will help him to get what he wants. But in the Franklin's Tale it becomes more than a principle that can be exploited: Arveragus's love for Dorigen means that he cannot bear to see his beloved wife fail to live up to this truth ideal.
    Honor also has another aspect in this Tale, as a reputation for marital fidelity. Dorigen herself is attached to this ideal, which, as Derek Brewer has shown, is the more traditional basis for women's honor, telling us that she would rather die "than of my body to have a shame" (1361) and giving us a number of examples of legendary women who have made the same choice.(FN38) Arveragus's guidance to Dorigen prioritizes truth to her word over sexual fidelity to him, but this seems to be at least partly because he is able to release her from the latter obligation but not the former. Indeed, his earlier determination to have the public "name of soveraynetee... for shame of his degree" suggests that he, too, values the sexual aspect of honor and that for him that honor entails not only public knowledge of his wife's chastity but also creating a public impression that he dominates his wife more generally.(FN39) At the crisis of the poem, Arveragus again attempts to preserve this traditional basis of the couple's honor by maintaining their reputation for sexual fidelity. Does this make him a hypocrite? Why espouse one ideal -- of spiritual, rather than bodily, fidelity -- in private but refuse to admit that this is what you are doing in public? The answer must be that Arveragus is trying to sustain a social image of a successful, faithful marriage that fits with society's expectations rather than his own principles.(FN40) But this would probably not have struck Chaucer's original audience as hypocritical.
    Advice literature and letter collections testify that medieval married couples took pains to create and preserve their reputation for honor and chastity. The Livre des trois vertus emphasizes the importance of a wife speaking well of her husband and preserving his honor (bk. 1, chs. 8-9, pp. 32-33) and of cultivating her own reputation for honor, chastity, and loving her husband (bk. 1, ch. 11, pp. 41-42; ch. 13, p. 56); it also warns of the dire consequences of any suspicion of infidelity for her reputation and even her life (bk. 1, ch. 27, pp. 110-19). The Menagier de Paris also stresses the importance of a chaste reputation: the mere suspicion that a wife is unchaste leads to her losing all good, which no other merit can restore (bk. 1, art. 4, p. 47). Interestingly for our purposes, the Menagier author gives several examples of husbands saving their wives' honor by concealing their infidelity in the eighth Article of his first Book. He also discusses spouses' duties to preserve one another from any public blame, whether or not it results from a real error, especially since a wife must share any blame a husband has: she "partiroit a son blasme pour ce qu'elle seroit mariee a si meschant" (will share his blame because she is married to such a wretched man; 110). Presumably the same would apply to a husband with an erring wife. Two things follow from this: that a reputation for chastity is, as in the franklin's Tale, considered far more important to honor than chastity in fact; and that the Menagier author's conception of shared shame supports Brewer's observation that the honor of medieval married couples worked collectively -- they formed an "honour group," and thus had to work together to sustain and increase their honor.(FN41)
    Philippa Maddern has analyzed the meaning and importance of honor for the Pastons. She demonstrates that for them, rather than being associated with military prowess and men alone, honor resided in "quotidien relationships," which both men and women could maintain; that in the fifteenth century honor was becoming increasingly associated with virtue but was still importantly rooted in public renown; and that it could involve, for example, holding off from insisting on one's rights through litigation and performing business transactions faithfully(FN42) Honorable behavior, she argues, could involve lying: in letter 73 John Paston I tells Margaret it is "worshep for yow to confort yowr tenantis" (133) -- "worship" is the Pastons' usual term for honor -- and he goes on to recommend that she lie to them that she has not heard from her husband. Margaret evidently considers reputation very important: she frequently sends John I reports of what is being said about him: for example, in letters 164 or 166 where she refers to what might be considered "wurchepful" for him (275). And she was not alone in this: writing about the Stonors, Christine Carpenter says that "a gentry family's concern for its local standing, its worship, is a constant thread running through the letters."(FN43) The Pastons and families like them, then, would have recognized the importance to a woman's honor of keeping to her side of a contract and, along with Dorigen and Arveragus, sometimes cultivated their honor through a lack of transparency about what was going on in their marriage.

