TOGGLE is a sex war hero: if you're a man and an incredible slob, that is!
His downtrodden wife, Mrs Toggle, has to make him endless loaves of bread, or risk a farmyard beating; and she has to get him drunk with scrumpy cider, to avoid having babies with her husband.
He's fat and unwashed, and in fact he makes a virtue of being unhygienic. But fate has something really special in store for him. Toggle becomes the world's first pregnant man, thanks to the special qualities of a magic loaf: a loaf which was made by a cunning witch.
As with many pregnancies, Toggle joins the club by way of an accident. But Toggle lacks "the necessary hole", so how on earth can he give birth? This is one of more intriguing questions answered in graphic detail by the Bizarre Fable, Bread for Toggle.
Toggle, it is fair to say, is an un-evolved medieval man, and there is more than a little evidence that blokes in the Middle Ages could really be that awful.
Why else did the so-called Marital Duel arise? This was a charming situation where the law sanctioned and evened-up a public fight between a man and his wife. Basically, the man would have to stand in a hole, up to his middle, while his wife would try to brain him with a sack full of rocks. In actual fact, according to surviving manuscripts from medieval Germany, the man would often be armed with something sharp and nasty, and the wife could opt for a club instead.
Mrs Toggle does not resort to such drastic measures, nor does she have to. Suffice to say, she gets what she wants in the end. She deserves to be happy, after all, because her husband is such a terrible man and, in spite of this, she even loves him, in her fashion, and she is always loyal.
