Depicting German Peasants in Poetry

I came to this topic by considering the fact that the son of Meier Helmbrecht, also called Helmbrecht, convinces his sister Gotelint, to marry his best friend among the robbers, Lämmerslint. And this struck me akin to the Muslim girls who would go off, sixteen years old, from London and Vienna, to Syria to marry ISIS warriors.

So I decided to re-acquaint myself with Meier Helmbrecht, leading to this English translation of both Helmbrecht and Hartmann von Aue's Poor Heinrich by Clair Hayden Bell, of the University of California, in 1931.

In the introduction, Bell furthermore discussed the works of the Austrian ministerials Seifried Helbing, who left us some fifteen poems (e.g. Kleiner Lucidarius, described here) and Reinmar von Zweter's poems. The Austrian ministerials benefitted from the relative peace and the excellent soil along the Danube river.

These two belong together so tightly that Reinmars and Seifried are at times neighbors in a manuscript.

Another fellow who belongs into this group is Ottackar von Steiermark, in the mind of Theodor Ritter von Karajan.

Bell also mentions Hugo von Trimberg, who wrote the famous didactic Medieval poem Der Renner, "welches die größte didaktische Dichtung des deutschen Mittelalters darstellt", which he wrote while in charge of the School of the priory St Gangolf. That text is available via Medaevium.de for the 14th century,  Von Trimberg is interesting as he received no university training and was a married man with a large family.

When did Husband start to mean spouse?

As Daniel Walker Howe observes in What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States) (p. 34). Oxford University Press 2007.

So many and varied were the aspects of farm labor that unmarried farmers were exceedingly rare; to operate a farm household took both a man and woman. And so the word “husband,” originally meaning “farmer,” came to mean “married man.”

That statement is a bit timeless in the way it is cast here. When exactly is that transition to be placed?

One way to approach that problem is to see how the word is used in various early Bible editions. In Tynsdale's New Testament from 1525, for example, there are 17 occurrences of "husband" in the sense of spouse (9 times "husband", and 16 times "husbande", with John 4:18 exhibiting both spellings). The NT part of the Wycliff Bible from 1395 spells the word "hosebonde" (30 times) or "hosebondis"  (11 times)---which is the earliest English Bible translation that is easily accessible.

Switching to literature then, if we look at Chaucer's Canterbury Tale, for example the Prologue of the Wife of Bath, which probably dates from 1396, we find also:

For, lordynges, sithI twelf yeer was of age \\
Thonked be God, that is eterne on lyve \\
Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve
(vv4ff)

Similarly, in the metric Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, which was written between 1260 and 1300, the phrase is also attested (vv.11,300-11,303).

Euere lokede þis burgeis · wan hii were vorþ idriue ·*
Prestles hom was wel wo · þat hii nere issriue ·*
Roberd of caumpedene · þat hosebonde was on ·*
Vor he was a lute clerc · he ssrof hom echon ·*.

Given that we are now back in Middle English, I think the statement as made is misleading; the change in the meaning of the word had happened at least 500 years before the start of the era covered in Howe's book.