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The Wife of Auchtermuchty is a Scots poem of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. The poem narrates how a farmer, envious of his wife's apparently easy life, proposes that the couple exchange their normal responsibilities. She will work the fields and he will take care of the home. The wife agrees to the proposal and proves to be quite capable with a plough. Meanwhile, under her husband's supervision, the housework descends into comical chaos. At the end of the day, with some encouragement from his shrewd and strong-willed wife, the husband decides that he has learnt a valuable lesson and will return to his plough.〔(The Bannatyne Manuscript, volume 2 of 4, pp. 342-345, Hunterian Club Edition, 1896. )〕 The Wife of Auchtermuchty is characterised by physical humour and wry observations on the relationship between husband and wife. In contrast to most of the works of the contemporary makars it concentrates on the life and circumstances of ordinary people. The poem gives a vivid depiction of domestic life in rural Scotland during the late medieval era. ==The Text== The Wife of Auchtermuchty is of uncertain date and authorship. The text is found only in the Bannatyne Manuscript which dates to the latter sixteenth century and contains works of the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries. As such the poem is most likely to be of this era. In the manuscript an unidentified scribe, not George Bannatyne himself, attributes the piece to an author called only ''Mofat''.〔 The poem's first modern publication, with many modifications, was in the ''The Ever Green'' of Allan Ramsay between 1724 and 1727.〔(Ramsay's The Ever Green )〕 The text given in this article is that from the Bannatyne Manuscript. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Wife of Auchtermuchty」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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