CONCLUSIONS
    If Chaucer was, then, drawing on his own social reality in creating his picture of a marriage under stress, how should this affect our reading of the Franklin's Tale and Arveragus's behavior in particular? First and perhaps most importantly, we should interpret Arveragus's concern for "shame" to his social rank and for people thinking "harm" of Dorigen in line with contemporary ideas of honor. Both the advice literature and the letter collections show that maintaining an honorable reputation greatly concerned medieval men and women. For women, this honorable reputation would have been linked to chastity, making it important to conceal Dorigen's sexual infidelity. But a woman's honor would also have been conceived far more broadly, as John Paston I's comments to his wife show, so that faithfulness to one's word, especially in a world where women transacted so much business on their own account, would have seemed of comparable importance. A medieval audience would not, I think, have seen Arveragus's interest in reputation as "shallow" or as having an inappropriate priority in relation to his love for his wife, as David and Gravlee argue.(FN44) Keeping secrets from the world and presenting a united front to others, which can involve an element of dissimulation, are recommended by the advice books and practiced by medieval husbands and wives.(FN45) Moreover, Arveragus is not claiming higher standards or beliefs than those he really holds -- rather the reverse. His aim is to have his private behavior, which is generally admirable, reflected in an honorable reputation. This would probably not have struck a medieval audience as hypocritical.
    However, Chaucer clearly had a point to make in creating a split between private and public behavior. Arveragus and Dorigen's marriage has an unavoidable social aspect, and this has the potential to threaten their private happiness. In order to function socially, both Arveragus and Dorigen feel that they must keep the public from full knowledge of their marriage relationship. By doing so, they perhaps leave the way open for individuals such as Aurelius to make mistaken assumptions about the nature of their marriage, imagining, given the conventional face they present to the public, that theirs was the kind of loveless, political union that seems to have been particularly prevalent among the upper classes of medieval society.(FN46) That would, of course, leave greater scope for Aurelius's adulterous suit. The existence of such assumptions might seem to argue for greater transparency, but it probably does no such thing. If Aurelius can imagine, on no basis whatsoever, that Dorigen might be favorably inclined toward a love affair, what might others assume of her if they knew that her husband showed her no "maistrie" or that she had been unfaithful to him with another man? The threat that an ignorant neighbor causes to his marriage goes a long way towards justifying Arveragus's determination to keep the world in the dark.(FN47)
    Finally, I do not think we are intended to read Arveragus's behavior as flawless. However, neither do I believe that his failure lies in declaring that Dorigen should keep her promise (which some have seen as an order that demonstrates he has never really rejected "maistrie").(FN48) Unlike Boccaccio's husbands, who do command their wives at this point, Arveragus simply makes an assertion about what Dorigen should do and considers the matter closed. Dorigen, unlike Boccaccio's wives, does not argue. Arveragus, by making this assertion, has surrendered his prior claim to Dorigen's sexual fidelity, releasing her from her marriage vow so that she can keep the promise that she (not he) made to Aurelius.(FN49) This, as Aurelius notes, is an act of generosity and gentilesse. Arveragus is showing respect for Dorigen's word and her autonomy -- at considerable personal cost -- rather than treating her as his property. Once Arveragus has sanctioned Dorigen's infidelity, she has no option but to keep her promise to Aurelius if she is to act honorably. However, threatening Dorigen "up peyne of deeth" to keep what she is doing quiet must strike us as unpleasantly out of accord with what Arveragus had promised when he undertook to "take no maistrie Agayn hir wyl." But, since Arveragus's failure to live up to his ideal comes as an outburst of negative emotion, it mirrors Dorigen's own failure, where she breaks her vow to be "trewe" to Arveragus as a result of her distress about the rocks that endanger him.
