Chichevache

Also Known As: earlier French Chicheface, Chinchefache, from chiche or chinche, “stingy, niggardly”, with face; reshaped toward vache, “cow”, only later
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: French Mythology, English Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: She eats only patient, obedient wives, and since almost no one qualifies she is permanently starving.
Role in Mythos: She is the lean half of a late-medieval marriage joke, paired against the fat Bycorne, who feeds on husbands ruled by their wives.
Relation to Humans: She hunts one narrow kind of person, the wife who never answers back, and swallows her whole. Any woman willing to argue is entirely safe from her, which is the point the poets were making.

On a painted wall at the Château de Villeneuve-Lembron in the Auvergne, a beast with a wolf’s head and a wolf’s body stands with claws in front and horse’s hoofs behind. A woman in respectable bourgeois dress is still struggling in its jaws. Verses run on scrolls between the pictures, so a guest crossing the room could read the joke and look at it at the same time. The beast is Chichevache, and she is starving.

She eats good wives. Not all wives, only the patient ones, the meek and obedient who fold away every grievance and never once answer back. The supply is poor. That is the whole of the joke, and it has been running in one form or another since at least the fourteenth century: a monster whose diet is a virtue almost nobody practises, wasting away in a country full of women with opinions.

The cow came late, and by accident. The older French name is Chicheface or Chinchefache, and it means something close to niggard-face. Chinche, chynchy, in French and in Middle English alike, meant stingy or tight, and Hoccleve uses it that way. For a long stretch the word was simply an insult, roughly what a later century would do with scarecrow. The poet of the Lamentations de Matheolus describes himself as being like a chicheface, lean under his own skin. Baudet Herenc, setting out his rules of verse in 1432, spits le laide cicheface at a foolish woman in love. In Martin Le Franc’s Champion des Dames, around 1440, the Adversary claims that woman was made out of the leavings after man had been carefully finished, the way a potter shapes some odd little marmouset from the clay left in the bowl, and calls the result celle Cicheface.

Somewhere behind the insult a creature was already moving. A poem of sixty-eight lines in couplets, De la Chinchefache, survives in a fourteenth-century French manuscript, and the thing it describes is lean and horrible, long in the tooth and fixed in the eye, and its work is to seize and eat any woman who will not talk back to her lord. There is no cow in it anywhere. In the Mystère de Sainte Geneviève the reference is thrown out as common knowledge: an angry townsman, listening to the saint recommend patience, tells her to mind the chicheface, because it will bite her if it meets her.

Then the middle consonant softened. Once the f in chicheface had voiced far enough to sound like vache, the story obligingly grew horns and a hide, and the niggard-face became the lean cow. The cow is a mispronunciation that grew a body. Not every picture followed it, either: the Villeneuve beast kept its wolf’s head and its claws long after English readers were calling her a cow, and most sixteenth-century cuts show nothing bovine about her at all.

Chaucer had her in English before Lydgate did, and used her once, at speed, at the very end of the Clerk’s Tale. Griselda is dead, he says, and her patience buried alongside her in Italy. Then he turns to the wives in the audience: let no humility nail down your tongue, and give no clerk the material for another marvellous story about a patient wife, lest Chichevache swallow you in her entrails. Follow Echo instead, who keeps no silence and always answers back. The warning is a trap dressed as advice. Be worse, he tells them, and you will be safer.

About thirty years later John Lydgate built her a room of her own. A worthy citizen of London, whose name nobody wrote down, wanted verses for a painted or stained cloth to hang in a hall, a parlour or a chamber, and Lydgate supplied a hundred and thirty-three lines in nineteen stanzas, with prose directions telling the painter exactly what to put where. Three fifteenth-century manuscripts preserve it. Those instructions are the closest thing the beast has to a portrait from life: a long-horned beast, slender and lean, with sharp teeth and nothing on its body except skin and bone.

Lydgate lets her introduce herself, and she is not proud of it. Hungry, meagre, slender and lean, she says, and she is ashamed to show her body, and no fatness will ever be seen on her because she can find no pasture anywhere. Thirty Mays she has gone from land to land looking for a meal. In her whole life she found one Griselda, and that one was long dead.

The painted cloth gives the victim a voice. A woman already inside the beast’s mouth calls out to the wives who will stand looking at the picture, telling them to take her as their example, to be crabbed, to throw humility away, or they will go the same road she is going. Behind her comes an old man with a cudgel across his back, brandishing it at the animal to get his wife back, far too late. She was the most patient and most peaceable of women, he says, and never once spoke to him amiss, and since there will never be another like her he intends to live out the rest of his life alone.

She is married. Her husband is Bycorne, fat and round, out of the country of Bycornoys, and his diet is the mirror of hers: men who let their wives be their masters, of whom there is no shortage whatsoever. He is enormous. On the Auvergne wall he is short-legged and scaly-backed with a human head, and a man has gone into his jaws as far as the arms. His name has never been satisfactorily explained. The French bigorne meant an iron-shod staff, or else thieves’ cant, and the two-horned reading the spelling suggests probably arrived only after his wife had turned into a cow. The pairing of the two beasts is itself a late arrangement. They did not start out as a couple.

What Chichevache has instead of strength is jurisdiction. She cannot be fought, bargained with or outrun, because she is not really hunting a body at all; she is hunting a temperament, and the sentence is carried out with teeth. To be eaten by her is to be convicted of too much patience.

That same appetite is the cage she lives in. She depends absolutely on other people agreeing to be meek, which puts her survival in the hands of the least reliable constituency imaginable. One sharp word and the meal walks away. Lydgate lets her admit defeat outright: she will not search any longer, will not strive for more pasture, because women have grown too prudent to go on being patient. The wives in the poem finish the job on purpose, making a joint vow to exile Patience and crying wolf’s head on obedience, which is to say outlawing it, so that the beast can find nothing left to eat. Their husbands end where the poem wants them, linked in a double chain. Give way and Bycorne has you. Hold your ground and you spend the rest of your life afraid of your wife.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Chichevache?

The Chichevache is a satirical beast of late-medieval French and English literature that eats only patient, obedient wives. Because such wives were said to be almost impossible to find, she is permanently starving and reduced to skin and bone. She is paired with Bycorne, a fat beast who eats henpecked husbands and never goes hungry.

Why is the Chichevache always starving?

The Chichevache starves because her only food is the wife who never answers back, and the joke depends on there being almost none. In John Lydgate’s poem she says she has searched from land to land for thirty Mays and found a single Griselda in her whole life, and that one was long dead. She finally gives up the hunt altogether.

Where does the name Chichevache come from?

The name began as the French Chicheface or Chinchefache, meaning roughly niggard-face, from chiche or chinche, “stingy”. It was an ordinary insult before it was ever a creature. The cow arrived later, when the middle consonant voiced far enough to sound like vache, and the picture followed the sound.

What is the difference between the Chichevache and Bycorne?

The Chichevache and Bycorne are a matched pair with opposite diets. She eats patient wives and starves; he eats husbands who let their wives rule them and is fat and round. In Lydgate’s poem the two are married to each other, though the pairing of the two beasts was a late-medieval arrangement rather than an original one.

Where does Chaucer mention the Chichevache?

Chaucer names her in the envoy to the Clerk’s Tale, at the close of the story of patient Griselda. He warns the wives in his audience not to let humility silence them, lest Chichevache swallow them in her entrails, and tells them to follow Echo, who always answers back. The advice is deliberately backwards, since being difficult is what keeps them safe.