    Thus both partners in this marriage are imperfect, just as the narrator had foretold, but this imperfection arises from their love for one another, making it especially forgivable. Moreover, it creates an equality of imperfection between Dorigen and Arveragus, so that rather than the story ending with a superior husband correcting his erring wife, as in Boccaccio, Chaucer's couple are both at fault; both need to be forgiven, and both will try harder in the future. As Davis puts it, "their original mutuality is restored, but this time on a more mature and self-aware footing."(FN50) As a realistic married couple -- the sort of couple that Chaucer might have encountered -- neither of them has been capable of perfect adherence to their ideals. But their ideals and their love remain intact, and this is why Chaucer finally allows them to escape reality and gives them an optimistic ending that confirms his original marital ideal: Dorigen is again "trewe"; Arveragus again "cherisseth hire as though she were a queene", and they both "leden forth hir lyf" in "sovereyn blisse" for evermore (1551-55).(FN51)
ADDED MATERIAL
    Cathy Hume University of Bristol

FOOTNOTES
1 The Franklin's Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), lines 746-50. Subsequent references to The Franklin's Tale are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically within the text by line number.
2 Kittredge, "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage," Modern Philology 9 (1912): 467.
3 Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 90.
4 John M. Fyler and Craig R. Davis argue that we are to see this public show as a way of compensating for Arveragus's low social status ("Love and Degree in the Franklin's Tale," Chaucer Review 21 [1987]: 321-37; "A Perfect Marriage on the Rocks: Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer, and the Franklin's Tale," Chaucer Review 37 [2002]: 129-44). However, I am not convinced that we are meant to see any serious disparity of status between the "knyght" Arveragus and Dorigen's "heigh kynrede" (733), since the latter is so briefly and vaguely mentioned and seems to be significant mainly as a manifestation of Arveragus's conventional feeling of being unworthy of his lady.
5 David, The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 190.
6 Gravlee, "Presence, Absence and Difference: Reception and Deception in The Franklin's Tale," in Desiring Discourse: The Literature of Love, Ovid through Chaucer, ed, James J. Paxson and Cynthia A. Gravlee (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1998), 181.
7 Riddy argues that Arveragus never really surrenders his male powers, and merely wishes to envisage Dorigen as his lady in order to confirm his status ("Engendering Pity in the Franklin's Tale," in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: the Wife of Bath and all her Sect, ed, Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson [London: Routledge, 1994], 54-71); Weisl argues that romance cannot allow a wife to be simultaneously a lady with real power and that the equality of Dorigen's marriage is an illusion (Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in Chaucer's Romance [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995], 106).
8 Edwards, "Source, Context, and Cultural Translation in the Franklin's Tale," Modern Philology 94 (1996-97): 154-56.
9 It is not known whether Chaucer encountered Menedon's story as part of a complete text of Il Filocolo or as an excerpted section of the Love Questions, which circulated separately, but for the purposes of my argument either scenario could be assumed. See Edwards, "Source, Context, and Cultural Translation" for a full discussion. The question of whether Chaucer knew the Decameron also remains open; in light of this, I will refer to some parallels and contrasts with the Decameron's version of the story.
10 See Sources and Analogues of the, Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 1:239.
11 As has been noted, for example, by Mark N. Taylor in. "Servant and Lord/Lady and Wife: The Franklin's Tale and Traditions of Courtly and Conjugal Love" (Chaucer Review 32 [1997]: 73), this section is similar to a passage at the end of Chrétien de Troyes's Cligés (ed, Claude Luttrell and Stewart Gregory, Arthurian Studies 28 [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993], lines 6731-36): "De s'amie a feite sa fame, Mes il l'apele amie et dame, Et por ce ne pert ele mie Que il ne l'aint come s'amie, Et ele lui tot autresi Con l'en doit feire son ami" (He had made his beloved his wife, but he called her beloved and lady, for she lost nothing by this since he loved her as his beloved, and she also loved him in the way one should love her lover). However, in Cligés the contradiction is far less labored and is merely between actual wife-status and treatment as beloved and lady, not between private and public statuses. Coming at the close of the romance, it is a solution rather than, as in Chaucer, a possible problem.
12 See, for example, David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980), 163; Weisl, Conquering the Reign of Femeny, 106.
13 See Rüdiger Schnell's discussion of the content of a collection of Latin marriage sermons, drawn together by a Dominican friar at the end of the thirteenth century, which survives in more than 350 manuscripts, in "The Discourse on Marriage in the Middle Ages," Speculum 73 (1998): 771-86. Schnell discusses the sermons' emphasis on couples living together lovingly and peacefully and making a shared contribution to the success of the marriage in the face of daily conflict (772-76).
14 See my "Domestic Opportunities: The Social Comedy of The Shiftman's Tale," Chaucer Review 41, no. 2 (2006): 138-62.
15 Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1983); Collette, "Heeding the Counsel of Prudence," Chaucer Review 29 (1995), 416-33; and Dor, "The Wife of Bath's 'Wandrynge by the Weye,'" in Drama, Narrative and Poetry in the "Canterbury Tales," ed. Wendy Harding (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), 139-55.
16 All subsequent references will be to the following editions and will be cited parenthetically within the text: Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des trois vertus, ed. Charity Cannon Willard and Eric Hicks (Paris: Champion, 1989); The Book of the Knight of the Tower, trans, William Caxton, ed. M. Y. Offord, Early English Texts Society, Supplementary Series 2 (London, 1971); Le Menagier de Paris, ed. Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and for the letter collections, Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); and Kingsford's Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290-1483, ed. Christine Carpenter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). All forms that Davis presents in italics (expanded from abbreviated forms in the Paston letters) are silently de-italicized here.
17 Carruthers, "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions," PMLA 94 (1979): 209-22.
18 See, for example, Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Means of Reproduction, 1300-1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Christopher L, Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Peter Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
19 For the former view, see Elaine Turtle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 272; Davis, "Perfect Marriage," 136; and Conor McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 102.
20 For Jacobs' comment, see "Rewriting the Marital Contract: Adultery in the Canterbury Tales," Chaucer Review 2.9 (1995): 345. Since these separations were so much a part of medieval life, it seems difficult to accept Jacobs' conclusion (345-46) that Arveragus disobeys Dorigen's will by going away and that Dorigen would therefore be justified in being unfaithful to him, Gravlee's criticism of Arveragus as being irresponsibly "absent at key moments" seems similarly anachronistic ("Presence," 180).
21 Colin Richmond calculates John Paston's absences thus in the accounting year 1457-58 in The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Fastolf's Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 25-26.
22 In obliging her friends, Dorigen acts similarly to Troilus, who allows Pandarus to persuade him to distract himself from missing Criseyde by going to Sarpedon's party and seems to feel a similar sense of compulsion to attend and an inability to enjoy himself once he gets there (Troilus and Criseyde, 5.402-62).
23 Hallissy, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer's Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 38.
24 See Weisl, Conquering the Reign of Femeny, 110, and Davis, "Perfect Marriage," 137.
25 Ward, "English Noblewomen and the Local Community in the Later Middle Ages," in Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 189. See also Christine Carpenter's description of how the Stonors and their contemporaries built and maintained their networks at casual meetings and dinners in "The Stonor Circle in the Fifteenth Century," in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 178, and my discussion in "Domestic Opportunities," 141-45.
26 Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 311. Further support for this view is lent by Kay E. Lacey, who observes that late medieval women seem to have had far more freedom to contract than the law officially allowed them ("Women and Work in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century London," in Women and Work in Pre-industrial England, ed. Lindsey Charles and Loma Duffin [London: Croom Helm, 1985I, 57), These findings contradict McCarthy's claim (citing Gratian) that Dorigen is unable to contract as a married woman (Marriage in Medieval England, 105).
27 See David (Strumpet Muse, 190) for this view of the characters' behavior. As Jacobs notes in "The Marriage Contract of the franklin's Tale: The Remaking of Society" (Chaucer Review 20 [1985-86]: 138), Aurelius relies on the language of law to enforce his contract.
28 I am not sure that this suggests, as Riddy argues ("Engendering pity," 62), that Dorigen really considers herself the sexual property of men; she may instead see this as a pertinent objection to the deal with Aurelius, which she knows could consist only of sexual possession and not of true love.
29 Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination, 165.
30 This hypothesis is perhaps supported by Joel T. Rosenthal's argument that Margaret and John Paston I had no apparent concern about their sons or servants knowing their private business, despite taking pains to conceal it from outsiders (Telling Tales; Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003], 112).
31 See Davis's introduction to the Paston Letters, xxxiv.
32 Ibid., xxxiv-xxxv. Davis also discusses the Pastors' use of formulae at length in "Style and Stereotype in Early English Letters," Leeds Studies in English 1 (1967): 7-17. Giles Constable notes that the salutation of medieval letters was often determined by class and paid "careful attention to the respective ranks and titles of the correspondents" but that this was not an invariable rule (Letters and Letter-Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 17 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1976], 17).
33 Rosenthal notes that the form of the address does not usually bear any relation to the content of Margaret's letters, even though it is sometimes identical to the internal salutation (Telling Tales, 117). Alison Hanham, in The Celys and their World: An English Merchant Family of the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: University Press, 1985), suggests that the observation of formal politeness in letters "does not mean that any unnatural degree of respect coloured private attitudes" (14).
34 It is perhaps worth noting that both Arveragus and Dorigen and the Paston and Stonor spouses invariably address one another with the polite "ye" form rather than the familiar "thou," so that the use of "you" does not stand out as belonging to a heightened formal register here.
35 This idea is supported by Peter Coss, who argues that marriage relationships based on something other than male dominance "seem to have been easier to imagine from the latter part of the fourteenth century" (The Lady in Medieval England, 1000-1500 [Stroud: Sutton, 1998], 104). Coss also connects the "distance between the public expectation and the private reality of relationships" manifested in Margaret and John Paston's correspondence to Dorigen and Arveragus's marriage agreement, arguing that relationships like the Fastens' make this equal marriage seem "at least feasible" (108).
36 Angela M. Lucas and Peter J. Lucas read "pryvely" as referring to a clandestine marriage and go on to interpret the whole of the franklin's Tale on this basis, in "The Presentation of Marriage and Love in Chaucer's Franklin's Tals," English Studies 72 (1991): 501. Their reading strikes me as perverse, since they are forced simultaneously to accept that Arveragus creates an "outward show of wedded lordship," which would seem to make the secrecy of a clandestine wedding redundant.
37 See Green's discussion of the meaning of "trouthe," in Crisis of Truth, 9-19. Mervyn James defines faithfulness to one's freely given word as "the essence of the social dimension of honour" in English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485-1642 (Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1978), 15.
38 Brewer, Tradition and Innovation in Chaucer (London: Macmillan, 1982), 103. See also the more general discussions in Julian Pitt-Rivers, "Honour and Social Status," in Honour and Shame: the Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), 19-77, and James, English Politics.
39 As Shannon McSheffrey notes, the honor that came from a woman's chastity was related to the fact that she was under proper male governance, so Arveragus's extension is logical (Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006], 175).
40 Pitt-Rivers discusses the potential conflict between virtue and social status that honor, which claims to be about virtue, entails ("Honour and social status," 37). Arveragus's desire for honor seems to reflect that described by Pitt-Rivers: the wish to have one's own estimation of worth reflected in society's eyes. Pitt-Rivers argues that this becomes difficult in a complex society where there is no consensus about what is honorable (21-22). This lack of consensus is what leads Arveragus to dissemble.
41 Brewer, Tradition and Innovation, 101.
42 Maddern, "Honour among the Pastons: Gender and Integrity in Fifteenth-Century [English Provincial Society," Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988): 357-71. 43
43 Carpenter, "Stonor Circle," 19z.
44 See notes 5 and 6 above.
45 The same holds true for twentieth century couples, as Erving Goffman argues persuasively in The Presentation of Self in everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959; repr., London: Allen Lane, 1971), especially 68 and 91.
46 For this characterization of medieval marriage, see, for example, Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative. Imagination, 143.
47 This is the conclusion that Jill Mann reaches (Feminizing Chaucer, 93).
48 See David, Strumpet Muse, 189, and Riddy, "Engendering Pity," 63.
49 Jacobs notes this as does Mann ("Marriage Contract," 135; Feminizing Chaucer, 92-93).
50 Davis, "Perfect Marriage," 141.
51 I would like to thank John Burrow, Ad Putter, Robert R. Edwards, and Alcuin Blamires for their many helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.